The AnimWatch Blog

I get asked plenty of questions as the Editor of AnimWatch. But by far, the one that I’m asked the most is: How can I make a film?The tenor is such that I don’t believe it is a rhetorical question, or an animation fan idly asking about technique. I believe most of the people asking the question really, truly want to make a film. They just don’t know where to begin.

After answering it sort of half-way many times, and still being faced with the question often enough, it occurred to me that a need exists in the community to have this question answered in a unique way. Although there are plenty of how-to resources dedicated to the technical side of how to make a film, I have yet to come across anything dealing with the psychological side.

So, I’ve decided to answer the question as completely as I can, dealing with motivation and its emotional and psychological underpinnings. Orginally, this was to be one article, but as I began thinking about it, I realized there was enough material here for a series of articles. So this will be the first.

WHAT’S MY MOTIVATION?

Face it: making a movie is hard. It’s not for everyone, and making an animated film is even harder. Some people simply don’t have the talent or the wherewithall to do it.

Still, many people do. It takes a lot of work and strong motivation, but people still do it. However, if you’re going to make a film, just like an actor, you need to know what your motivation is. For that, we’ll need to talk about the sorts of people who set out to make a film.

For purposes of this discussion, I break would-be filmmakers down into three main groups. The first group I call The Doers. These people will get the film done no matter how long it takes or how much it costs. Even if they have to quit their jobs, even if they have to do everything themselves, they will get it done.

On the far other end of the spectrum is a group I call The Dreamers. These are the people who come up with the most amazing stories, original characters, breathtaking environments. These are very creative people.

The third group, the bunch in the middle, is huge. Most people who will make a film one day are in this group, I’d say probably 90% or so. I call them The Willing. These people want to make a film, but they lack the drive of a Doer, or the creativity of a Dreamer. They are often burdened with job or family responsibilities that take them away from their dream of making movies. A Doer, on the other hand, would do it regardless of the cost, personal, professional, or economic. The Willing also frequently doubt their own ideas, setting aside half-developed material that actually had potential, but simply didn’t get the benefit of being brought to fruition because it wasn’t as compelling as the work of a Dreamer.

But The Willing are actually the most likely to make great movies because they are a blend of the two extremes. If the weak point of The Willing is their commitment to their responsibilities over their film, and their vulnerability to self-doubt, their strength is that they are very balanced people.

The Doers, for example, will make that film, to be sure. But it will likely be the first idea that came to them. Maybe it’ll be great, maybe not, but it won’t be something they search their souls for years to find. Doers can be single-minded because they are frequently single-idea people. These are people who seize on a good idea and wind up working on that for the rest of their careers. You might consider George Lucas one of these people, making a career out of Star Wars. You might consider J.R.R. Tolkien one of these people, writing about Middle Earth for the rest of his life. But the downside of being a Doer is that the idea may not be the most thought out. Because all ideas grow thin in time, they’d better be very well thought out in order to survive a lifetime of work. I should point out that I have picked the most obvious examples of Doers I could think of in Lucas and Tolkien, and I happen to love Star Wars and Lord of the Rings very much. But in both cases, the later works of these men failed to connect with me the way their earlier works did, and I believe it is a function of the single-idea syndrome.

The Dreamers, on the other extreme, may come up with the most original, breathtaking stuff. But they are frequently distracted by their own ideas, often abandoning one after another, leaving a trail of wonderful but incomplete forgotten ideas behind them. This is the downside of being a Dreamer, and the danger is that these people will spend their lives this way, never completing anything. Dreamers are most at risk for failing to complete a film, of all the people I’ll talk about. But their saving grace, aside from their rampant creativity, is that their abandoned projects don’t weigh on them the way they do on The Willing. Examples of Dreamers are usually found in the Visual Design departments of high profile film companies. (Again, this is not meant to insult anyone, only to categorize - any filmmaker lucky enough to land a Dreamer in the concept department is lucky indeed.) They can also be quite successful on their own. I have a sneaking suspicion such luminaries as Brian Froud and Tim Burton are examples of very successful Dreamers, or at least they have Dreamer tendencies. Their work, that which is completed, is marked by creativity and variety. That which is not completed, I would imagine doesn’t concern them.

The Willing don’t forget their projects when they are knocked off course. Say work suddenly needs you to work a bunch of extra hours, or your wife or child gets sick. The Willing make their films in their spare time, and when that spare time goes away, the project gets starved, like a candle starving for oxygen in a jar. Progress is like oxygen to a project, and without it, the project sputters and dies. For examples of The Willing, see the roles of AnimWatch’s FILMLIST. It is full of part-time filmmakers who have to learn how to balance life, work, and extracurricular pursuit.

WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME ALL THIS?

Does any of this sound familiar to you? Well, it certainly does to me.

I am choosing to deal with this subject not because I think I’m a great filmmaker. Obviously I’m not. Well, not yet. I’ve completed several little films, even won a couple of awards, but I’ve never finished anything over a minute long.

Still, I feel uniquely qualified to talk on this subject for two reasons. The first reason is that I’ve been a member of all three groups - Doers, Dreamers, and The Willing. Mercifully, these categories are not written in stone, and it’s quite easy to pass from one classification to another. In fact, one of my recommendations is that you do just that. Stretch a bit and see what it’s like on the other side.

