Production Diary 6 - Mr. Facebook Teaser
Intro
Today’s blog is a teaser for the next short film in production. Currently it’s titled “Mr. Facebook” and is in a skit format that is about 2 min long. It’s a pretty big project for me to make and it’s closer to a traditional production I would have made around 10 years ago (although far more limited). However, I initially wanted to do a new Storytime format. After completing "Burning Big Daddy”, I kind of had enough with the Storytime format, and wanted to do something different. Not that I dislike the Storytime format, but the production was so long and troublesome I needed some time to reset and thought this was a good opportunity to do so. I also thought it would be good to go back to a traditional pipeline so I can start developing a method that would expedite long for video production.
This short is in a very dialogue heavy format that’s reminiscent of web skits from creators like “LongBeachGriffy” or “Trarags”. It’s a format I really enjoy watching, and it’s something I wanted to experiment with for a while. If it does well, I have a lot of ideas that could work in this style and there will be more like it.
Short And Sweet
To start, as I’m writing this, I just wrapped up pre-production of the short, and the files are set up and ready to be staged and animated. This process took longer than usual, but that’s to be expected due to the project being a bit bigger than normal. What is interesting is that there were several points where I had to adjust my usual pre-production process to get things done quicker. A good example is that for my legacy “Moment of My Time” shorts, I would put several shots in 1 Toonboom file. This is so that if I have to make adjustments, I don’t have to constantly switch files to do so. This makes setting up, fixing and animating shorts a lot quicker overall, but that wasn’t possible for this short due to how long the shots were and how much dialogue they had.
There were many elements like this (too many to mention here), but fortunately the process is a lot smoother than it was for the “Burning Big Daddy” short. This is probably due to the fact that the only animation program for this short is Toonboom. It’s still been a messy process, and I have no idea how production will go at the moment. There are aspects of the scenes that should be easier to work with, but there are also a few uncertain areas where problems could arise.
I’m not sure how long the animation process will be either. There are about 30 cuts overall, but most of it is talking so on average the difficulty of each cut should be low, and I should only have to worry about making sure the puppets don’t break in strange ways. Provided that things go well, I could possibly be finished with animation by the end of July or beginning of August.
Outro
Even though the short is pretty long, it is shaping up nicely. I haven’t had too issues that were too difficult. It’s mostly just been little contrivances here and there. At this point I can’t even think about if it will perform well. In fact, I don’t really have any performance expectations for the short. Youtube is a strange beast, and I think if I expect too much too soon, I’ll be setting myself up for failure. It’s sufficient for me to classify this short as an “excavation project”. The goals being to develop a long form pipeline and iron out the kinks of production so when I do create the “big ideas” they get made as efficiently as possible so I can tell higher quality stories.
Things are getting exciting!
-Until next time-