Making a short after hours - part 1 - The Why?

I will endeavor to pass on some knowledge I have acquired in making a short after work.

Before we get to how let's first start with The Why?

You have to ask yourself, at this time in your life "WHY, do you want to make a film?" Especially since you are going to spend many a leisure hour working on this thing. I know this more now then when I started but you really have to love the process of doing it. You have to concentrate on the smaller goals not the end result, especially something external such as awards, money, a job, fame, that stuff doesn't matter. There are too many a long lonely frustrating hour ahead of you and if you don't enjoy them you will stop. Your big goal should be personal. For me the why with "Leonardo" is that I wanted to find out if I could actually do it. I wanted to find out, could I make a film in my own voice, could I finish it. The jury still isn't in yet on that. I knew Pixar wouldn't just hand me a film to make so I thought why don't I just make one. Other reasons ( you can have more then one, probably better that you do) I frankly missed hand drawn animation and wanted to tell a story in that medium and I wanted to put my creativity where my mouth is. You see, I would complain about other peoples' films. How they screwed them up and how I would make them better. Without having made my own it really is just a lot of hot air. It's really something different when you have to put yourself out there. To say to the world these are my ideas, my way of communicating them, my filmmaking and open yourself up to that criticism that it is so easy to dish out. That for me has been - The Why?