My hump my hump my hump!
Storyboard pitch: Completed!
Initial Reactions: Totally unexpected! Whoooooaaah (holy craaap).
Right. So. Here's what happened.
After some drama regarding my internet being a butt this morning, I successfully panicked and got my lovely assistant Lisa to come to my rescue at the last minute (by calling on her lovely assistant, Scott, who e-mailed me the PowerPoint that Lisa had so lovingly helped me put together in days prior).
In the 10-15 minutes I had left before I was supposed to start officially setting up, I succesfully drove to
work, made copies (of all 107 or so pages), scanned the last 5 pages, cut out the 10 panels I was missing from the older Powerpoint, put them in, added an "End" page, e-mailed it to myself, ran downstairs, downloaded it, and pinned 107 copies of said storyboards to the main conference room wall, which apparently was enough to succesfully cover almost the entire wall. I only started about 5 minutes late.
At some point there I think I had a glass of water, and I think that's still most of what I've had to eat today.
I then proceeded to give my pitch on a veeeeeery big screen TV (seriously, this was bigger than I am). Like, 40", at least, freakin' plasma touch screen, so that when I wanted to go to the next panel all I had to do was walk up and touch it. It was like I had changed my first name to "Vanna". The pitch went pretty well. I apparently didn't quite pitch it right for an "action" pitch (I've never seen one of those before! I didn't know they were different!) Allegedly I over-explained stuff some, and it got a bit bogged down in places, but on the whole everybody "got" it.
As a result there was very, very little actual commentary or critique on the short! "Looks pretty okay" was the consensus, which is fine and dandy, but kind of frustrating when you've just spent the last two weeks drawing it. But still, I've just cleared my first really big production hump.
So did everybody just leave? Not at all! In waiting for people to file in, Ezzie had suggested I show everybody my trailer to kick them off, which I did gladly, and explained that the short was part of a concept for this little series I'm working on. Whoa! Everybody was much, much, much more interested in that. So 95% of the questions I got were suddenly a huge number of extremely hard-hitting questions about this action comedy series I've had brewing.
And man! What a wakeup call.
It was really sobering to realize, as well thought through as I thought these beginning phases had been, I've still got a long way to go. It's like...
There I was, clearing this hump. And suddenly I was right there at the top of it!
I had a moment of clarity.
From the top of my hump, I could see the enormous number of humps playing out before me, each waiting in turn with glee for me to run up against it and try to scramble over.
"Shit."
But I fielded the questions pretty well, and everybody seemed fairly pleased with me. The huge consensus was that it's a great start, and I've really got something here. But we need to keep going. The story needs some overhauling still. My art still needs some major overhauling.
Furthermore I've got a week to do any revisions before I suddenly won't have access to their glorious executive copy supplies, and making my own versions of things will suddenly be expensive again rather than free. Crap. I also have to turn that all into an animatic before I have to go home, and then go to school, and suddenly find myself in the middle of production hell!
Why oh why does SCAD make us handle every aspect of the production? Okay, scratch that, I understand why. It just sucks to have to actually go through all the more tedious bits of it.
Ah well! In I go, head first, goggles on.
Initial Reactions: Totally unexpected! Whoooooaaah (holy craaap).
Right. So. Here's what happened.
After some drama regarding my internet being a butt this morning, I successfully panicked and got my lovely assistant Lisa to come to my rescue at the last minute (by calling on her lovely assistant, Scott, who e-mailed me the PowerPoint that Lisa had so lovingly helped me put together in days prior).
In the 10-15 minutes I had left before I was supposed to start officially setting up, I succesfully drove to
work, made copies (of all 107 or so pages), scanned the last 5 pages, cut out the 10 panels I was missing from the older Powerpoint, put them in, added an "End" page, e-mailed it to myself, ran downstairs, downloaded it, and pinned 107 copies of said storyboards to the main conference room wall, which apparently was enough to succesfully cover almost the entire wall. I only started about 5 minutes late.
At some point there I think I had a glass of water, and I think that's still most of what I've had to eat today.
I then proceeded to give my pitch on a veeeeeery big screen TV (seriously, this was bigger than I am). Like, 40", at least, freakin' plasma touch screen, so that when I wanted to go to the next panel all I had to do was walk up and touch it. It was like I had changed my first name to "Vanna". The pitch went pretty well. I apparently didn't quite pitch it right for an "action" pitch (I've never seen one of those before! I didn't know they were different!) Allegedly I over-explained stuff some, and it got a bit bogged down in places, but on the whole everybody "got" it.
As a result there was very, very little actual commentary or critique on the short! "Looks pretty okay" was the consensus, which is fine and dandy, but kind of frustrating when you've just spent the last two weeks drawing it. But still, I've just cleared my first really big production hump.
So did everybody just leave? Not at all! In waiting for people to file in, Ezzie had suggested I show everybody my trailer to kick them off, which I did gladly, and explained that the short was part of a concept for this little series I'm working on. Whoa! Everybody was much, much, much more interested in that. So 95% of the questions I got were suddenly a huge number of extremely hard-hitting questions about this action comedy series I've had brewing.
And man! What a wakeup call.
It was really sobering to realize, as well thought through as I thought these beginning phases had been, I've still got a long way to go. It's like...
There I was, clearing this hump. And suddenly I was right there at the top of it!
I had a moment of clarity.
From the top of my hump, I could see the enormous number of humps playing out before me, each waiting in turn with glee for me to run up against it and try to scramble over.
"Shit."
But I fielded the questions pretty well, and everybody seemed fairly pleased with me. The huge consensus was that it's a great start, and I've really got something here. But we need to keep going. The story needs some overhauling still. My art still needs some major overhauling.
Furthermore I've got a week to do any revisions before I suddenly won't have access to their glorious executive copy supplies, and making my own versions of things will suddenly be expensive again rather than free. Crap. I also have to turn that all into an animatic before I have to go home, and then go to school, and suddenly find myself in the middle of production hell!
Why oh why does SCAD make us handle every aspect of the production? Okay, scratch that, I understand why. It just sucks to have to actually go through all the more tedious bits of it.
Ah well! In I go, head first, goggles on.