One Year of Being a Solo Indie Animator
It’s been a few months since my last entry — largely because I’ve been deep in the animation trenches, cranking on new projects, experimenting with new tech, testing new techniques, and generally learning in leaps and bounds.
Most recently, I also put together my first ever demo reel, for an application I had to submit. It’s a showcase of some of the things I’ve made this past year and you can see it below.
April 1st, 2023 marks exactly one year since I quit my old job to become a solo indie animator and the occasion is a natural milestone to step back for a minute and do a little introspection.
So how am I doing?
The simple answer is that I’ve never been happier. My old job was great — I learned a ton, and worked with great people — but it was still a job. This feels completely different — I still work long hours, and it’s hard (like really hard — I’ve likened the technical learning curve in some cases to doing all four years of my engineering degree at the same time) — but I wake up every day excited to get started, which is a pretty strong indicator of a good fit. As with anything difficult, there are frustrating days where I make less progress than I’d like, but most days I end feeling good about the things I learned and the things I made.
Am I meeting my goals?
I had some fuzzy, but rather ambitious goals in mind when I got started on this journey — with the optimistic intention of knocking out three proof-of-concept shorts by the end of 2022. Keeping to that original, and rather unrealistic timeline has been impossible. I have since re-evaluated and reconfigured — giving myself these first two years (one of which is now over) to focus on learning, without too much pressure to “ship” a finished final product.
Having said that, I remain me, and to feel a sense of progress I HAVE to ship stuff regularly, however small. In December, I was able to complete my first ‘proof of concept’ short film, Rogue Squadron, which caught in the algorithm somehow and has become quite popular. I’ll write a separate post about engaging with the commenters on that video — it’s been a hilarious, heart-warming, and fascinating experience. But it feels good to have made something that so many people seem to love.
One year in, I think I have a clearer picture of how to estimate how long a project will take, and I think that a reasonable target for ongoing throughput should be making two short films (each about 4–8 minutes long) per year. Rogue Squadron was 62 shots, and took about 4 months to make, and I was learning the basics while making it. That’s a rough benchmark, knowing that’s a lot of shots, and assuming that there are new technical challenges and experiments with each new film. The hard truth though, is that films aren’t widgets, and everything always takes longer than I think its going to — so metrics and predictability only go so far.
I’m also aware that before I can make something really good, I have to make a bunch of not-very-good stuff. So I’m trying to be realistic — as with any difficult task, this will take time and a lot of work.
My broader goal remains the same: To make beautiful, thoughtful, animated short films good enough to be shown at major international festivals like Annecy. I’m a long, long way from that — but glittering somewhere in the distance, I think I’m starting to see a path towards it.
How do I spend each day?
During my sabbatical year (in 2020, before I quit) I developed this process of dividing the day into a morning chunk, an afternoon chunk, and an evening chunk — and if I was reasonably productive in two of those chunks, I’d call the day a success. These days, I find those chunks flowing into each other more, and honestly, the bigger problem is setting boundaries for when to stop.
Its quite an exhilarating feeling to be past the initial steep technical hump and being able to get creative with the work — and it can be hard to step away. Some evenings I’ll look up from my computer and it’ll be 9.45pm and I’ll have no idea how that happened. I need to get better at reining that in and building better boundaries — which is hard for a person like me who dislikes routines.
What am I working on now?
In January, I got done with pre-production on an original short film I’d written, based around a sci-fi take on the iconic crop-duster scene in North by Northwest. I took a break from it and had some travel before getting fully stuck into production — and when I came back to the Northwest script I was a lot less in love with it. So I am re-writing now, keeping a lot of the same elements in the story, so the pre-production work doesn’t go to waste.
A really talented musician, Tyson Cazier, who has done a lot of game music, saw some of my stuff and offered to do the music for Northwest — which was very nice of him — and will be a very new experience for me. I’ve always cut to existing music, having never had a custom score written beat for beat to a film that is already edited together. I’m excited about how that will turn out and looking forward to working with Tyson.
In the meantime, I am trying to quickly crank out another quick short using IP that I don’t own. I’ve learned a lot about meshes, rigging and materials since my early Mace Windu experiments, and am able to do things much faster, with better results. So I was doing some experimentation in Unreal with a couple of the character models from Disney Infinity, when I had the half-baked idea of an Avengers / The Office mashup — with the characters doing to-camera interviews etc.
Its also a simple way to concentrate on learning character animation in a controlled environment (mostly seated, simple camera and environments) — so it serves as a nice second proof-of-concept for my learning journey.
After initially toying with the idea of an original script and voice actors, I decided that it would be faster to just cut together some bits of audio from MCU films and knock it out quickly. If the voice components come together at some later date, this can serve as a technical POC for that. I’m about a third of the way through shooting this one, and learning a lot about character animation while having fun with it. Stay tuned for more news on Avengers: An American Workplace soon.
