I'm sure every animator runs into this problem. You open up flash, stare at your scene and then end up doing something else. This hits me quite often and I think it really slows down my release time. So I ask all you animators out there: How do you cope with this?
Do you give in and just do something else?
Do you buckle down and get things done?
Do you search for motivation?
I'm interested to hear if this actually doeshappen to a lot of people. If it does, what do you do about it?
I make things. Cofounder of Innersloth. Responsible for Henry Stickmin and Among Us.
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Unmotivation (Dismotivation?)
Posted by PuffballsUnited - November 15th, 2008
Comments
I always thought that looking for motivation would keep me going. You know, watching movies, reading books, listening to music.
Unfortunately that hasn't been working.
Yeah, I try the same thing. I'll try surfing NewGrounds to find inspiration, but I usually end up getting distracted. :P
Demotivation?
Like...Not being motivated to work on something?
Usually im motivated to do something cool but at the end, my expectations were too high, so i end up doing nothing....
but sketching should work, do a lot of sketches even if they are completly random, you can come up with something interesting that way, then when you finally have something concrete you can start using flash.... sometimes going directly to flash is not the best idea, you have to build up your thoughts before hand.
Yeah. It's not so much trouble with ideas, more that I don't feel like working on my project when I have the time to.
it always happens to me.
and the lack of response when i actually get something done,
is even more discouraging.
That's sad... That's one of the things that keeps me going. Looking forward to all the feedback.
Don't let people discourage you. If you keep at it your skills will improve and one day you'll get all of those responses you've been looking for!
If you work hard on something, it will pay off. Even if you don't get good response at first, you can only improve on your next. There is no way you can get any worse by making more movies and practicing really.
Motivation is a big issue, what tends to work for me is I tell myself, "Hard work will pay off and the more effort you put into it, the more it will show in your animations." Just keep thinking about how awesome it'd be when its finsihed... dream big!
I completely agree.
Watch either Waking Life, Paprika, or Spirited Away, then meditate for a little while. Works for me I guess.
I see. I dunno if that'd work for me.
Fuck motivation.
k then
At the moment I just work on whatever part interests me the most at that particular time. Then once all the fun stuff is done, I can fool myself into thinking that it's only a "short" grind putting the pieces together until I have the project completed.
That's a good idea. I usually make my movies from start to finish. Maybe mixing it up will help. But then I'll end up doing all the fun parts first and leaing the boring parts for last.
I find that if I go looking for motivation in other media, or inspiration as it sounds like you're describing, I end up taking things in a direction completely different then I meant too, and it becomes more unoriginal than I intended to begin with.
But since it's not so much the coming up with ideas part anyways, you pretty much just have to push yourself to get things done. Support and feedback from people are major, but you have to find your "zone" too. Usually the less stressed someone is, the more in the "zone" they're in.
Also something I forgot to mention: If it's positive feedback you look forward to the most, you have to have passion for what you do. If you can't feel passionate about your work, how can the viewers feel the same too?
I know. I do have passion. It's just that positive comments are like the icing on the cake. I don't really ever go looking for inspiration, I just surf NewGrounds most of the time until I get motivated.
Well, I, being a somewhat-famous Pivot animator, run into the same problem. What I do is, finish up my current animation and start another, doing nothing but re-doing it, and re-doing it, and so on. It calms me!
Also, for you fans of my animations, I'm working on turning the .piv files to .swf files so I can put them on here!
Everytime I want to get through that mentally barrier, I do some meditation at first, focusing that this coke/redbull will give me motivation and inspiration to keep on animating, then I drink the coke/redbull. ;)
Hehehe, I think caffeine would just make it hard for me to sit still.
It DOES happen a lot.
But you sir, are very good at making very entertaining flashes, and you need to MAIKMOAR(tm)
Thanks! I'm in the process of making several flashes. I'm just slow... :P
Haha looks like i'm a bit late to the party.
This is primarily why i never got into flash, i tried it a little, some of my stuff was alright, but most of the time I just opened it, thought "urghhhh" and closed it again.
I think I've gotten past this stage now. Don't really know what it was that pushed me over.
i have a question can you tell what you used to make your animations adobe or something else please tell me
I use Macromedia Flash Professional 8, but Adobe CS 3 is pretty much the same thing (Just more expensive)
I know what you are talking about, it happens when I create songs, I simply can't be asked, although its never happened to me on Flash. (partly because I don't use Flash much)
When this happens I simply get up, have a snack then close the program down, play a game or two and get back on with it.
Hope this helps for future animating!
P.s: I know this was your first news post, but I just thought this looked interesting.
See what ends up happening when I do that is too much time goes by and then I have to go to sleep. And the next day I'm still not motivated so I play more games or something and... yeah...
Now that I have finally found a style for myself in Flash, I can say what I need to say again.
Motivation, I know what you mean, I found it hard to concentrate on one of my animations (Its called Black Circle Dude Ep1 if your interested) and I simply couldn't do much, but what your saying is different to what I experienced, I could do the animation, but only for a few frames, then I closed it down, what I found helped was leaving it for 2 or 3 days and get back on with it, when that happened, I was able to finish it off! (Starting on frame 1800 and something and finishing at frame number 2991)
-Madjasper1
if i were you i would just take abreak and do something else until the motivation comes back.
the beginning of puffballsunited
Olimar011
All the time, I usually just end up scribbling different things or trying to learn actionscript.
PuffballsUnited
I guess sometimes I'll try and work on the plot in my head when I don't feel motivated to animate.