Can't Say No

There have been times in my life when I have no work to do. My free time is left wide open, and I am a little bit lost for some way to occupy myself.

But to be honest, I cannot remember the last time that occurred.

I've always had arty, creative friends throughout my life, but the current crop are the most creative, energised bunch I've ever known. There's always some new project bubbling under, or actively happening, and I am happy to see it so. I also love to be involved.

I'm lucky enough to have a skill that is sought after. Though there have been others with my skills in our team's past, those people have mostly moved onto other things, leaving the way open for me to muscle in where they once trod.

I think I've made an impact, though, as now they won't leave me alone.

I am loving doing the work for Rob's film, Checkpoint. It's one I've chronicled a lot on my Blog, and hopefully it's come across as enthusiastic, because there's so much new and different stuff to do on it. I'm learning new skills at every turn, and if the challenges weren't there I'd not be having half as much fun. And it's typical of us to see that we've almost completed the work involved only to subsequently pile on more. But it's getting there - even now as I write this, my other computer is rendering out a sequence of frames.

I also need money coming in, so I have committed myself to doing a website for my friend Anna. She's a musician, and she wants a site up showcasing her music and gigs. We've figured out a nice, clean, simple design for it, and if all went to plan she will have taken a load of promotional photos over the weekend, which will be used on the site. The actual assembly of the site won't take too long to do, once I get back into it, and it will net me some extra money and future work, so I can't complain, but I must say that at times my heart isn't in it, and I'm finding it hard to engender any enthusiasm for it. I expect that will change once I have more stuff to actually work with, but until then it's a struggle.

Anna also suggested an amazing idea, that she would like to publish some of the stories she has written, as a series of children's books, and she needs an illustrator, and she asked if I'd be interested. Well, I would indeed! Especially if I could use 3D characters to do it. I think it could look really amazing!

This may never eventuate, but it's something that continues to bubble under in my brain, nevertheless.

And now another friend has asked me, once again, to re-design his characters for the superhero TV show, the one he's been almost starting to make for five or six years now. It's a complex tale he has wrought, one that requires an enormous budget and a raft of talented people, neither of which we currently have (we are a small, highly talented crew, of limited skill and no money).

And though making these character models doesn't take too much time, I'd feel better if this production had an end goal in sight. But it's something that's always been at the earliest stages, with the goalposts constantly shifting, and I don't think will ever get past step one.

And of course, there are my own projects, the most visible one being writing the Viking movie script. For the last fortnight I've been concentrating so much on all these other projects, I've not written a word on it. But I hope to get back onto that very soon, as I was thinking about it today, and made a plot decision that I need to write down. I expect that once I do that I'll probably go off on a burst of scriptwriting again.

So there's where I'm at. I'm happy doing Checkpoint and I'm happy doing the web site design paid work, and I am very happy writing. But what I really should learn to do is say "No" to things that clearly have no future or money in it.