Incase you forgot, I like to kid myself that I can animate sometimes!
Well, despite telling myself over and over that I “would be finished with this tomorrow so there’s no point making a work in progress post about it now”, I’ve still not finished it. Why is finishing things so hard? Starting is so easy! All the ideas, all the potential, then time is spent and progress is made and the product is whittled down into something increasingly real and the will to continue is worn away in kind.
Maybe it’s because the closer to being finished it is, the easier it becomes to imagine the result and once I can see it finished, it feels completed even if it’s not. There’s probably anxiety in there too, calling something finished is quite a feat really; announcing to yourself that you are satisfied with what you’ve done and it’s time to move on, letting a Thing that you put so much work into go. It feels safer to leave them unfinished and keep them and all their promise tucked away safe away from expectations. I guess this is why people say that deadlines are important, it forces you to actually end a project whether you’re ready to or not.
Anyway, here’s some bits of the animation I’ve fumbled and struggled through. It was supposed to be a quick little job but imagining it would be that way was the fantasy of a fool!
Basically, I made a fairly quick animation of this girl, Rebecca, getting eaten by a ROBOTIC tentacle monster barnacle SEX TOY thing. I liked it a lot and was happy with it; that sounds like a good thing but it actually turned out to not be! You see, what happened is that I was so happy with it that I decided that it deserved a little bit of preamble, a bit of context, some STORY. Turns out that doing that bit was a lot more effort than I expected. I spent far, far, faaaaar too long giving little Rebecca here enough personality and movement to fill the void while the preamble is ambled. On top of that, all the reframing and scene changing and animating I did for this I did AFTER the more important part of her actually being gobbled up. This has made the gobblng-up section look pretty choppy and shit in comparison to what comes before it in the story board and also kinda fucked all the positioning and everything up for it. Now I need to go and readjust and format an animation I worked on months ago and feel is low quality which is quite an annoyance that I keep putting off. I pretty much finished all the actual drawing I need to do and sounds a long while ago, I’ve just not been able to motivate myself to finish editing it which, now I admit that in written form, is pretty lame.
I have only a screen-shot of the gobbling action because Its all fucked up and weird. You can see clearly how I, in a misguided attempt to stay organised and save time, used far too many layers all hap-hazard which makes the whole “fixing everything” process very upsetting and confusing. I’ll move one layer and some other thing will start flying all over the screen because it’s linked to the layer I moved and AHH I almost wonder if it would be less effort to just re-animate the whole section, it’s literally only a few seconds long! Which is pretty silly considering the preamble I made is over 2 minutes, hehe, oops
ANYWAY I AM GOING TO FINISH IT I AM!!!