My slight Chaotic and Elastic workflow.

Having a vision for a story and then making that come to life in a film is never that straight forward. When I started to write the script for my film I tried to imagine certain scenes that I thought would tell the story best, but over time, when some parts get developed and visualized those initial images do not always fit with what has been already created.

Transferring what I see in my head into a visual format will always result in something different from the original vision.

Since this is such an unpredictable process I try to operate the whole production within an elastic style of working, where on the go decisions are welcomed. I have found this to be a more enjoyable way of working compared to a rigid planned out pipeline where the pre-production dictates everything.

Having a solid foundation done in the early stages of the development will for sure be beneficial when the film is being created. If I could nail it all in pre-production it would most likely end up in the smoothest and quickest production, but when my film takes me years to make, things are bound to be changed over time. It could be that I stumble upon something new and inspiring that I want to include, or that I change my mind about how I want a character to behave, or that I learn new things about the topic of the film that I was not aware of during the early stages of development.

This is one reason why I did not fully storyboard this film from the beginning. I have somewhat of a storyboard for the project, but it keeps changing and updating as I create new shots. Seeing those new shots often spark additional ideas for how I want to tackle the connected sequences around them.

One could almost say that I am not fully in control of the process. It's a bit like making a live action film where location, actors, time and weather are all variables that one can not always control. What gets captured is what you work with.
In animation, everything you see has come out of the creators head, which makes it quite an interesting format. The tools used to visualize the images and the creative thinking and skill of the creator will be what makes up the variables and limitations.

The process of figuring out the film as I go is for sure a bit less efficient, but I don't always take a shot to an absolute finished state before moving on to the next. What I have been doing a lot of is what you could call animatic sequences. I create a few keyframes that make up the shot so that I can slot it into an edit. That way I can drop on some placeholder audio and voice acting to see how things work when edited.

This is especially useful for scenes that rely heavily on acting as the way it edits and the characters expressions are crucial. For a sequence with landscape imagery each shot is often a bit more standalone and does not impact the previous or following shots as much.

These animatic sequences do not take me too long to create, which means I can test things out without spending hours or days on images that don't make it into the film.

When production started on this film I focused mainly on the standalone shots first. Shots I knew I could always slot in somewhere and that were less specific in terms of storytelling.

I have now created or at least established about half of the shots that I currently think will make up the film. This means that the shots I have yet to create have to work well with those I have already made. Sequences containing dialogue has been a main focus currently, and that is definitely a challenging thing to create.

Since the focus has been more on these animatic sequences recently I have not really had many polished pieces to share, but I have to say that focusing on story and seeing shots work together has been a lot of fun.

Feel free to let me know your ways of approaching filmmaking. Do you keep things super structured and follow clear directions you set for yourself or do you also like to keep things free flowing? I should mention that I think this kind of workflow probably suits itself better for a personal project then in a collaborative project.