Short Review
I actually started doing my 2003 year end reviews on December 28th of last year. In it, and the day after, I immediately wrote some things that raise questions today:
I can tell you of a certainty that next year will see the creation of my first one-man feature Occult Salvation. It may not get finished next year. It will be a true feature at the best possible quality, thus taking time to do right, but it will get past a simple trailer!
Needless to say, not even a trailer has been done on this project. Not to sound like absolutely nothing happened, at least some development has moved forward, but clearly, not on the level planned back then.
It gets better though. Because of the demise of Westwood Studios, I wrote this:
If I hadn't made a concrete decision never too return to working at studios before this, the decision was made then. I still stand by that decision to this day. I will never, under any circumstances, return to working in that environment.
Well, I didn't stand by that long. I
did go back into that environment and there found myself working on
this project:
Yet another remake of
Lost in Space, this time directed by the famous John Woo. Of course, like so many other major Hollywood projects I get involved with, this show, according to
this site right here, has been entirely scrapped. More on that later.
Let's get to the actual review:
This year began with the creation of this character. After a short stay in Marina Del Rey, I wrote this:
I will soon be wrapping up the old, starting with the World of Hartz manga. I have one final chapter to do for the book. Now if I was a Japanese artist like Masashi Kishimoto of Naruto fame, this would be a week's task. I may not do it that fast, but I don't expect to spend all month on it either. I will do the "name" for this new chapter tomorrow and Friday. All of it. Over the next week I will finalize the pages and call this book in the can. I mean, a whole year to do one manga. Let's be realistic. Still, I will not get into that. That was last year. I will wrap it up.
Yes, I was still finishing up
Hartz. So something was getting done, but I also wrote this:
I don't yet have solid production schedules for my new projects. I don't know how long they will take, but they will be pursued diligently and you will see constant updates of new characters, images and trailers as great changes overtake this site in the coming months.
As you know, that didn't quite happen.
Not wanting this review to be too long and boring, I am not going to get into every little store I went to like the reviews of last year. I am wanting to see what I really accomplished, so I will focus on that. To that end, the remainder of January seemed to be spent covering other animation news and thinking about
Occult Salvation, the Asian market, and how to make a quality feature is six months.
In February, I completed the storyboards and final pages for the last chapter in
World of Hartz, wrapping up that project. I also started thinking about upgrading my music methods. Finally I did some more historical research for Occult Salvation.
In March, I suddenly redesigned this page and put in the new contact form. I started truly thinking about being prolific and asking how I could really get products done, but for the first half of the month, at least, that didn't translate into much action. The second half of march was a different story though:
The
Mind Animation experiments began and, while working in high definition, I fond the need to totally update my 3D character models to achieve that true anime feature quality:
As I continue to think about animating at the speed of thought, the idea of being able to truly just get in there and do it, free of limitations, I constantly find myself saying, "There's got to be a better way!". I am experimenting; with ideas new and old and techniques new and old.
I started seeing a new vision, and supposedly started a new project, resurrected from the old. Only one scene got done. Luckily, my other project was really moving along:
Aside from that, I did a bit of sound FX editing for a game company. But April brought something else to the table:
In April I worked on John Woo's remake of
lost in Space. You can see some of the work I did on it in my 2004 reel by
clicking here. Of course, that took up all my time and little else got done. On the plus side, I got a
lot of money. I also learned
Combustion 3, which is a top notch compositor. By then end of the month, TOKYOPOP told me they were holding actual copies of World of Hartz in hand, and TechTV Japan called to get script information to translate
Understanding Chaos for showing in Japan. Not a bad month if I do say so myself.
In May I was in a bit of a slump. This means I probably spent most of my time watching anime. I also decided to restructure how I work based on the new things I learned at the studio.
World of Hartz hit the shelves, and I wrote a new schedule to better manage my time and get more work done. I started doing models for
Daniel, tested new software and worked a bit on a freelance video game gig.
In June I pretty seriously worked on Daniel. Or did I? I didn't post for the first two weeks of that month. Near the end of the month, my computer died and I did a full system restore:
I started doing cloth simulation work on the Daniel project, and installed my music software to prepare to score the trailer.
In the beginning of July, I finished the music score and narration for the trailer, but then I got into thinking about the schedules I created for myself and if they became more of a burden than a benefit. I thought I should sit down and pound out something long term. Instead, I spent the next two weeks watching about 90 episodes of
Naruto. This was quickly followed by
Fullmetal Alchemist and maybe some other shows before I came to my sense.
Around July 20th, I posted the
Daniel trailer. The were no more posts for that month.
August began with a post about
Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, so I was clearly still "studying" anime. As you may note, there are no other worthwhile posts in August. So after watching several entire anime series, such as
Wolf's Rain, E's Otherwise, Gilgamesh, Peacemaker Kurogane, Tsukihime and
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, not to mention six seasons of
Buffy, season five of
Highlander, Season five of
Stargate and all the
Superman movies, I feel I am finally studied up and ready to make something! :)
So in conclusion, quite a bit got done this year. The issue is
focus. As someone wrote in and mentioned, sometimes we have to do the paying gigs and put the indie stuff aside. I would add to that that such gigs must be chosen wisely, lest they totally eliminate time for the indie work. The indie user must also protect themselves from burnout. This leads to many hours in front of the TV or PS2 rather than being productive. Better to work just a tiny amount per day over a long period than cram 16 hours a day for two weeks and then die.
I believe the solution is something I may have written about before. It is the way of
Chaos! That project was done on nights and weekends, but what it amounts to was sustaining work on a project, a little bit at a time, an average of two shots per day, until it was in the can. Even if more free time is available, it doesn't mean you have to use it. That would be like sprinting to try and finish a marathon faster. Bad idea. The key is to set a pace and get it done! What better pace to set than that of
Chaos? That's a project that is proven!
Comments?
