I’m only speaking slightly hyperbolically when I say that I can’t do anything half-assed. I always feel that if I’m going to do something that’ll be a lot of work, I might as well do it right. Take, for example, animation.
It can be frustrating to have that attitude sometimes. It means I do a lot less stuff. It would be great to be able to just jump in and start animating something, but I think I’d end up with a bad result if I did that. Why make it if it ends up being so bad that no one will want to watch it?
In the case of animation, story is vitally important. That’s the real stopping point. I have to sit down and make a good story to animate, otherwise it’s not worth creating the animation.
I’m thinking about this in relation to my Cats in Space series idea. I made a very short animation based on that recently. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look:
I did that video in a super-rough style for the sake of getting it done fast. I got an interesting comment on the Youtube page for that video, suggesting that if I did an episode like that once every two months and gave it some higher production value then I might actually be able to get some people following my Youtube channel. That’s a pretty exciting thought to me. I love the idea of people who I don’t know actually being interested in the stuff I make.
How hard would it be to do something like that? Well, that’s where we get back to the basic premise of this post. If I were to do a series then I’d want it to have a good overarching story. Serialization, that is. I should be able to string it together and have it be coherent as a whole presentation. You know, because it should be something that new viewers can go back and watch sequentially and get the whole story.
To have a good story there has to be some planning. You can’t just jump in because that’ll create a mess of a story. You get more short-term gratification but in the long term you get a bit of a shoddy product.
For the last few days I’ve been messing around in Word, working on story ideas. It’s hard. There are good specific steps you can take to make a good story but you still have to have some creativity. Maybe that’s obvious, but it’s something I need to remind myself of. I need to come up with something good to make it engaging.
So yeah, that’s what I’m working on. I’m excited to make it happen. I guess we’ll see where it goes from here.