It’s been a good long while since the last blog post. Nobody reads these I’m sure, but I still feel the need to write something out every once in a while, just because some thoughts are nagging away at my brain, so it’s time to write about it.
For context, I’m just in the finishing stages of post production on my first feature film, Sorry, We’re Dead. In a month from now, the sound design and mix should be complete and then the film will finally “go gold”. This stage of finally putting the finishing touches on the film has had a long tail though (most things have been locked and in place for sound and color to be worked in since maybe October 2022, and it’s almost April 2023 at this point). This long tail has left me itching to finally finish this project and start the next one, though I can’t quite figure out what the next one is.
Not because I don’t have ideas. That certainly isn’t the problem. I’ve written two more feature film scripts in the meantime, and have really started to settle on one of the two as being the next major project that will take over the next 5-10 years of my life (for context, Sorry, We’re Dead took up about 8 years of my life from the first drafts until now, so I expect the next project to run on a similar timeline). However, the main thing keeping it from happening faster is that I need to very slowly save up money and resources to make it all possible, and it’s a bit demoralizing when that’s the only thing keeping you from being able to move forward on a project! Sometimes I envy people whose preferred medium is simply the written word, which costs nothing except time to produce. Though, to be clear, I’m not in any way disparaging writers or writing. That medium has its own challenges.
Anyway, because I can’t be stuck in a stage of “I need money” for a decade without losing my sanity, I need some other, potentially smaller projects that don’t cost any money that I can work on in the meantime. I have some short film ideas (though those still cost money and take that money away from the next feature project), several animated shorts on the docket that have been forever on hold, a graphic novel idea, a board game concept… too many things to choose from. For a moment I was leaning toward the graphic novel, until I started doing the math about how long it would take me to finish all of the art, and I started realizing that this project was going to take me several years. Potentially just as long as the feature film, if not longer. And I’m not looking for ANOTHER project that will take a decade to finish when I’ve already got one slowly cooking, so I’ve got to set that aside for the moment.
I’ve already had some stuff prepped for the next two animated shorts for a while, including the scripts, all of the voice acting, and lots of the art, so that seems like a natural project to pick back up that I know is probably not going to take a decade to finish. Probably. And both of those are Brother and Sister episodes, which is a series I returned to and partially designed to be easier to animate because the animation style is stiffer and simpler, so hopefully I could make more of them. As you’re likely aware, when it comes to 2D animation, while I love a beautiful frame by frame animation, I just can’t be bothered to dedicate the amount of time and effort that’s needed to do it right. I always end up going with repeated frames and tweens and other limited animation cheats that let me finish things on a reasonable(ish) timeline. I have so many ideas I want to pursue that I’d rather release several animations that are slightly simpler in animation style rather than double down on one of them to really perfect its animation, but then only have one thing finished instead of several.
BUT, as I’m looking back at it, even though I picked the Brother and Sister series to focus on for a while because it’s a simpler animation style, I haven’t actually been pumping them out any faster than before. Quite the opposite, in fact. Now, some of this, maybe even most of this, is because I’m no longer in school and have a career in indie filmmaking now that takes up a lot of my time. And also, my feature film has taken over a lot of my brain and spare time for the past several years. Despite this, I’m currently animating the next Brother and Sister episode, and I’m noticing myself doing something. Even though I COULD simply animate the characters with almost no movement and mostly just flapping their mouths as they talk (since the scripts are inherently very dialogue based), I’m often choosing to add more flourish instead of doing the simplest option. I’m constantly adding movements (albeit limited and simple) during their dialogue. I’m constantly sitting back and trying out some new little visual idea to show during the scene, or testing out a new feature I’ve stumbled across in the software, or just trying out an alternate way of doing something that just occurred to me. I keep making things take longer, and I keep making things more complex, even when I told myself to keep it simple. But I can’t keep things simple. There’s always at least a small step right above simple that I end up taking, if not a few steps.
Looking back, this has happened to me so many times before. I remember getting stuck on “Genius Cop II” back in High School one summer because I kept somehow adding more to it than I originally planned. I had planned on it being a smaller little side project before I returned to the big next “Funny School Things” project, but Genius Cop II ended up ballooning so large that it took most of my summer over, when it was only supposed to be like a week or two of my time.
And even my feature film! It started as a short 5-10 minute film idea that was a reaction to how large and complex my senior thesis film had been. I told myself that I was going to write something with fewer locations and without 5 main characters, so I could have an easier time shooting and scheduling the next film. And, somehow, it turned into a feature film with a lot more locations and characters than my senior thesis, and with a five times longer page count. Granted, there is only one truly main character, and there are lots of other important characters but they aren’t in large swathes of the script, so that was at least partially what I was trying to do. But still, a short 5-10 minute film ballooned into a feature film. That’s a pretty crazy when the whole point was that I was trying to make my next film simpler and easier to make. And it seems I let this ballooning virus take hold of most of my projects, whether the project becomes larger in scope, or whether it remains short but becomes more time consuming to finish because of additional flourish.
Maybe everyone experiences this. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a bit frustrating. At the same time though, it’s not like I want to pull back and just make everything more simple. I love the way projects end up evolving. So… I’m not sure I could have it any other way?
It doesn’t seem like I’ll be changing my ways any time soon. Whoops.