It’s hard to tell someone that they’re fired. Especially when they’re essentially working for free (with no end in sight). But that’s exactly what we had to do tonight, and I fear we did it wrong. That’s probably just me being insecure.

It’s become painfully obvious over the past couple of weeks that regardless of the dedication, stamina and attention to detail that Jeremy holds in constructing his boards — that it’s just not going to work. He completed one board last week in the time that it took Phil to complete seven. And while Jeremy’s work is phenomenal (and highly photo-realistic) we just can’t hold the guy to the commitment of being with us for several nights a week when we know that his work is not going to pay off for him or us at the end of the day. And, we kind of ran out of work for him.

Adrian and I have been secretly generating two very distinct workflows for Phil and Jeremy over the past couple weeks - to take advantage of Jeremy’s talents in detail and shading while addressing his shortcoming of not being able to generate boards with only broad strokes of specificity. We already have a list of boards growing that we originally gave to Jeremy but know we’ll have to have Phil redo (or complete) - and we’ve gotten to the point where we need these in assembly. But, we didn’t want to hand these to Phil to restructure while Jeremy was present.

I’ve been trying to call Jeremy for the last couple of days, but haven’t been able to reach him. And I was getting really concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get hold of him before we get together again tomorrow night. (Enter the panic of having to do this in person.) But I reached him tonight and had a chat. And he understood.

It really sucks that the main guy that Ryan brought to us didn’t work out, and then that the second guy worked but only for a while, and then that at the end of it all it was the unknown friend that Ryan didn’t know that we’re going to stick with. I have to remember to tell Ryan that we’re not doing this on purpose. I hope he gets it. He probably will.

9:39 pm

tags: animatic, Jeremy, Phil, Ryan, storyboarding