Todays super interesting animation production blog is about? Motivation.

One integral part of any independent animator is motivation, or inspiration, as I refer to it in order to not appear lazy (tee hee). It takes a LOT of motivation to animate, especially when you aren't getting paid, and you have no idea how many/few people will see your work.

I'm talking dozens, possibly hundreds of unpaid, work-filled hours. Sure it's what I love doing, and that's a part of where my motivation comes from, but sometimes it's very difficult to continue on. There is an overhead to these things, too. There's no such thing as a project costing $0. For my current project (read last post) I need to buy a new microphone and pop filter, new pens, and more "animation paper" (read: paper that's been hole punched in a certain design on the bottom for maximum stay-in-one-spotability.) It's not a huge amount of money, but it adds up.

Sometimes the best form of inspiration is to just walk away from the project for a moment. Get a clear view, maybe refine some old ideas. Lunchbox Duck episode 3 has been mulling for almost 3 years! Thats a bit on the extreme side, but it was very easy to come back into it with a million new ideas, and better versions of older ones.

Sometimes the motivation comes from just yelling at yourself to stop being such a fuck and just get some drawing done. Thats some good motivation, right there. I find also, that starting a new animation session is hard, but stopping can be even harder. It sucks leaving an animation sequence unfinished. You come back the next day and aren't in the same flow and it just doesn't work.

Right now, I'm in a strange place with my motivation because I know what work I have to do, I'm excited to start it, but I just need a few more items in order to start; such as the aforementioned paper. So far the script is 100% done, the storyboard is a little less than half-way finished, and there are 0 voice tracks and like, the 30 seconds of animation I did for the project 2.5 years ago. Today I was planning on moving on to backgrounds. Well, experimenting with backgrounds, anyway. Like, with actual paint. we'll see.