DO NOT LOOK AT Animation Mentor student videos while animating:

It will rip your self-esteem away.. at least that's how I feel. I frequently look at the 11 second club contest.. Its so inspiring to look at talented animators.. However- now when I looked at my own then- I just felt.. "wow..what a dung of useless crap I've animated today". To produce a short..alone..and to keep the spirit up can be challenging. You want to make the best short in the world right, and
then you realise that you just..cant. All you can do is aim high- and hope to get SOME of the result that you had in mind. I must accept that its going to take YEARS before I am able to animate at the level that I aim for. And I must learn to "let go"..

OK..you know you could just do that "one" little last thing to get that shot perfect.. The problem is; that "one" thing is never "one thing",
and you simply do not have the time. I was unsure of if I was the only one feeling like this. Then I watched an interview with Shawn Kelly (ILM) and Carlos Baena (Pixar)... they said that very often they felt uncomfortable leaving a shot.. "I just want to fix ONE last thing..etc.. The advice they gave was..just let go.

Another funny thing is..I've gotten much better at animating in a short time now..
The shots that looked OK three weeks ago looks like crap now. So I have had to go back and improve "old" animation, or else the difference in quality would
be very noticeable I think. The cool thing though- is that I've obviously had progress. One of the things that I had to improve many places is overlapping, weight and and timing. Also I've been adding more breakdowns- and let the computer to less inbetweening for me. Still- I really must learn to take greater control over the inbetweening- I let the computer have far to much power in that matter. I do not want to continue to be a curve-editor animator, searching for "happy accidents"- as Keith Lango says.