I’ve been watching a number of classic comedies lately on Netflix’s instant and one that is up next in the queue is “What About Bob?” You may remember in the film, that the title of the book that Doctor Marvin wrote was “Baby Steps”. Which got me thinking about baby steps in my own work. The idea of taking baby steps is a great tactic for knocking out one of those overwhelming projects. I’m currently working on a couple of longer videos and when I think about how I have over six minutes to animate my eyes glaze over and it’s easy to find some sort of distraction. Like checking Twitter or writing a blog post… Taking baby steps has really helped me to knock out these videos one after another. By breaking down the project into smaller pieces it’s really easy to make progress. I’ve been looking at these three minutes as individual scenes rather than an entire animation. Each scene usually only runs five to ten seconds and may or may not connect to the next scene. A five second scene seems like nothing and can easily be taken care of and made to look great. By focusing on those smaller pieces I’m able to make the entire video that much better because I didn’t try and stretch myself so thin attempting to animate three minutes right away. If you need to even breakdown things smaller then that, then do it. You’d be surprised at how much easier it is to focus when you’re just taking baby steps and not thinking about everything all at once.