I’ve started to loathe the Infinity Beach Bar. It’s the first location in the pilot and I can’t seem to get past it. Every time I think I’m done, I find another little tweak or something that’s wrong that I have to fix and spend time on. I’m not striving for the remotest perfection either. My time is limited, so I’m already making huge compromises with the animation of my characters. Movements and gestures often seem still too wooden, but they do the job so I leave them as is, only fixing obvious mistakes like wrong layering of objects or apparently jerky movement. Either way, I’m stuck at the first five minutes of the damn episode and it won’t let me move beyond it…

As if that wasn’t quite enough, I’ve been tweaking and even completely re-rigging both main characters several times now to the point where I feel I might have overdone it. Mowld in the last scene has possibly changed a little too much, and I might have to go back to an older rig and redo this scene entirely. Far greater men than me ran into the pitfall of fiddling with their creation until it’s gotten worse instead of better (cough, cough, Star Wars Special Edition, cough). So at least I am in very good company.

On the writing front it’s not better. I’m currently considering rewriting one scene of the pilot, which would also require re-doing the narration work. It seems it’ll never end.

At least the script for episode 2 is in the can. But I got stuck writing the 3rd episode. I’m struggling to make a story out of what seemed to be a good scenario that would write itself, but now turns out to be not as gripping as I thought. On top of all this misery, I’m desperately longing for spring to come. I’m so done with cold weather and cloudy skies. Please weather gods – a little sunshine could really make a difference now…