I’m glad the article could help out. I’ll be writing the second installment this weekend… heh heh, can you imagine the embarrassment if I couldn’t finish writing a series of articles about finishing things?

Its just draining the heck out of me. my social life is fading, and my health is dwindling- sleeping and eating less;
but hey as long as the project gets done on time eh?

anyway, just wanted to say this is a great article and that it was just the pickup i need to finish our short.

more power to ya!

After film school and the trials of trying to get animation work and supportting a young family lead to animation becoming a hobby and I fell into dreamer mode , having lots of ideas at different stages but not making anything.

I am now struggling as one of the willing trying to motivate myself (making a film with someone else or in a school environment was so much easier to stay motivated) which is extremely hard when life keeps taking you in different directions.

Motivation is the key. When you work on a animated film idea, you can stay with that sole idea for potentially years! You can easily become bored with the idea and familiarity breeds contempt, you think the idea wasn’t as good as you thought so it gets abandoned. You need to keep telling people about your film and showing it to people to get their reaction and feedback. They will get excited by your idea even if you aren’t any more and that helps tell you that you are on the right track. The mistake is to be too precious about your idea and keep it secret.

Since film school I have not had anyone around me to bounce ideas off and work out the story, this blog has been a great boost to my energy and motivation.

Cheers

Neil

As for learning from other people’s mistakes, I hear ya. All I can do is put my cautionary tales out there and let the chips fall where they may. But when I was first starting out, I think I would have appreciated a report from the front lines, just so I knew what I was getting into.

In talking to different directors, I’ve noticed that there are certain habits and pathologies we all share. It would have been helpful to know this, rather than thinking I was the only one trying to solve these motivational problems.

Then again… perhaps I wouldn’t have listened. Most of this stuff is just plain old common sense, stuff that I bet you already know. Still, you can tell most people till you’re blue in the face that they should pay off their credit cards. People know this. The word is out. Yet credit card debt is at a record high…

Thanks for the note

I’m not so sure people can learn from other people’s mistakes though,
they might learn some stuff, but people tend to do the same mistakes, but they learn eventually.
Hopefully, I’ll learn something from this, so I can at some point finish some of my projects.
Going to try to do some work this summer vacation though finishing the game I’m working on is my first priority, it’s been sitting there with practically nothing being done to it since last year.

I’ll get you a new installment soon. Thanks for writing.

You said something about “single-idea syndrome”. This reminds me of this feature WIRED published July 2006 “What Kind of Genius Are You?”

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html

It’s an interesting theory about creativity.

Yours,

COS