7 to 13 February 2016, we hardly knew ye.
The computer’s all set up now. Yay!
This week I kicked off an entry for the monthly animation challenge 11 Second Club. I’m polishing my own entry using notes from other people, and watching other people’s WIPs and giving notes to them. You can see a WIP attached to this week’s post. It’s a draft so the execution isn’t great but other forum peeps are into the interpretation, so that’s encouraging. 🙂
It hit me this week that instead of thinking “this is how long it takes me to do X”, I’ve started thinking “this is how much I can do given timespan Y”. I used to hate the idea of deadlines, but after SculptJanuary I’ve come to appreciate that in some cases a finite span of time to finish something is dead useful – better for focus, more certainty, being forced to make better use of available time instead of just taking more time.
After all that time spent in story mode over 2014 and 2015, I’m really enjoying working on stuff that
isn’t story development – design, animation, surfacing, rendering, editorial,
etc. It’s not because I don’t want to finish AMITS – on the contrary! All that time I spent doing story work was necessary experience – I had to learn the craft of developing a project for a particular resource pool and running length. But In hindsight, it’s self-defeating to only develop my skills on stuff I’ve personally written. (Pathological egotism? Fear of the unknown? Misunderstanding the path to the goal? Who can say…)
Even if I do want to make a film, I can learn just as much if not more by allowing other people to choose stuff for me to work on. AMITS is still going to happen if I have anything to say about it, but trying to climb straight up that particular mountain just wasn’t working out.
So for this month, it’s cute werewolf families and the odd story sketch for AMITS. Then we’ll see.
Thanks as always for reading!