Overtime week

It's been snowing alot up here the past couple of weeks, and it's just finally starting to melt away.  And NY is finally starting to feel like its getting warmer!  Man I'm looking forward to seeing Central Park in the spring.

I spent my first week doing a bit of overtime to get a shot done.  The deadline was pushed up early, and I really didn't want it to go past this week, and more importantly I didn't want to half ass the shot.  It was my first dialogue shot in the movie, with the main character no less!  It was small, but I wanted it to stand up to the shots around it.  Early in the week monday, I was nowhere near being done!  Not even close.  Work-wife Joe was a lot of help, he's got a great eye for not only mechanics but whether the shot if feeling right.  Motivation, thought process, mood.  We walk a lot about that stuff and it really helps.  So I spent most of the week to get the acting to feel right and stayed late thursday to polish the sh*t out of it to show the director the next morning.  I come in early friday to make some last-minute, down to the wire tweaks at my desktop,  and I scrambled into the screening room so scatterbrained that all I had to take notes with was a dull pencil and a recycled napkin.  My shot was the first to show,  the director watched it over twice, gave a few notes on camera tweaks, and It was finaled !  Production Manager hit the gong and I had the biggest sigh of relief.

(As an aside, the cool thing is that they pay you for accrued overtime hours here, which may seem like a given, but I've never worked in a place like that.  And I've done my fair share of overtime in games.)

On the drive home, I was thinking, that was best shot I've ever done.  As animators there's always gonna be times where we feel like we plateau or become stagnant.  I think the best way to remedy that is to put yourself in a position where you are scared.   When I felt like my animation becoming stagnant a while back I took an Animation Mentor to push me out of my comfort zone.  I was intimidated of dialogue shots, acting.  But consequently I grew leaps and bounds taking those courses.  When you come into a place like Blue Sky, you're scared all over again.  The bar is so much higher and there's no way you can anything even close to it.  With me, that struggle and sense of urgency ends up pushing me to do my best work.  I'm scared every time out of the gate, but the trick is to dive in fearlessly, and I'm confident enough to say that every subsequent shot I've done since I've been here has been the best thing I've animated so far, and I still have a long way to go.