This pile of paper makes me smile

Pictures speak better than words. I think the above picture says a lot more than I could hope. Last night I finally, FINALLY finished animating my shots. Not to say that I won't be redoing some of them in the coming days, but essentially - - it's done . . .

It feels good and fits in with my revised (my original one was/is long gone) schedule of devoting the next fortnight to photographing (my drawings), editing and compositing . . then the last week of October to sound.

I still have backgrounds to do . . hmm . . but most of them are not too detailed, so can probably be done in a few days.

I don't know what else to say really . . besides that I've kinda reached one milestone in this project.

And that I'm feeling very preachy on the topic of PLANNING. I haven't adhered to that completely during this project - particularly when it came to picking an aesthetic (isn't it much easier to live in denial hoping someone will bail you out? well, at least in the short term?) until Will woke me up with a "Why are you trying to sabotage yourself?" - but for the things I have planned . . I can see now how important planning is. . planning is so essential to managing all of this. It isn't always the answer to things, but it is the answer to a lot of things.

It's scary initially, as planning can be overwhelming - and in some instances I'm glad I approached this project somewhat naive. I would have thought twice if I had known that Scene 4 would result in about a ream of paper. But on the otherhand, it can be an encouragement to know how each bit of work fits into the overall picture, especially when you've laboured 3 days over a shot that the line test playback spits out in 1 second.

Planning has meant that I haven't lost weight (from stress) this year. Not that it was too hard to put it back on again after . . haha.

Planning has meant that I haven't stopped eating properly (well, unless you count snacking on chocolate, biscuits and seaweed - it's an asian thing - as falling off the healthy eating bandwagon - in which case I've somewhat failed . .)

Planning has meant that I've been able to sleep properly and NOT see a sunrise (yet). Sunrises are beautiful things but not when you saw the sunset before that also and haven't had time to rest in between. In those situations sunrises are depressing.

Anyway, that's about it for now . . I have to work on my Honours Paper now . . class has resumed again and I need to make changes to the draft Lynne marked. On the whole though, the paper is looking a lot better than two months ago . . I get it now. Like I really get it. Before it was like a tumor growing on my project (gross, but this analogy works . . i think) sucking away time and energy from it . . but now I see it more as . . a conjoined twin? . . a part of my project. It does involve time and energy but essentially so . . and not in a negative way. That is probably the worst analogy ever . . but yeah . . I hope you get the idea? :P