something long and not funny about why I get anxious about a thing please feel free to ignore
Hit J to skip it’s very TL:DR
So I’ve had people asking about the SKIP (feature) thing, and while I’m sure you’re all tired of me restating that I come up with the characters and then they tell me what the story is that really is what happens to me, and in this case Arthur and Mesi came with a full feature film attached. The SKIP short you know was an abbreviation of the main aspects of it; inter-filmic travel and them being adorable.
What you may not know (or, at least, I can’t remember if I made a post about it), is that this crazy fun-times feature film in my head gives me enormous anxiety. Because I handed the entire plot to someone that I didn’t know.
Allow me to explain first that VFS was wonderful, is wonderful, and I love it and regret nothing about attending the course. What happened was something unusual, and only really a fault of my not asking for confirmation and for doing too much work. That stated our character design lessons were great and my teacher was and is a super great guy, like wow what a guy so cool. When we got an assignment to draw three characters from a feature I went at it full tilt. I wound up not only designing three characters, but a whole spectrum of supporting cast and a rough script outline. Start to finish, the big finale, the critical points of character development, the whole thing. I handed it in… and only got the character design sheet of the main three back.
I was, naturally, a little bit upset about it as the drawings had all been originals and I had no copies, but when I asked my teacher he was as surprised as I was that I’d only got the one sheet back. As it turns out the assignments were not being marked by the same guy who was giving us the lessons; a little unusual but not a fault necessarily. Two points of feedback are better than one and all that. My problem was, and is, that I didn’t know this person. I have had trust problems with teachers before, and to this day I don’t know if this mysterious other simply threw away the extra work, or kept it. If it was the former I would be overjoyed. The thing that has made me wake up in a cold sweat at four in the morning once a week for the past three years is the prospective of the latter. I live in perpetual fear of waking up to find a trailer for a corrupted version of my own film staring back at me on the internet. Paranoid, yes, but there it is. I can’t lie about it, I am constantly anxious about it, and even if I am busy enough to forget about it most of the time it bubbles back to the surface time and time again.
I am, as I hope you might know to be true by now, really quite critical of my own work, so I hope you understand what it means for me to say that I really believe that the SKIP feature is a good film. It is a good story. If this unknown person (whose name I have long forgotten and who I am almost afraid to seek out), thought the same of it and acted immediately they could quite well have me over a barrel, as I only finished the short film a good ten months or so after submitting that assignment. I know this is probably a fruitless and embarrassing confession of how truly unraveled my general state of mind is and that I am being overly suspicious and egoistic, but a story writer’s brain is always asking ‘what if?’ and mine is likely doomed to keep asking that question about this until I make this film, or someone else beats me to it.
Anyway sorry for the text splurge I think I just really needed to get that off my chest.
