If you’d ever painted or sculpted, good practical advice is to work on all the little bits for the piece in parallel. You start with lower detail, get the big moves figured out, and while maintaining a consistent resolution of your strokes (or chips? do scultpors chip?), you iteratively progress into a more detailed version. ^metaphor

I like this because you can take as much time, or be as loose as you want, and call it done whenever. A master’s painting looks good at any point of its completion. A mural may be the finished accomplished vision of the artist, and a sketch is also; what matters is intent.

my process rn

I’m working on an animation, so my process at the moment looks something like this

1. working on script and thumbnails intermittently
2. storyboard with placeholder voice acting goes into the first rough edit ASAP
3. keep working on it, and leave place for improve

Once there’s a rough cut done, I’d say I’m in post-production. And with animation in particular there is room to change things, because… you are kind of painting but in motion. You start with a storyboard, then you find key frames^[the most impactful and important poses], then add tweens(if you want)^[In-betweens, or secondary key frames in-between], colour it (if you want), add shading (..you get it), etc.

Really you could even stop at a storyboard, or an animatic. It wouldn’t tell a story as well as a completed version of the film, but there is still a narrative that the viewer can follow, presented consistently. And leaving yourself a choice to opt out of finishing the project early has value. An idea that works as a script, or in a comic¹ is not always worth translating into film / animation production.

[!warning] A caveat This won’t work for everyone of course, especially once a team is too big to fit in one room.

I’m working alone, so I can afford to take my time, to swerve in new directions, to improvise, do last minute additions (where they make sense). Having a more loose approach gives me a lot of freedom.

Once you add more people into the mix, there is more need for communication, planning and managing and this house of cards will surely break down. But for indies and smaller teams it’s a great way to leverage skills of each artist in a more natural, less constricted way.

The beauty is you can stop at any point, and you have a completed piece if you are working consistently. This approach lies in contrast to doing things hyper-sequentially, which drains me off motivation. It feels like I’m just completing a grocery checklist, but it takes 8 hours to get the baby carrots from the produce section. Not much freedom for the amount of work I’m committing.

[!example] Imagine This:
You are working sequentially. A quick one-day shoot on site, then spend like 30 hours editing. What’s left after all that, is: low energy, creeping doubt, and lots of jobs to complete. You still need score, sound design, colour correction, etc., and this then becomes a low point at which the project could end up abandoned.

The proposed ‘multithreaded’ approach I’d argue may help alleviate this scary dip motivation, because the piece is done when you feel like it is. If you are burnt out, and feel like it can live without a score for example—that’s fine. Maybe you shelve it, or maybe it’s good enough.

This way of working can also help to:

• cross-pollinate ideas across “departments”
• make it clear which corners to cut, and reveal what is missing
• maintain motivation
• make the film shareable at any point of completion

since a painting was mentioned.. I should prob show some

To illustrate my point look at one of Da Vinci’s unfinished works.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin, and Child with Saint Anne, ca. 1503, Louvre, Paris, France.

It doesn’t look half-bad to me. I mean, it looks finished, like you could spend another month on the transparent cloth or maybe some other detail that I can’t discern but it looks great to me.

Okay, here is one more by Cézanne.

Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, c. 1906.

Depending on who you are, you might say it’s unfinished, but if you can accept that realism in painting is not the only interesting and beautiful quality then this can change your framing. This 1906 painting is accepted to be in the style of cubism.^[Cubism really took off only after Cézanne’s death, but his works in later years had major influence on the next generations of artists, fathered Cubism, and modern art in general by showing how much more you can do with painting. ] The concern of Cubism as a style is not to represent or mimic reality, but to abstract it by embracing the medium of painting via emphasis of its limits – the two-dimensionality of the canvas.

Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, c. 1895.

And here is the version of the painting that might look more “finished”… except it was made 11 years prior. Cézanne painted this particular landscape many times in his later life, and many of the later versions are experimental veering into what-would-be called Cubism.²

My concluding point comes down to this. Who is to say that the 1895 version of Mont Sainte-Victoire is the “more finished” one? If the intent was to abstract and experiment then I’d argue that the later versions are just as complete. And I think this is a healthy way of working on a piece of art.

If you can find an approach to create without being held hostage by your own piece of work, then the relationship with the process becomes a lot less painful.