The problem with maintaining a site...

The problem with starting over after not touching things for a long... long time... is that you're starting over... after a long... long time. So long in fact, that I've forgotten how things work. So this place was once my hobby platform to present my illustration, it's since sort of turned into my personal version of dropbox. I dump stuff in some hidden directories, I access it or send people to go check stuff out. 

Not a whole lot of drawing has occurred in recent years. To be honest, I'm not sure if will ever be a regular occurrence again. While I work in the animation industry, it's hard for me to come home and pick up the pencil some more. I have experimented with other aspects of animation production, but every creative person can agree that it's pretty easy to get caught up in the details of such.

I work in the late production stages of the studio, so by the time it gets to me, my job is consistency check and enhancement of special effects. It's been that way for a while, and I don't get to draw a whole lot. It's a lot of click and wait and click and wait. Previously I did character animation for a couple years, which is hellish in TV production. Surviving from week to week hoping to achieve a certain frame count so you get paid something that isn't minimum wage is not my idea of a great job. Some guys thrive on it, personally, I lost my taste for it. So almost post production is a lot better, being salaried and not as stressful in terms of nagging questions if you will be able to eat that week or not.

The other aspects of production that I have mentioned were mainly preproduction stages, scripting, design, storyboards and backgrounds. Those are all areas I have little to no experience with, so I started a project a number of years ago to explore that area, starting with scripts. The ultimate goal was to take those scripts to design and boards, but I lost momentum after a while. It seemed nobody was interested in reading scripts to help me form a strong basis of the project. So, I didn't see a need to finish a story for an audience that didn't exist. I already know how it ends, I certainly don't need to put it down on paper for nobody to see.

So in the end, the project was halted ... I have 16 or 17 episodes in a 44 minute format, unheard of in animation... cause you know, I like breaking rules and doing something my way cause, well damnit, I want to do things my way. The original plan was 13 44 minute episodes but as I got writing, trying to jam it all in was a bit difficult, so I started to extend and flesh things out. My circle of friends who abandoned me on this task to help me find plot holes and weak bits of writing only wanted to see finished product and had no real interest in providing real critique. They wanted to be an audience, not peers. It's a difficult position to be in as a professional vs a hobbyist. 

Moving to storyboards with an incomplete script would be unwise in the production world, and because I was doing it to simulate a production, jumping around with incomplete things would be a waste of time if I had to come back and throw out a lot of work in order to redo it. What they didn't seem to understand from my point of view is that it's a house of cards. If something is bad to start with, no amount of art can make it awesome.

Anyways, I digress. They lost interest, and I had explored and slayed the beast that is a script format for production. I never got to storyboards because I felt the writing wasn't ready for it and I had nowhere to go. Thus the glimmer of hope for the last incarnation of the site to be reinvigorated with new art died a rather inglorious and quiet death.

In the meantime I started self learning piano from scratch. I suck at it, it's enjoyable to an extent and every once in a while there's a tiny crack of light that shines in the recesses of my mind of a life long project that sits unrealized because it seems nobody wants to see it. Such a sad state of things. :P 

 

Or I'm just a lazy bastard.