The pros and cons of being a one-man operation is something I’m becoming aware of more and more. The flexibility of doing whatever you want and changing your mind on a moments notice is great, but I tend to run into walls quickly. Walls being limitation of my ability, my time, my experience.

Workflow – What Workflow?

Working alone, I usually don’t create storyboards just a very static, crude animatic using my narration and some background art with some character stills to figure out how to time and animate a scene. This roughly planned ‘ad hoc’ approach to animation is really only possible, because I’m a one-man operation. I don’t need to “sell” my concept to team members, and there’s no need to explain the scene to anyone. This helps me to save a lot of work.

However, I’m not an experienced filmmaker who can visualize a whole scene and the camera angles just by reading a script. My mental visual concepts for any scene tend to be quite vague. Trying to put these vague ideas on screen, I quickly bump into the limitations of my animation skills, and the limited time available to put the scenes together, so I end up having to scale down the complexity of the short, or try to find other ways to express what I’m aiming at in a scene. Fortunately being a one-man operation, I can just pivot and unfold the scene in an entirely different way, more closely matching my skill set, the limitations of my character rigs and the limited time I have available. So it keeps me extremely flexible.

The downside is that, after all these adjustments, some scenes turn out to be far less interesting or clear as I envisioned them, so I might have to add in a few different angles and b-roll shots on a whim, just to make sure the scene works after all. Eventually scene number 12 becomes scenes number 12a, 12b, 12c, 12d and 12e. What I initially imagined to be a 6 second shot, can turn out be more like 16 seconds… This can kill the pacing, and then I might have to redo the whole scene or get very creative on the editing table.

This just happened with a scene I thought to be kinda funny, but it turns out with the added cuts for clarity, and the altered pacing it’s probably not so great. For situational comedy, you have to be a great animator with excellent timing – which I’m not – so in the future I’ll probably try to stick to witty dialog and quirky characters for comic relief.

I’m now looking at a possible end of July release for the second episode, and I really, really want to get the damn third episode out the door by end of year (episode 3 I think is going to be pretty cool).

Vlog is Coming

Production of episode 2 is dragging on and with it I don’t get around vlogging either. However a two new vlog episodes are in the work, but they’ll take a little time, because I’ll be talking about designing for animation what decisions went into the art style I’m using for Phungus & Mowld as well as how I create the artwork which then directly leads to a second vlog episode where I want to explain my personal workflow of producing this series all alone. YMMV, particularly the all alone part as you’ve read above allows for a very different approach (I guess) to animation that the production houses and people from the biz would take.