"Burnout" is a personal passion project made as a homage to a childhood game, and how it sparked an untapped creativity as well as reflecting an issue that inflicts all artists, 'burnout'.
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'Burnout' is the phenomenon resulting from work-related stress, with symptoms characterised by; feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion. For artists, this can happen from spending too much time on a project or exhausting preexisting ideas.
My short film "Burnout" seeks to portray how ideas are created, used and expelled through the use of floating sticker vfx, but also how ideas can turn sour if held onto for too long, as well as the concept of how we can regain our creativity through rest and more open thoughts.
The style is reminiscent of a children's book; bright colours, characterised childish naivety, and clear british narration evoke the same melancholic reminiscence to childhood advertisements, video games and tv shows. Following the feeling of childhood, the short follows this as it is when I believe we have the most creative thoughts, ask the most questions, and learn the most.
Furthermore, I wanted to be able to aim this film towards both an adult audience but also a younger more impressionable audience, to be able to evoke the same nostalgia in kids as I had when I was a child playing the game which influenced this film.
Despite influence and the stylistic choices, the main reason I decided to make this film was as a passion project. At the time I had been dealing with burnout quite consistently and was driven to make this film, ironically burning out of creative flow in the process.
However, I also believe I grew after making this project not only in skill but as a filmmaker.
Finally, I wanted to talk about the process of making the film. Despite how the film presents itself, this was filmed over 2 weeks and was just me, a tripod, and for any movement my brother held the camera for me. The hardest part was yet to come as editing began.
Editing was by far the most troubling and intricate part of this process. Cutting, grading, syncing, 3d tracking, asset gathering, exporting,the list goes on. Although the process was mostly tedious vfx I feel the fact I did it all by hand made this feel even a little bit more personal and creative.
Yes, I did in fact hand animate every floating sticker you see. Each and everyone was placed, tracked, camera blurred, rotated and scaled by hand. It was a huge pain to do the animations but I definitely don't regret it as the result speaks for itself.
The entire film took a grand total of; 3.4 months to make, not including the time it took to export each time (almost 2 days per export). Overall I am still very proud of the final piece however as I say about all my work, It could be improved.
For example; the beginning is not fast enough, and the camera work is dodgy as I did not have access to a gimble at the time, close shot of face needs more variety (e.g laying at the beach or something then cut back to in bed). Other than various small things I don't think are worth changing, the film is pretty decent for a passion project.