But the other reason I would presume to speak on this issue with authority is because I have failed to make far many more films than I have completed. I know what it’s like to feel handcuffed to the first idea that comes to mind, I know what it’s like to get distracted by my own ideas, and I know what it’s like to want to make a film but not get be able to get to it because of my other responsibilities. I know many of the ways artists lose motivation.

But because I’ve also finished a few films, I have a few ideas on how to get you through. I know what it’s like to abandon everything except your film, I know what it’s like to come up with something really creative, and I know what it’s like to get a film done while balancing work and home life. Basically, I’ve done reconnaissance, and I’m giving you the report on the road ahead.

Next time, I’ll talk about the first pitfall, Walking in Circles. And maybe, some ideas on what you can do about it.

Well… here we are at the final installment in my series of posts celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars and how it inspired me to become an artist.In this last post, I want to talk about the extraordinary lengths the team went to in order to bring the fantastic world of Star Wars to life. Remember, this was before computer graphics, so all this stuff had to be built, and painted, and photographed. See the image up there… those are the Death Star surface modules I was telling you about yesterday. Here they are, all assembled into a continuous surface, and actually taken outside. The sun, it turns out, is a really good light source for photography.

Also, it allowed the team to get really unusual perspectives. By turning the model up on end like this, they could put the camera on rails and push it forward for the impression you were dive-bombing the Death Star.

Plus, someone figured out that explosions filmed like this would scatter sparks and debris in unexpected directions, giving the impression it had been filmed in space and not on Earth.

For the sequences of the fighters zooming down the Death Star trench, the model shop built an actual trench out of Johnston’s modules. To get the point of view of the fighters zooming through that trench, they strapped a camera to a boom, strapped the boom onto a truck, and drove along with the camera in the center. I wish I had a picture of that. It’s one of my favorite images from the making of Star Wars.

I think it’s the scale of the operation that impresses me. I think of the parking lot behind the initial ILM facility, littered with these mammoth Death Star surface models, and the trench. Think about working outside because you get different effects than working in a nice, sterile studio environment. Isn’t this such a cool, gritty feel? Isn’t just so garage-development?

Today, you’d just do it by computer. An to prove the point, look at this screen capture of the Death Star surface from the original Star Wars:

And now, look at a CG recreation, composed of modules faithfully replicated off of Johnston’s original designs. That’s pretty neat. Makes me want to model a few ships and animate them flying off down the trench. (The Death Star greebles are available at our friends over at

The CG model is undoubtedly crisper, and undoubtedly cheaper to create. But I sure miss the artifacts. I mean that both in terms of a physical artifact, a memento of shooting, but also artifacts in terms of imperfections. Something about the edges being imperfect, not sharp, not crisp. The physical models just have so much charm.

Of course when the camera is zipping past them at a zillion miles an hour, who cares about that anyway.

But the guys in the model shop cared. There are gun turrets on the Death Star. They could have just been tossed together out of junk plastic. But they weren’t. They were designed:

And built:

See what I mean about all that junk and artifacting? Look at the amount of detail on that thing. Just phenomenal.

Well, that’s about all I have to say about Star Wars for now. Since I began running this series, I’ve had many artists contact me to tell me they had the same books, and the same reactions to some of the same pictures. Funny to think how much this film has inspired an entire generation of artists.

And now, I guess it’s our turn, we who are lucky enough to be working in TV, film, computer games, comics. We should spend that extra bit of effort on that drawing, that model, that design. Just think… some kid might be inspired by your work.

Isn’t that an interesting thought?

The one last thing I got from Star Wars and Joe Johnston was the notion of managing the impossible. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. When you’re faced with a seemingly insurmountable task, figuring out what you want to do is only half of the problem. In preproduction, and on through production, you need to decide, and occasionally review in light of new information, HOW you’re going to do it.Take scale:

That drawing is classic Joe Johnston. Simple, quick little technical jot, but it sets the scale for the ships, so that everyone involved in the production can see at a glance, without having to go ask or look it up, exactly how big the ships are in relation to one another. That’s very important.

But equally important is how you break up the Impossible Task. Take the surface of the Death Star, for instance. It’s a nightmare of chunky detail, what the special effects guys call “greeble”. Look at this scene from the movie:

Bad enough you’ve got to create acres of this stuff, you’re going to fly a camera RIGHT DOWN IN AMONG IT! Sure, the camera will be whipping by, and there will be fighter ships and lasers to distract the viewer, but no matter what, it all has to be made (this is in the days before CG, when stuff was actually built and painted by hand) and it has to hold up reasonably well at close range.

Well, Johnston and his boys came up with a solution: a modular approach. They designed a series of modules that could be broken into sections and reattached, or turned 90 degrees to get different effects. These were then modeled, and mass produced out of a sort of high density styrofoam. Brilliant! But it all started with this series of drawings by Joe Johnston:

This ingenious approach has served me well when I’ve had to model stuff, even in the computer, that needed the appearance of detail and variety, but time or resource was short. Think of the “forest” in Channelwood in realMYST. They are all one tree, scaled and rotated to try to give the impression of more:

Next time, I want to talk about how this approach worked on Star Wars, the strange things they wound up doing to make it work, and discuss a little bit about the power of detail.