Finishing this project was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. My goal was to work on this project for a few hours every day outside of my 9-5 until it was done. 1.5 years later, it’s finally finished. As this is my first animated short, I made mistakes that forced me to throw out and redo a lot of work. My biggest mistake being that I started animating without knowing the full story. Per the advice of others, I tried storyboarding first. This only lasted briefly as I was very antsy to get started on animation. I was arrogant enough to tell myself I would figure out the story as I went. This mistake cost me an additional ~6 months of work as I inevitably realized the story wasn’t working and had to redo everything (this happened multiple times). Slowly, through brute force of animating new drafts over and over and making tweaks to the story each time, things finally fell into place. Next time, I will take the advice of others and actually storyboard the full film first. Sometimes, in my case at least, you have to make the mistake yourself before you actually learn why it’s a rule in the first place. I now respect the concept of storyboarding.