The AnimWatch Blog

This is the second in my series on Making Films the AnimWatch Way. In my first installment, I talked about the three groups of people who are likely to make a film – Doers, who will stop at nothing to get it done, Dreamers, who come up with the most imaginative stuff but are easily distracted, and the huge group in the middle, which I call The Willing. These articles are going to address the various pitfalls you can encounter in making an animated film, but they are many of the same issues you face in any creative endeavor. Basically, I’m looking at problems of motivation from an emotional and psychological standpoint.

I DON’T NEED TO WALK AROUND IN CIRCLES

The first pitfall I want to talk about is a phenomenon I call Walking in Circles. If you find yourself addressing the same issue, answering the same question, trying to solve the same problem over and over again, you’re walking in circles. It’s one of the first problems people face, and it can go on for years. You may even mistake it for a lack of discipline, and there may be an element of that present here, but I don’t believe it’s the entire problem. The root cause of walking in circles, just like the name implies, is that you’ve lost your sense of direction. Literally, how can you get where you’re going if you don’t know which direction to go?

Oddly enough, it’s usually the little questions that can keep you going around in circles. Do I want my movie set in outer space or in ancient Egypt? Do I want to use humans or talking animals in my story?

Some people – those close to the Doer end of the spectrum – probably had the idea come to them fully formed and they are dead set on this. They’re making a film about talking animals in ancient Egypt, and that’s that. Every decision can be evaluated against that decision, written in stone, never to be revisited.

But if you honestly don’t know which sort of film you’d prefer, then you’ll just keep coming back to those questions. There are a couple of things you can do about it.

I GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

If you’re having trouble making that decision, try it out on some trusted friends. These ideally should be people who share your interests and know what you’re trying to achieve. Lay out the possibilities for them, the pros and cons of each side, and then tell them which way you’re leaning. However, don’t let them make the decision for you. It’s the responsibility of the director to make these decisions, but it’s also the privilege. Subconsciously, it’s tempting to surrender these decisions to someone else. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you can always blame them instead of you. But you need to embrace that responsibility, and enjoy the privilege. Get advice, but choose your own road.

Now, a word about other people’s input: you need to make sure you’re getting good advice, and not just letting a bunch of forum monkeys push you around. There are people who have nothing better to do all day but hang around in forums. They tend to wind up with a strangely warped view of things, and become part of a hive-mind that becomes hyper-critical of things that don’t seem to bother normal people, but at the same time they can be quite fickle. Pay too much attention to these guys, and you can really find yourself going around and around.

Take the issue of whether to make your story with talking animals or humans. There are people out there who feel the talking animal thing has been done to death. But of course, there have also been plenty of films about humans. When you come right down to it, what else is there? Animals, humans, aliens, monsters, other sentient beings, or inanimate objects. Saying that you’re sick of any one of these genres is sealing off access to a bunch of things you could make a film about. I can see being tired of a particular sub-genre. For instance, there has been a spat of penguin movies as I write this, and I would think that it would be wise to hold off on your new penguin film for a bit just from a market over-saturation standpoint. But if the only way you can tell your story is with penguins, have at it.

The dirty little secret is that it really just doesn’t matter. It’s hard to imagine George Orwell’s Animal Farm working properly with humans instead of animals - the allegory sort of depended on it – but that situation is really rare. In most cases, it just doesn’t matter.

Look at the Lion King. That film featured talking animals and is regarded as one of the greatest animated features of all time, and was quite successful both critically and financially. But it was based on Hamlet, which works just as well with humans. It really just doesn’t matter. No matter what else they are, they’re just characters if you think about it. So spending a lot of time and energy coming back to the issue is just a waste of time.

Here’s a quick test to help you decide and get you on your way: can you see your characters as humans? If so, why are you trying to make them anything else? What you get from non-human characters is a chance to break them free from stereotypes of race. It does help make them more universal. And it allows you to develop a strange new world. For instance, who knew what the world of Salt and Pepper shakers looked like before you came up with your Spice Story?

Again, this comes down to your sense of direction. If you have a strong feeling you should be making your film with animals, vegetables or minerals, then by all means, make it that way. If you are ambivalent, take that as a license to just make a decision and go.

TOO LEGIT TO QUIT

Here’s the thing: sooner or later, you need to commit. If you’ve decided to make a film with talking animals, but you keep wondering whether you should have used humans instead, your subconscious might be trying to tell you something. Maybe deep down you understand that the decision you made isn’t the right one for the story you’re trying to tell.

But if you find yourself vascillating – animals one day, humans the next – that’s lack of direction. Since you clearly have no preference, what you need to do in that case is just pick one and stick with it. You may find yourself halfway through the project longing for the path not taken, but that’s normal. That’s called Opportunity Cost, and it’s part of the creative process. You have to let some things go in order to keep something good. You can’t keep everything or you wind up with a mess.

The time to listen to your subconscious is in the beginning, that little nagging voice in the back of your head. Once it starts changing its mind, stop listening to it. And once you’ve gotten out of preproduction, you’re not changing animals to humans, or changing from Science Fiction to Ancient Egypt. Next film, maybe. But you should console yourself that it mattered so little to you that you couldn’t even make the decision at one point, so just know that whatever decision you’ve made should be just fine. The fact that you finally decided is what matters.

