Check 12

Reflection

This ones a bit of a long one and kind of rant-y but bear with me.

This week was probably my most unproductive week of the semester. I'd been doing a good job fighting the burn out feeling but this week taxxed my mental heavily. I really underestimated how heavy the feeling of burnout can be and now feel very fortunate for being able to stave it off for as long as I have. I had put some classes on the back burner to try and those are now rearing their ugly heads in the ways of their final projects. I had a colossal amount of things to do this week and barely had the motivation to keep myself properly fed which isn't the best combo. Admittedly, I was avoiding my hard shots (19, 21, 22) all while trying to feel productive which led to me hyper-fixating on breakdowns when my primary focus should have been getting out of the animatic stage.

Now that it's coming to the end of the semester I find myself staring at my assembled premiere file and thinking "Oh my god I've really spent 12 (at this point) weeks on... THIS?" which is quite disheatening. I don't think my film should be locked away, never to be seen again, but I am overall disappointed in most of it. The more I watch it the more I think my story, animation, shot selection, etc. are all just... "mid". No real points stand out and its a story that just kind of tugs at the heart strings for the sake of it. I did seek simplicity in hopes of elevating it in some entertaining way but I don't quite think I did that. I have confidence in my skills and by no means think I'm a lousy animator, I'm just a little sad that after a semesters worth of dedication all I could seem to produce was "mid". But I think most of all, I really wanted to like my senior project. I wanted to go against the whole "its okay, everyone hates their senior project" and make something that I could proudly show to people later on and say "Yeah, given everything, I still cooked."