Getting OVERWHELMED with your personal projects

[Music] imagine you're tasked with completing a short film a short animated film maybe it's for school and you're given a certain deadline you get excited so you start but then you start to realize oh my God this project is actually a lot of work it's really big and therefore you start to feel a bit overwhelmed a bit intimidated and therefore it kind of kills off motivation it kills off The Willpower to keep going on and eventually it leads to you giving up and it could be any other passion project whether it's a series of illustrations whether it's a comic book a graphic novel you're writing something or maybe you're designing something like a video game whatever it is you're making a passion project but you realize you're intimidated by it and you know what's crazy this doesn't really just apply to Big ambitious epic projects it can also play applied to small projects projects that can be completed within a few weeks or a few days whatever it is it is easy to feel overwhelmed regardless of the scale of the project hell I always feel overwhelmed when I start a 48 Hour film a project that is only meant to last me a weekend but for some reason when I started and when I'm working on it I just feel taxed out I want to give up this is this is crazy man and are there any solutions to this to get rid of this feeling and to plan out a better work method that makes you feel a little less intimidated a little less overwhelmed so you can actually finish whatever project you're working on but before I get to that I also want to talk about when I start to feel overwhelmed one of them is when I'm constantly having to make creative decisions I don't know if any writers are out there watching this but you know what it's like when you're trying to write your ideas down or trying to problem solve a storyline you're not writing anything down but you're doing some heavy brainstorming some thinking some creative decision making and that taxes you out it's the same thing with trying to come up with an idea for an animated short or a project but let's say you're not trying to come up with a story idea and it's really just focused on the animation production so when I'm working on an animated shot for example I have to think about the character design I have to think about the background design and then I have to also think about the acting Choice the animation and then I have to think about the color design the post-production the overall direction so I'm constantly thinking about the creative decisions and that taxes me out faster another is when I start or when I'm working on a project I start thinking about how many steps there are to getting a finished product so especially with animation there's a lot of steps to getting a finished highly produced looking animation work done independently even for limited or budget style animation there's still a lot of room needed to think about the file organization the shot layout the composition of shots storyboarding editing Etc again a lot of steps to get a finished product and of course the feeling is highly Amplified depending on how ambitious your project is there was one time I spent a year and a half developing a story for a 35 minute short film I only finished the animatic and the story reel for that project but I ended up canceling it because it wasn't really a project that I wanted to move forward with anymore I finished an animatic I don't regret it at all I learned a lot from it but I think a part of it was because I was overwhelmed by how big that project was too and another factor that plays into this and this is something that I've been addressing in my recent videos is is it worth finishing the project you know having done multiple animation projects myself a good chunk of those didn't get the rewards and benefits that I had hoped for knowing that it was a lot of work so it kind of kills motivation to keep going and to keep moving on to the next because and will this ever pick up or will this go anywhere and of course there's other things like a tight deadline unforeseen life circumstances that you don't see coming whatever it is it adds to the feeling of being overwhelmed and overwhelmed to the point where you get nothing done so what are some possible solutions that I might have that can help you overcome the feeling of being overwhelmed some thoughts and advice that can sort of help you get closer to actually finishing the project my first advice is just to focus on one part of the process and treat that process as a project itself so let's say you have a short animated film idea but instead of making a fully finished short maybe you just write a paragraph summarizing the film and then that could be the project for now and you can walk away from it and once you feel a bit better about yourself maybe you feel a bit more refreshed then you can come back to it and move to another step so let's say you're working on the same project maybe just make the personal project now finishing the storyboards and the animatic for it and that could be again another project of its own then you know next step is the next project so you can just finish all the rough loose anime animation of the project and that could just be the next major thing that you want to get done and this is addressing the thing that I was saying about constantly making creative decisions you're constantly thinking about all these different steps in the animation process that require a whole world of thinking of its own all these creative choices that you have to make but what if the creative Choice was deciding okay I'm just gonna spend my time just focusing on rough animation and not worrying about the cleanup or the color or the final lighting or post-production stuff you're just focusing on the rough animation and of course a lot of that energy isn't just creative work it's also labor work and I personally think it's a better Habit to at least finish a stage of your project rather than having a project that