THERE MUST BE SOME KINDA WAY OUTTA HERE

Now, if you’re still having trouble making those little decisions in the beginning, and you’ve tried sharing it with someone, and you’ve really taken a good, hard look at it, and still just can’t commit, you may be lacking perspective.

Just like when you’re lost in the woods and you might consider climbing to the top of a tree to get a better look at where you’re heading, you need to get some distance from your problem here. Write down your decision, as if trying to convince someone of your decision, and shut it in a desk drawer or mail it off to yourself. Try to get a few days, maybe a week, away from the whole project. Mark a date on the calendar to review the problem, and then do something else. Read a book. Watch a movie. Visit some friends. Go outside. Ideally, forget about the issue for a few days.

Then, when the date on the calendar arrives, it’s time to revisit the problem. You might have even forgotten about it entirely. Look at what you’ve written down, and you just might see it more clearly. If the decision as you’ve laid it out makes sense, then it’s probably right. If not, go the other way.

And then – this is the key – stick with it. Get stubborn. Get disciplined. Commit to the decision, and don’t look back. You have a story to write after all, and all these tiny questions of what sorts of characters or genres are really secondary to the story you’re trying to write.

TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, WHAT YOU REALLY REALLY WANT

But there are also big questions that can get you walking in circles. Among the biggest is not know what kind of film you even want to make. This is common among people who are more in love with the idea of making a film than actually making a film. I think anyone who says that they really want to make a film but just don’t know what kind is going about it backwards. Ideally, you’d have a story you want to tell, and everything would spring from that. So if you’re having this problem, try looking at your film from the other direction – character and story first - and see if that helps.

A related issue is the question of scope. I know a guy who wants to make a huge, sweeping epic series of graphic novels, but he’s never really finished even one small comic. He has asked on many occasions whether he should try something smaller just to prime the pump before trying to work on his multichaptered masterpiece, or just charge right in and learn on the job, so to speak. This is a very common question for people who want to make animated films, too. People are inspired by huge stories like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the Matrix Trilogy, the Harry Potter series. And they see people like Brian Taylor, who never had much Computer Graphics or Animation training working alone on Rustboy, learning by doing, and ultimately getting a feature film deal out of it. That’s the argument for just charging in, isn’t it?

My advice is always to walk before you can run. Learn on the small thing first, and then do something bigger. Yes, it’s possible to make an animated feature film all by yourself. It’s possible to win an Academy Award your first time animating. But I wouldn’t enter a baby that was just learning to walk into the Boston Marathon. To me, that makes about as much sense.

I understand the issue. You want to make this huge thing like the huge thing that inspired you. Doing something smaller seems almost beneath you, and a waste of time, because after all, your epic masterpiece is just waiting for you. Time is a-wastin’, right?

I offer you a compromise. If you just can’t face doing something small, can you break your epic into smaller bites? If you’ve never finished an animated film before you need to aim at something realistic, no more than 5 or 10 minutes long. Break your huge epic down into bite-sized chunks. You know the old adage – how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

IT HASN’T HAPPENED YET

The last thing I can think of that’s keeping you walking in circles is you. And you may not even realize you’re doing it. This is where psychology rears its ugly head again.

First, you may just not want to move out of your comfort zone. Mentally, you enjoy the well-tread path of ideas you’ve already considered, of problems you enjoy rolling around in your head, looking at them from every direction. Taking on the bigger problems you’ll face in making a film means moving on to new problems, and that can be intimidating. In terms of motivation, you may just not want to make the sacrifices that you know you’ll have to make.

The bad news is that you will have to move out of your comfort zone in order to make the film. That is a fact, and you just need to accept that and move on. If you can’t accept it, that’s fine, but you need to understand that you’re just not going to make a film in that case, because it can’t be done without discomfort.

Second, you may be keeping yourself in this cycle because of a fear of failure. Basically, so long as you never actually solve these problems and finish the film, you can’t fail. No one can pan the film critically because they never see it. That’s the seductive reasoning. And so long as you never get far on the film, in your mind, it’s perfect. It’s all potential. Any idea that interests you sort of fits, and you have in your mind this fun, perfect film full of potential that you just love thinking about. And what if you give it your all, do your level best and the film sucks? It turns out ugly, and no one likes it? If you don’t finish it, you can tell yourself and all your little friends online that you could actually do much better than the latest Shrek movie, but that you’ve just been too busy to finish. See? You didn’t fail. You didn’t get to compete, that’s all.

Fear of Failure can be a deep-seated psychological issue, and doctors and therapists have discussed it for years, and you may have larger issues than my simple advice can cure. I’ll just offer you this: you need to redefine failure. Try to see that failing to make the film is a bigger failure than making it and having it fail in the marketplace. After all, you want to finish a film, don’t you?

Oddly, Fear of Failure has a sibling called Fear of Success, which can just as effectively keep you from finishing your film. The logic goes that if your film is successful, you’ll have to take time off from work to go support it on the festival run, or you’ll suddenly have more money than your piggy bank can hold, or you’ll be otherwise somehow inconvenienced by your film’s success. I’ll just offer you this: you can handle success. Finish your film. Just concentrate on that. And you can burn your success bridge when you come to it.

Finally, I want to say - be brave. The Universe loves bravery and will reward you. If you’re walking in circles, and you don’t know where to go, you’re in luck! Any way out is the right way to go. Only continuing to walk in circles is wrong. You need to just pick a direction and go that way.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 7:45 am and is filed under Films The AnimWatch Way. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.