Far too often people don’t notice the little things. Those little things that go the long distance.
Your spouse puts a note in your lunch or travel bag… it always seems that right when you’re missing home, you get that note and everything seems closer, not so far away. It’s a little thing but big effect.
Someone sends you an email to say they were thinking about you and your family when your mom was in surgery. Stuff like that goes a long way.
You get a song gifted to you through iTunes and you gift again to someone else. People love that.
You bring home a flower or a gift to your significant other and you do it for no reason. Small gesture but big effect.
A person, a complete stranger, asks you to zip up their blue body suit for you and you do it without hesitating… ok that’s just weird.

Life seems to be made up of little tiny moments. A lot of those moments seem insignificant and meaningless. Chances are that’s probably true.

I live a life in production. I do it for work, I do it for fun and I just do it. I love looking at how a production can be broken down into little pieces so that it can make the whole project much easier.
For instance, a recent project I got to be a part of, I broke it down into a feel simple parts (I’m going to go through this project on a deeper level in the coming weeks), but here’s what it looked like from start to finish:

We started off with ideas, screen shots, a bunch of notes and a meeting. Then we moved onto drafts for a script (since it will be driven by a voice over and moving text) and worked our way through 3-4 drafts.

I started putting together an initial draft of the final product with just music and timed elements of the words. I left voice overs to be done later, just in case we decided to cut any of the text… which we ended up doing because timing was so fast in the 30 second spot.

When I put the piece together I created a large (5000×5000 composition above) that I could put in the 1080p version (below) that way I could easily manipulate a camera movement for the crazy layers of text (thank you Andrew Kramer for teaching me this)

Then I put together a nice little draft and posted it online for the client to check out. I’ll be posting the final product when it’s all said and done.

So when I look back at this project while I’m in the middle of ending it… (could I give any other time references in this sentence?) I see how many little steps it took to make it. I’m also sure as I continue to learn production steps, tips and tricks, I will find a few more little things I can do to improve the end product.

There are a lot of other little things that went into this project that I didn’t share: my scrap pieces of paper, the voice over, the examples I looked at for ideas, my time sitting staring at my screen wondering how to make it work (yes, sitting stare at a screen can help you even though it doesn’t look like work) and more.

What little things are you working on today that plays out in the bigger picture of things?

Cheers,
Matthew A. Hawkins