Saturday, November 25, 2006

Infinite Options Paralysis

Part of the difficulty with making your own short film (or any major creative project, for that matter), is that anything is possible. Think about it: ANYTHING.

So, I hear you ask - isn't that the fun part? Well sort of, but here's the problem: imagine one day someone comes to you and says, you know what - for the next 5 years, you can do anything you want. No limits at all, not even physical limits. Wanna go and live on the sun for 2 months? Go ahead. It's possible.

What do you do?

You see the difficulty? There are just too many great options. No matter what you come up with, there's something even MORE wonderful that you're missing out on. For me, this can be a paralyzing thought.

One of the symptoms of this "infinite options paralysis" is going in one direction for a while, then changing your mind, taking a different route, then changing your mind again, and so on - until you get completely confused about where the hell you're going and why. I've seen it happen to others, and I've done it myself. In fact, I'm doing it right now... I'm trying to figure out if I should stay with my latest idea, or go back to the original silly animation gag idea (the one with the purple alien), which is far easier for me to make. So far I'm leaning towards the gag - perhaps using it as as an experiment before going on to the more serious project.


Hmmm....this was supposed to be about environment concept art, but ended up with too many words. I'll post the sketches next time. Stay tuned...

2 comments:

Rafi BA said...

i hear ya!
i think that's the biggest problem i deal with in everything i do...
let me know if you find a way out of it ;)

Amir Porat said...

Sounds very familiar :)

I face the same problem in every project that dosent have a deadline

I'm still not sure how to get out of these cycles, I mean most of my work is WIP because of that :)

But I think that a good start is learning when to stop, and move on to the next thing