Thursday, December 2, 2010

Fucking Ideas, How Do They Work?

As part of the continuing delusion that I make AMVs any more, I've completed the first shakeout of my to-do list in almost three years, with some probably uninteresting results.

If everything on the current list gets made and nothing that isn't, I'll finish up with SH130. This is probably going to be about accurate, because though there are four ideas on the list that I have no real idea of the viability of, there are a lot of long cuts on the list that difficulty and plain old inertia will push the finishing of all those ideas out for at least five years in the most likely case, and new ideas are probably going to come in inside that span.

Slightly more interesting is the vintage of the ideas concerned; this breaks out as follows:
2000 - 1
2001 -0
2002 - 1
2003 - 0
2004 - 2
2005 - 1
2006 - 1
2007 - 0
2008 - 1
2009 - 1
2010 - 7

I've been keeping a to-do list since 2000, before I even started making these things, and while most of the current ideas are actually current, there are a few that have been carried along from the very start. This has major implications for the anticipated delay of finishing up: ten of the fifteen ideas on the drawing board, and six of the eight that have been around for more than a year, involve cutting at least 20 episodes or episode-equivalents. Several are a lot longer than that.












This is a graph of current ideas of year X vintage versus videos produced that year. Most of what I've done is based on relatively new ideas; SH110 in 2008 was a 2007 idea, SH111 was a 2008 in 2009, SH112 and 113 were 2009 ideas in '09, SH114 had been around as an idea since '06, and SH115 was a '10 idea and production. If a video idea is doable quickly, it tends to get done quickly; the hard ideas stick around as newer projects get promoted past them, and the crap ideas, like those four that I haven't actually done any checking on may turn out to be, die off and fall out of the list unproduced. This is the hard part of crushing out the ideas that are left and winding up the studio: by taking the path of least resistance, I end up saving the hardest part for last.

The other way of looking at that, though, is that these ideas are, like SH070, not coming into being before their time: that now, at the end of the road, I either have the skills to pull them off correctly or the composure to toss them out as unworkable. At the very least, the future is looking bright musically: those fifteen ideas break out into ten metal, two hardcore, one punk, and only two songs outside that bailiwick. The more I enjoy working with this stuff, the more likely it is that it all gets done.

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