October 2010

At this point in time, I was working on what I thought was a lot of personal projects. It gave me a sense of purpose and reason to be locked up in my room. But looking back at this place in time, I didn't realise I had huge fundamental issues with my creative process.

Part of being creative is being spontaneous or inspired, it's where a lot of brilliant and crap ideas come from, but if you're not willing to let yourself be in this moment, then you'll never have the freedom to create to your full ability. But the other side of being creative is being able to structure your ideas into manageable stages, so you can push ideas beyond what they are into something even better, whilst making it easy on yourself to not get too bogged down. This part I hadn't figured out yet.

After She Farted And Created The World in 2009, I was furiously throwing all my ideas into motion. I wasn't planning or structuring myself, I was just creating for the sake of creating. Instead of writing out a plan for a short film, I went straight into making a weird comic-like thing and then immediately made the soundtrack, for some reason! I had a little party where I invited friends over to record voice-overs (animal gurgles and noises, no dialogue) and I paid them in burgers and beers. I did all of this with no narrative, no plot, no real story… nothing… I just imagined the soundtrack would help tell the story for me!

As a result, I couldn't get the project going. I thought maybe if I just did one thing on it, the rest would come to me and I'll be able to plough through it, as if I was having a creative blockage. So I created one background. Then I realised I had no idea what I was doing. And the background artwork took me a week to make, for some reason! It wasn't even that detailed, I legit have no idea what I was doing to make it drag on that long!

Nowadays, I know how to make that project work. I still think about it and how it'd work today and I've actually got a story fleshed out for it which I don't think would work in an animated medium anymore (probs be an interactive piece). But thankfully my brain is saying "hold out". Slow down. Relax. And do your other projects first. Nearly finished with something which I hope to share soon.

This song is from this very failed short film. Drums were recorded by my brother, and my freshly learned trombone skills came in use again all over this soundtrack.