How to never finish your project

Hey everyone! In this series, I want to share the behind-the-scenes of my thesis film - so you can avoid making the same mistakes I did! Kind of a shorter post this week, let’s dig into it ✨

👹 Some updates

• Last week we put out a voice actor call to a super positive response - we’re working on scheduling auditions in the coming weeks

• Our AMAZING composer Jason Fujita is set to come in with music over the next month or two

• We’ve officially entered major production! Wooo 🥳

So, as pre-production of our film wraps up and the story and animatic are finalized, a fear of fully committing to the project starts to creep up. Couldn’t I just keep working on the story? Making it clearer, the twists more unexpected? And why shouldn’t I keep working on it until it’s perfect?

🏄‍♂️ Striving for perfection

Committing to a story for your film feels scary, at least for me, because it means picking one out of hundreds of possible versions of it and saying “this is good enough”. So, my instinct here has always been to avoid finalizing the story, hiding behind “it’s not ready yet”. But that’s all it is - hiding.

"We can convince ourselves that hiding, you know, making it better, hiding behind this perfection is in and of itself work and that we're accomplishing something. We don't have to put it out in the world and get feedback." (from this interview with tennis coach Paul Assaiante)

Character explorations - by Mish

It’s easy to keep dismissing a story as unfinished and using that as a reason for not putting it out. A mentor once shared this helpful anecdote that’s stuck with me since: “A professor of mine showed our grad-school film class a short he’d been working on for the past 10 years, to average reactions. The film was mostly fine..“. Not bad, but nothing amazing. Why is that?

Part of it is that each idea only has so much built-in potential. As story artists and writers, we're always tempted by the elusive "perfect story", so we keep chipping away at stories, never satisfied with their quality. And yet to grow as an artist requires you to finish stories and let them suck. You can’t develop your taste without failing over and over. To have 10 ideas fail while trying your absolute best with each one can teach you so much more than trying to perfect a single one for 10 years.

WIP expression sheet - also Mish haha

So, commit to finishing your projects. Deadlines can help. Let your stories suck a little - while it can be painful, doing that can give you something much more valuable than a “perfect project” - the chance to make a better one next time. Push each idea to its fullest and give it your best, of course. But let it go at some point.

There will always be another film to make. In the words of surfer legend Duke Kahanamoku: “Be patient. Wave come. Wave always come.”

🌊 Thanks for reading! Let me know if you liked this post and see you in the next one! Hopefully by then I’ll have a successful film to show, or at least an interesting failure.

Bonus reading: This excellent mini-comic by Tristan Yuvienco on developing tastes has shaped my thinking on the subject - I can’t recommend it enough:)