2020 Production Update

Intro

Welcome back friends! It’s been a crazy fall season and I’ve been very busy restructuring my life behind the scenes. There are a lot of cool developments that I’ll talk about in later blogs, but today is going to be about what my main plan for next year is. Let’s get to it!

The DL

This has been a very interesting year that saw me produce content at a pace that I (or many other creatives, I wager) haven’t done before. I made a bunch of shorts, spent the summer updating my assets to be more modular, and burned myself out. While I am very happy about the updates I made, it got me thinking a lot about my overall production capabilities. While I think I’ve set up a very nice pipeline and I’m proud of all the work that I’ve done so far, I don’t think it’s where I need it to be to tell the best stories that I can.

I love telling stories, and I’ve told a lot since making these “Frame of Mind” type shorts, but I’m at the stage now where I don't care as much about quantity as I do about depth of content. This means I want to create bigger, more meaningful stories, not the smaller, shallower ones that I’ve been making. I simply haven’t been able to push my visual abilities and storytelling skills because of my current pipeline. I definitely think I can put out some amazing content given the right amount of time and  planning, and that’s the direction I feel like I should be taking now.

This all culminates into a plan to not create any short films in 2020, but focus my energies solely on updating my pipeline to tell deeper, and richer stories, as well as building up other aspects of myself. By doing this, I hope to reignite my passion for telling these personal stories, by giving them more time to simmer, and allow me to update my process to a point where I can create these larger stories without suffering in my private life. Maybe it’s possible to achieve a best of both worlds scenario? That’s something I’m excited about finding out.

To elaborate more, next years goal is to bring my production capabilities of these shorts to their actual peak (and beyond). This means, specifically, I’ll be taking a couple of steps back and do a slight visual refresh, expand the capabilities of my rigs, while streamlining the animation of them, and expanding my avenues of animation. I’ll go into more details throughout next year, but that’s the gist of what will be the primary focus of my time for next year. With that said, I’ll point out that I’ll still be taking time to make smaller types of content. Some of it has been coming out already, like the blog snippets, and I have planned a bunch of other platform appropriate content. 

A year is a long time to take a hiatus, but I think it's necessary to grow out of my plateau at this point. I'm also way more excited about optimizing my workflow than I am about story telling right now, and I've learned you have to chase whatever excites you most to maximize your productivity. I’ve felt a lot more energized by this decision, so I truly feel this is a good path forward for me. Focusing all of my time and energy on one thing is a very big change for me, so I hope that it makes a big difference for future projects.

Outro

So that's about it for this one. No new production of shorts ( there's one short I produced this year that may or may not come next year), all of 2020 will be about hashing out a new refresh and workflow changes, and smaller content for social media will be coming.

It’s nice to write a shorter blog as the last few have been very long. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to enjoy the free time I've made for myself.