has a few finished shots and then just some rough animation and then some rough animatic or storyboards because once you have the rough animation done then you can just focus on the color and the cleanup which is again a lot of Labor work but at least you're not constantly thinking about the other steps that require Creative Energy take coloring for example it's a pretty laborious part of the process but it doesn't require so much creative thinking it doesn't tax me out it just becomes labor work and that eventually leads to me being in a flow meditative state I'm just moving forward knowing that if I just add on to it little by little I'll finish the project a few months ago my project was really just to finish a few animatics of stupid skits and story ideas that I have and then when I feel like returning to the idea I can just focus on animation I don't really have to think about all the creative stuff like story or writing or voice dialogue and acting because from personal experience I know that's going to overwhelm me thinking about all those other steps I applied the same method to a little comic book chapter that I did I did my rough thumbnails first and then I did all the pages but roughly done and then once that's all done then I moved on to cleaning up those drawings with a cleaner line and just focusing on making sure all the pages were cleaned up and then I moved on to coloring and I could just focus on the coloring itself so again just focusing on one step at a time spending a lot of that time and energy just focusing on the labor work and not so much with the creative process and I feel like that was the big contributing factor to why I was able to finish ambitious projects because there was a stage where I was only focusing on adding ink and color even though that process was laborious and it was long I knew that if I just kept moving forward and I didn't really have to think too hard about creative decisions I know that I would get it done another advice that I'd like to add is to simplify your outlook and your process so what this means is that you take away many multiple steps to get a desired finished product so here you kind of have to think what the priorities are is it the look is it the story or is it just getting something done so I would say remove certain steps or stages in your pipeline or go for a direction that calls for parameters to me examples of parameters are like things such as your project has no color or maybe your project is shot using only one set and one camera angle maybe your film has a limited running time maybe your project is all pantomime there's no voice work or the art direction is simplified another thing that you might want to consider is maybe doing the whole project in one program rather than having multiple programs for different uses so here are some other examples as much as I'd love to add cell shaded Shadows on my characters I know that's a whole other step of its own and I think about it well maybe those Shadows aren't important maybe I can find ways to cheat it in After Effects so I'll just animate my characters using flat colors only and not worry about the cell shadedness a part of me loves having really really smooth animation where everything's animated either twos or ones but then I think about well it's the performance gonna be okay without those extra drawings or is it really that important to have really smooth animation I want to keep things consistent and I'm racing against a deadline so there are cases where I might have to opt out for a more simplified style of Animation looser drawings less detail Etc I personally think working smarter or doing something like that does require a bit of experience but I also think it requires a bit of challenging your own ego too having the willingness and the openness to maybe pull back next is thinking about the scale and the size of your project so I would say think about achievable projects achievable projects to me are ones that you can see a clear end to it or it feels realistic it could be knowing the final outcome or knowing when you're expected to finish it it could be a really simple and small project you know stop thinking about trying to make full-on Pilots or an entire season or a whole feature film by yourself when you don't have much of an experience doing that stuff anyways but maybe you have a big lore a big story and a big world and you want to somehow Express these stories or these characters in animated format or graphic novel or whatever what if you just did little Snippets or scenarios or vignettes meaning that what if instead of telling a whole story maybe told a single chapter or a moment featuring that world or those characters and just let that be the project itself it's small it's short there's less commitment so if you finish you're done with it you can continue on if you want to expand on that but you finish a certain project and maybe being overly committed to something really really big can also make you feel a little overwhelmed you could treat each part of a big project as micro projects or you can make many micro projects and treat them as their entirely own thing I'll talk about that later in the future about micro projects and about independent projects in the future but for now that's all I want to talk about bye interested in learning hand-drawn animation or learning how to finish an animated shot from beginning to end have a look at the store where you'll find the complete introduction to 2D animation video course tutorials and other resources learn classical animation approaches drawing lectures techniques and other process videos visit the store through the link in the description below

Channel: Toniko Pantoja

Views: 20,731

Keywords: Toniko Pantoja, Youtube, Animation, Tutorial, Advice, Lesson, Vlog, Adobe, Photoshop, Animate, Flash, After Effetcts, Premiere, Video, Film, Drawing, Tips, Gestures, tvpaint, toonboom, harmony, storyboard pro

Id: maaEpd85yR4

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023