Three Square Wheels animation!

Well I have been very busy lately boarding my short film POP! and compiling my animatic. I have a deadline of August 17th to work towards as that is the closing date to submit to the Australian Film Commision for film funding.

My general workflow has been to write a treatment or scene breakdown of the film and then to board out the scenes and compile my animatics. Once I am happy with that I will use the scene breakdown to write my script and finalise the dialogue at that stage.

I am a good way into the boarding of it now with maybe three more scenes to put down on paper. I have got quick at using after effects to add pans, zooms and limited animation to the boards for my animatic and I then add the sound effects etc in Premier.

However I have hit a familiar point in my film development of late. I don’t know if this is just a case of psychological fear of failure or a under achieving thing, but I have doubt in the viability of the my idea.

I have worked on short film ideas before and gone a long way through boarding the films to be suddenly struck at a point say three quarters through and then I lose all impetus to finish the film and doubt whether my original idea was any good to begin with. The last few projects I have worked on have ended up the same way, a manila folder full of design pics, script fragments and storyboard sheets waiting for me to one day reexamine and get going again.

With POP! I feel the film will look good, I am getting good “shots” with good action and cinematic touches but the film to me seems a bit predictable and I am wondering if that is just becuase I have become so familiar with the idea that I have become bored with it. The film also needs more humour at the start to conterpoint the serious tone of the finish.

I guess this is a problem of working in isolation. I have no one to do my story “pitch” to  to get feedback on it. I could have a good idea and not know it, or I could be right and be making a well made if somewhat routine film

I would be interested to see if other people out in blogland have similar problems when developing a film and what they did about it.

Right now I am trying to just push through this and get the storyboard/animatic done. Then I can put it aside for a week and forget about it and then hopefully revisit with a fresh outlook.

Well this short blog entry has got carried away as usual.

Bye for now

Cheers Neil

 P.S. I hope to put another animatic sequence up soon