The gap is closing

I have wanted to make an animated short for years. I could picture the style, but producing it meant learning another craft, and I kept putting it off.

In part 3 of Ira Glass on Storytelling, Glass describes a familiar problem for beginners:

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap.”

Your taste is ahead of what you can make. His advice is to produce enough work for your ability to catch up.

I have always found that reassuring. It also describes a cost: closing the gap takes years, and there are only so many crafts I can give that time to.

After twenty years across software engineering, infrastructure and operations, I can usually build the systems I picture. Outside that work, AI tools are making it easier to try. I can describe something, see a version in minutes, say what is wrong and see another.

The coral drawings

The ink drawings on this website are an example. The first set was perfectly usable: detailed reef drawings with fan coral, branching coral and a striped fish. They looked like a page from a good colouring book. They weren’t what I had pictured.

I asked for “pen and ink, one weight, black, artistic, Picasso pen drawing”, and the replacements went up the same day. The longer prompt described line weight, empty space and what to leave out. Most of it was a description of taste.

Taste is still yours

The tools made it cheap to produce another attempt. I still had to recognise what was wrong and describe the change precisely enough to get a different result.

The first drawings were good enough to use. Stopping there would have been easy, especially when the old alternative was having nothing at all. What made me try again was comparing them with the look I wanted.

That is the habit I’m trying to keep. A presentable result is useful, but I want to look carefully before accepting it.

The first thirty seconds

In September I built a small animation studio that makes paper-cutout animations from descriptions of characters, sets and props. The first story is five shots and thirty seconds long.

I’ve also been experimenting with paintings made with code, architectural drawings built from individual pen strokes, and terrain maps for data exploration. The drawing work still falls short of the style I want.

There is still plenty to learn. But now I can watch the short, compare it with what I pictured and make another version. After years of carrying the idea around, I can finally find out how close I can get.

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If you have an idea for your business that you have kept putting off, email hello@coralgardensoftware.com. We will help you work out a sensible first step.