Month: May 2021

THESE MOMENTS ARE FLEETING

As I work through the final days of mixing, watching the film over and over I’m reminded of how difficult the animation process was for this film. There were a number of reasons for this (which I will not go into here) but I remember becoming seriously frustrated by it all on several occasions. Not exactly the frame of mind you want to be in when you’re animating. It can really sour the whole process if you let it get to you but you have to take the long view. The overall quality of the animation in FROM HELL HE RIDES is, I believe, the best I’ve ever done and those difficult days seem distant and irrelevant today.

STORY TIME


I don’t actively seek out new projects. I don’t sit back in my chair, hand on chin and think about what my next film will be. Scenarios pop into my head all the time and if one of them stays with me for a while then I’ll start developing it. This past year I was sure I knew what I was doing next on several occasions. One idea made it all the way to an outline, sort of. I spent two months trying to write it down but I could never land on an ending that satisfied me. I felt I could work it into something but sometimes when you begin investing time and effort it’s hard to let an idea go even when you know it doesn’t work. This past week I was standing in my kitchen and had a completely new, fully formed idea. Within a day I had the whole story. By the end of a second day I had a written outline and clear ideas for characters and sets. I won’t definitively say this is my next film … but the simplicity of it is so self-evident that I’m shocked that I never thought of it before.