It's been 434 days since my last post. While it may be logical to equate silence with inactivity, in this case that would be an erroneous assumption. More importantly though, we shouldn't confuse movement with progress. Let me explain.
It's always a struggle to balance my desire for excellence vs. practicality, progress, and affordability. Excellence requires that I invest time and energy into creating long term solutions to the problems that I will face in creating a stop motion animated film. For instance, I have been experimenting with materials to make molds for replacement faces, lighter weight materials to make more durable puppets, and better armatures to allow my puppets to move realistically while building in what I call “controlled breaking” points. All of this experimentation has been fun, yet frustrating and I have learned a lot (though mostly of the “what not to do” variety). But I have to admit that with the exception of my really cool armature design for joints (knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders), I really have nothing to show for all of my efforts, and I can't afford to drop $900 to buy 3 armatures.
I have come full circle in this. As a one man band, I've arrived at the conclusion that I can spend all of my time fixing problems and not shoot a single frame. I can have a lot of movement, but not make any progress. Now if I can't solve a problem after a reasonable amount of time, I will set that aside in order to keep the momentum going. It sounds simple, but it's hard for me to do.
So what remains to be done? Make my three puppets, paint a model car, animate/shoot, edit, and add any special effects. That's it! My script is finished, the voice tracks recorded and lip synced, and my sets are built. For better or worse, I'm going to skip story boarding since I have a good idea of what each scene will look like and will have a lot of time to think about working around the problems. After spending two years to get to this point, I'm ready for the real work to get started! But don't expect anything soon. I'm going to figure that it will take a minimum of 36 weeks to animate/shoot and another 2-3 months for post production. Thank God it's only a 6 minute short.
It's always a struggle to balance my desire for excellence vs. practicality, progress, and affordability. Excellence requires that I invest time and energy into creating long term solutions to the problems that I will face in creating a stop motion animated film. For instance, I have been experimenting with materials to make molds for replacement faces, lighter weight materials to make more durable puppets, and better armatures to allow my puppets to move realistically while building in what I call “controlled breaking” points. All of this experimentation has been fun, yet frustrating and I have learned a lot (though mostly of the “what not to do” variety). But I have to admit that with the exception of my really cool armature design for joints (knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders), I really have nothing to show for all of my efforts, and I can't afford to drop $900 to buy 3 armatures.
I have come full circle in this. As a one man band, I've arrived at the conclusion that I can spend all of my time fixing problems and not shoot a single frame. I can have a lot of movement, but not make any progress. Now if I can't solve a problem after a reasonable amount of time, I will set that aside in order to keep the momentum going. It sounds simple, but it's hard for me to do.
So what remains to be done? Make my three puppets, paint a model car, animate/shoot, edit, and add any special effects. That's it! My script is finished, the voice tracks recorded and lip synced, and my sets are built. For better or worse, I'm going to skip story boarding since I have a good idea of what each scene will look like and will have a lot of time to think about working around the problems. After spending two years to get to this point, I'm ready for the real work to get started! But don't expect anything soon. I'm going to figure that it will take a minimum of 36 weeks to animate/shoot and another 2-3 months for post production. Thank God it's only a 6 minute short.