On blind drive and human sacrifices

During my first proper tutorial, a bald man whose name sadly escapes me completely asked us collectively if it's possible to give 100% to a task.

I didn't think it was, but then, I'd rarely been given tasks I actually enjoyed. In the past week or so, I've discovered that I can be an incredibly driven person, a veritable tornado of unstoppable effort, if the task is one I enjoy or set my mind to.

I've also discovered that this isn't necassarily a good thing.

Without planning, 100% effort can be wasted, and with a team who are more focused on planning and therefore not sharing in my blind drive, things get a bit complicated. That said, for the most part I had an excellent team who've done a doubly excellent job at putting up with me so far. And the torrent of work we've pumped out today has left us with a strong framework for what we're doing tomorrow, and I for one am feeling good about it.


That said, we've managed to get a good mix of ideas, taking parts of a lot of peoples thoughts to come up with the final theme for the scene, which is good. It's a hard thing to actually throw your ideas into a public pool for a lot of people, with the fear of sounding stupid or ridiculous being quite hard to overcome, despite how silly that sounds.

I don't tend to suffer from this massively by virtue of knowing that I look ridiculous and stupid the majority of the time. But then, if I was the only one willing to give out ideas, people would feel forced into something. Luckily this wasn't the case, and after the ground idea was set, I lost track of the times people added their ideas to the pool and the whole thing was twisted, changed, and adjusted until we were (insofar as I can tell) happy with the result. And despite how much it deviated from my original thought, I truly think the final product is going to go a lot better than anything I could have thought up alone.

So, yes, massive thanks to the rest of my team for both putting up with me and being generally brilliant and, as Jools would say, engaged. And for reigning me back before my blind drive ran me directly into a brick wall, metaphorically.

(Side note: Already been playing with 3d Studio Max and ploughing through the tutorials on NOW. It's made more entertaining by the fact that the narrator sounds a little bit like Chekov from Star Trek. (Even more side-note: I am a massive geek) )

So, on my to-do list is now to write a prototype script for tomorrow (other people are also doing this on the theory that since we're bound to have good ideas and bad ones, more scripts means we can fit more good ideas together), write the short essay for Jools on my design process, get a shower (lots of ground covered today, running and walking, I probably smell like the devil), then if there's any time left, save the post-apocalyptic world from mutants and cannibals.

Oh, the life of a student.

Edit: An idea for a final one-shotter, when we have more time to prepare...

A Rube Goldberg machine. Always wanted to make one of these babies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w