Perfectionism

I have a friend that is still working on his student film. We graduated fifteen years ago.

My friend (and you know who you are) continued to work on his film after graduation. Then he looked at the stuff he did in school and decided to improved it, since his skills had improved. By the time the old stuff was redone it was better looking than the new stuff. So he deicided to redo the "new" stuff, which was better looking than the other stuff... for fifteen years.

My approach to my student film was more pragmatic. I knew that after graduating I would never touch it again, even if I didn't finish it (which I didn't.) I did the best I could, used it to get a job and moved on. A few years later I made another film, and finished it. And then made another; and then a couple more (which are almost done). I like to finish what I start.

With each project I set out to acheive certain goals. The first film was to be finised first, quality was secondary. The next films were to experiment with different techniques and to push my self as to do the best work I can. My goals with Cold Iron Badge, were to make a comic and to tell a long format story. What I didn't take into consideration at the time was that a long format story take a long time to tell. And in that time, I am improving. It has gotten to the point where the earlier pages of CIB are full of things that are painful to look at. Some of it is in the pacing. Some of it is in the layouts and some of it is in the drawings themselves. It is to the point where portions of the comic are no longer representative of what I am capable of doing. So what do I do? Move on or revisit?

As much as I like to move forward, sometimes going back is inevitable. Experience is a good teacher and hindsight is always 20/20. So I will be going back and "fixing" some of the artwork. When eventually (knock wood) we make a print version some of the things I am talkng about will be much more obvious than when veiwed a week at at time so I owe it to Christine and Delric to show them in the best light I can. I will be leaving the archives alone for now but at some point I will post the new and improved versions somewhere. And I promise that won't take fifteen years to finish.