Alexander Tullo
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How to Know when to Give Up on a Project
🕑 Added 2025-09-24 18:37:22 +0000 UTCI'm not advocating giving up on pieces, but there is a time and a place to do this,
and I lead by example.
What do I mean by that?
Well, I've scrapped my idea for Who Am I Now.
There's 2 reasons I've done this.
When I went to NYC in hopes of polishing the idea with a very good friend and well-known animation director, the ideas just...clashed.
We couldn't agree on much at all, and it ended in a messy compromise of our ideas.
The piece was stretching to be well over a minute, 3 shots, confused, overly complicated, and just too much.
To be honest, I knew it wasn't right in the first place.
It was a couple different ideas that all felt decently strong, but didn't excite me.
And we all know that animation takes too damn long to start a piece that doesn't excite you, no matter how complex.
But i've got good news,
Moving on means picking your feet from the mud and walking on stable ground.
You don't need to piece together the same ideas any longer, and often times, this leads you to amazing, new ideas.
Which is exactly what happened.
The other director and I spent 2 days thinking this piece to death, and 10 minutes after we decided to kill the idea, we came up with something simpler, more clear, and more inspiring than we could've hoped for.
This new idea is completely unrelated, fresh, simple, and makes me want to tuck in and work on it. And at the end of the day, that's the element that gets a piece done fastest.
I'm going to be sharing tons of content and new workflows from it asap, and I hope this helps remind you that sometimes, beating an idea to death is not the solution. Try to consider other avenues, and be open to taking 1 step back, to take 2 steps forward!
