I often wonder whether making films and games is feasible as a career, considering how incredibly LONG it takes me to finish any given project.  The stop motion piece below was initially filmed in late 2008, and I’m just releasing it now.  Granted, there were specific reasons for this, but it’s not a joke that I spent over a year editing the live-action film that will (hopefully) be released next.  (And these are only a few minutes each!)

I guess it comes down to the conflict between quality and speed; any project I care about will incite me to spend as much time as necessary perfecting it.  The question then becomes, do I spend my time working a job that’ll pay me enough to live, or do I spend my time making pieces of my own that’ll leave me starving in the end?

It was there for two days!

So I recently sent in a claymation video to compete in a “World of Goo” video contest that Game Trailers was having.  My partner and I thought up a horribly morbid take on the subject matter, and we spent two weeks storyboarding, building sets & models, filming, and editing.  The idea was for it to be a quick, throw-away film, but it ended up being a lot more involved.  In the end, we produced a film that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to put in my portfolio, which surprised me:

The really shocking part, though, was the level of response.  You can go here, and see for yourself; it received more comments and views (over 20,000!) than any other video in the contest.  We even attracted the attention of websites not affiliated with the contest at all, which I say makes the project a success, contest or no.

But, as you can guess from the post title, we didn’t win.  We didn’t even get an honorable mention, which I thought was in the bag.  Maybe we violated one of the rules, or missed the point of the contest, but I think we just weirded the judges out and they didn’t know what to do with us.  Heh.

Anyway, this video is probably the most cohesive narrative I’ve filmed yet, and the animation is much smoother than my previous attempts at stop-motion.  It makes me want to do this all the time, actually, if the process wasn’t so agonizingly painful!