Since they worked on 'Devils, Angels and Dating', where have the team moved onto?

I was recently asked what I'd say to a University aged version of me if I could, and one of the top tips I'd give is to keep working on personal projects in your free time to compliment your day job. This ensures that your portfolio grows (even when the work you get paid for is canned, or kept from the public for years). One fantastic way to…

A quick note to the Devils team. I've cleaned up all the Dropbox permissions and unshared most of the folders. So don't worry if you spot a notification from Dropbox saying that you've been removed. It's nothing personal, it's just been over a year since most of the team were involved so it was time to clean up the permissions to remove any chance of mistakes damaging the files. If anyone didn't get around to taking a copy of their work and they want something specific please feel free to…

So it's been a year since 'Devils, Angels and Dating' was first released onto YouTube where it recently passed a million views, which was a very nice Christmas present!

http://youtu.be/rkddkbu-EMA

Our film's composer, Phil Rey, has a great new album…

Continuing on from the last Production Tip blog about Tracking Production...

The Recruiting Database

This might seem creepy but I kept a spreadsheet with some basic information on everyone on the team... or anyone interested in joining the team. The key thing I used this for was to remember their strengths, up to years after I last had any contact with them. We had over 400 volunteers sign up and many more that I spoke to outside of our development site.…

Kenny Roy asked me to contribute some anecdotes for a presentation he's putting on, and I thought it would be a good idea to share them here.

Tracking Production

I'm a keen addict of a good Excel spreadsheet that tracks the progress of each project. My short film was no different and over time I was able to show the progress of each department across the duration of the film.…

There’s mixed stories about when you should get feedback on your ideas. In animation it’s common for people to say that you should get feedback early and often but I’d argue that’s not always true. If you do that you risk ‘too many cooks’ and you can water down the elements that would make the film what it needs to be to make it resonate with a targeted audience. Better instead to protect the idea, and explore it fully for as long as you can, taking breaks so that you come back to it fresh…

I've started an external blog to give me a platform to go back and talk about the making of this film. It'll probably stray into other personal stuff too. But I'm hoping to cover some of the topics I wanted to get into in the 'Making of' book. It'll give me a push to get these stories out and perhaps I'll collect all the best stuff and update it for an actual book later on.

http://AnimatedFilmmaker.blogspot.com…

There hasn't been any major news, so I've tended not to post much. I've also moved to New York and started a new job so life's been pretty busy.

Devils passed 150,000 recently and it's receiving far more views now than it has been. I guess as it becomes more popular it attracts more people to watch it…

We raised around $2000 to assist with the cost of the festival circuit, film promotions, media distribution and this website. I wanted to take a moment to outline how some of that money has been spent. I've not kept exact records but it's safe to say we've gone well over the $2000 budget, and that just means that I've personally suplimented all the costs out of pocket. That's not to say the $2000 wasn't extremely valuable though as it pushed me to apply for things I would otherwise have been…

http://devilsangelsanddating.ning.com/behindthescenes

Shortly after the release of the film I thought it was worth trying to use a pay-wall to raise a little extra funds for the festival circuit costs. A few people did chip-in but not nearly enough to make it worth holding back the content for too long. The feature also has a monthly cost, and without enough contributors it wasn't even covering itself. So turning off…

I noticed a spike in the number of views Devils was getting over the last week or so and I'd been trying to figure out where it was coming from. I just figured it out.

I was told you can't do much about content agregators and sites automatically reposting your film, so you might as well roll with it. There is a reasonably smart content agregator site that's picked up our film and it's providing links to numerous sites that now seem to host our film. It also links to our IMDB page, and…

Here's the announcement from AniMazSpot:

"Hello to all Q2 Entrants,

The scores are finally all toted for the 2012 Q2 shorts entries, it was a quarter full of great entries. ... so it should be another great festival week, mid-September again. ....

It was quite a close event for this first quarter of our fourth year. But, we did get two clear winners which will go on to vie for Best of Festival…

The Credits were first uploaded to IMDB some time ago, and Shane did the first pass, keeping things pretty simple. Neither of us quite understood how the system worked and that first submission stayed published like that for ages. We've tried to change it a few times but it turns out you can't update the page the same way once it's on IMDB. So this last weekend I took another pass at it and the missing credits have finally been added.

Shane actually ticked a few too many boxes for…

This is potentially a controversial topic. But I felt it would be valuable to other short film makers in the future looking to run a production like this. Using statistics from running the project I made this chart to show how the work in the film was distributed in three main categories; the team…

Viewers = 85% Male vs 15% Female
Biggest age group = 35-44
Number of "Likes" = 182 Likes vs 9 Dislikes

So the last crowd funding campaign ended last night. We exceeded our target on that one which means that I can comfortably send off the film to every one of the top 20 short listed festivals we'd planned to hit as a minimum. It's already gone off to numerous others that weren't on the short list (out of my pocket) as well.

If you add on the amount we raised from the campaign we did a year or two ago, a few cash donations…

Having spent so much time sorting out the credits for the end of the film and IMDB, it seems I forgot to update the list on the 'About' page. So I've rectified that and apologize for the wait for anyone that hadn't been included yet.

http://michaelcawood.com/CGShort.htm

Unfortunately IMDB still hasn't updated the credits. It's out of my hands, and there's nothing more I can do. But it's disappointing they take…

I came across our first copyright infringer yesterday. Luckily we have a big team so we're likely to find them pretty quickly. Someone found a way to download and re-upload the film to their own YouTube channel. I'm sure there will be more and there's no point in getting too worried about it. I asked them to take it down and they complied, although clearly had a different perspective on copyright. In the space of a day they had uploaded over a dozen top quality animated shorts without…