Subdivide…

Survived the 4th of July and associated vacation with all my digits intact and no sunburns worthy of a trip the hospital. I hope yours was equally pain-free :)

Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog is creeping along at a speed normally associated with moving tectonic plates, and as a result I’m starting to lose my marbles. This is not good — my puny brain is the only thing that separates me from monkeys, and losing it would mean a lifetime eating bananas and flinging dung around. Production went south roughly the same time I decided to do away with production deadlines, so I suppose it doesn’t take a genius to see what the fix is. Yeah, deadlines make me nutty, but so far the lack of any hasn’t kept my mental boat on an even keel, and if I’m going to be a stark-raving lunatic I might as well hold a finished film in my hands than not. Easier to explain to the shrinks — or zookeepers. Anyway, I have the end of July as the deadline for finishing inking, with two months to get on the coloring. If all goes well, we’ll have a release date of October 31st…

Speaking of things that make me crazy, what I’ve rediscovered through the self-inflicted stupidity of Scary Monster 2 is that my attention span is far too short to tolerate slugging through the same movie for longer than two months without wanting to shove a flaming poker through my skull. I’m the only person working on these films, and the amount of time I can devote to them on any given day is minute. As a result, these films take forever to produce, and after a few months spent working on the same project something that’s worth maybe two minutes or less of film time, my brain says, “Enough, already!”

Why bring this up? Well, sitting just over the horizon is the first episode of the robot series I’ve been wanting to do for over two years now. The first animatics reel I did for it put it just a shade under ten minutes long. If I use the same production math for Break Time — seven months of work for six minutes of movie — I’m probably staring at an entire year to shoot this thing.

Hmmm. This is a problem…

What does one do??? Well, instead of eating the elephant all at one sitting, I’ve got it split up into twenty separate mini-projects of various lengths (all short). If I can crank out one or two of these guys, take a break, then kick out a couple more, it might go a long way towards keeping me off Death Row. Each project would be considered a whole movie in and of itself, so I’ll go through the same steps for each one from start to finish — storyboard, dialog, models, etc — all the way through the final shading and rendering. The only thing that would be excluded would be the sound effects and music.

So, that’s the game plan. I tend to flake out when implementing these plans, but not this time — I absolutely cannot continue doing business the way I’ve been going about it, not if I want to get these movies finished and shown at film festivals any time this millenium. I have to change my ways, even if it kills me…