There are many spirits and guides that float through the netherworlds of creativity — Fates, Muses, and the like — but the one whose presence I crave most is the Angel of Clarity. When I’m cluttered and pulled apart, when ideas collide and wage war to claim my poor underpowered grey matter for their own, it is Clarity who waves her magic wand and electric cattle prod and imposes order upon the chaos. What a sweetheart! Problem is, she’s fickle, and very, very busy, so getting her to pay a visit is next to impossible (I’ve left cookies and milk on the breakfast bar in an attempt to entice her, but some fat old guy in a red suit kept showing up instead, and I finally had to call the cops to get rid of him. Jerk…). Well, bless her goose-stepping little heart, she stopped by at long last recently, and left a note under my pillow laying out the following game plan:
Phase 1 — Slug through the bee joke movie one act at a time. When we get done with the last act, put all four of them together into one film. Meanwhile, we continue to color Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog on Saturdays, as well as hammer on the other three 2-D projects, trying our best to keep the production cycles close together when we do model sheets, set designs, rough keys, and animatics reels, then work on them one scene at a time for penciling, inking, and coloring.
Phase 2 — After the bee joke movie is complete, we examine our four 2-D films and move the one furthest along into the Monday-thru-Friday spot, continuing with the other three on Saturdays. When done, we move the next film closest to completion up to Monday-Friday, and so on, until all four films are done.
Clarity recognizes my attempts to evenly subdivide my time amongst multiple film projects usually end in complete disaster. At the same time, she’s not a huge fan of working exclusively on one movie at a time — it tends to cause rapid burnout, and my other projects suffer a load of atrophy. Somewhere in-between lies the truth! The way she sees it, the computer-generated stuff is where it’s at, and that should get my full attention five days a week. Saturdays should be reserved for the 2-D traditional films, DanBee’s Doodles, and whatever else that’s left…
The logic makes sense, actually. I’ll be able to concentrate on the bee movie most of my free time, getting it worked on in fairly short order. All the while, I’m not killing myself to work those hand-drawn films in any particular hurry; instead, I’m just stirring the pot, keep those films in motion so they don’t grow stale from lack of attention. When you figure I’ll be working on the bee joke movie for at least another year, I still have more than fifty-two Saturdays to nibble away on those other films so, when their turn comes up, there’s that much less to do. Or something like that.
After Phase 2? I have no idea. I think she scribbled something else but I was in a particularly drooly mood that night, and my slobber made her notes somewhat, um, illegible. But that’s cool with me — anytime you start thinking more than a year out, you’re asking for all sorts of trouble…
So, that’s the plan and I’m sticking to it. I won’t be blurbing about any 2-D progress here; I prefer to keep it all on the down-low until I have a finished film in my sweaty little hands. I will continue with the bee joke movie updates, hopefully a little more frequently than the past couple of months. Stay tuned…
I have several questions that need answering for our grassy meadow set:
