Post-its

I really like post-it notes, so much so that I’m writing a post about it so maybe you’ll appreciate them as much as I do.

A “problem” I have is that I spend all day at my job working at a computer, then in the evening I come home and I work on a computer.

Since starting this project I’ve been trying to look for ways to reduce the amount of time I spend staring at a screen, might of choose the wrong project for that.

My solution, and you might have guessed it by now, is Post-its. Post-its are amazing for a few reasons

• There’s a limit amount of space
• They take up a limited amount of space
• They’re colourful
• They versatile
• They’re replaceable
• They’re not a screen

I’ve been using posits for a few different stages in my process so far, at the beginning I used them to brainstorm,
I had for years been collecting ideas for something in notes of my phone, this was good but eventually, the pages got really long and split across a few apps and different notes within the apps. I also tended to forget about this idea until I was trying to find something, by switching to post-it notes I was able to have all my idea surrounds me so I could always see them, it stated with one wall of my room but quickly took over every available wall. A side effect of this was making my room very colour and bright, and It only looks a little bit like an insane person live there.

After brainstorming ideas I started to group the post it’s into themes and ideas that went together, anything from story theory, character traits, little bits of dialogue, to full episode ideas or story points.
Once my walls were covered and my mind empty of new ideas I started planning out some episodes, if you read my posts on Story and Story Structure you’ll know about my enthusiasm for Dan Harmon’s 8 point story circle, this is where I started with episode planning, once I found one or more post it’s with an episode idea I liked I put them together with the put next to the 8 new posits numbed 1 to 8.  I quickly realized that 8 post-its weren’t enough to fully describe the story, I needed 8 post-its per character because within a story each character has their own arc.

I quickly ran out of wall space, I decided that meant I should start actually writing, so using my episode plans to cover the walls I began.
A while later . . . I finished the drafts of the first season, I started giving myself notes you guessed it on post its, as I mentioned before I had no wall space at this point so I took all the episode plan post it’s off the walls leaving just the spaces for each episode, now under the section for each episode I put new ideas, notes, comments, and dialogue for the episodes as I continued thinking about them.

After a filling my walls once more, I decided I need to come up with a plan to get things moving so I stopped working on all but the first episode,  a few script revisions later I got to a place where I wanted to start storyboarding. Originally I wanted to do this on the walls too so I could always see it and be thinking about it but once again I was out of space and wasn’t sure how much a whole episode would take up anyway.

My next best option, a book, I bought myself a couple of blank Visual diaries. Thinking I’ll have one per episode.

I feel a real need to fight my perfectionist tendency so post-its come in handy, At the time of writing this I’m using post-its to draw out my storyboards, and drawing with a marker from the beginning, each post-it is one shot, I can easily replace or move any of the boards at any time, this gives me a lot of flexibility and I feel I don’t have to worry about drawing something wrong.

I’ll talk more about the storyboarding process at a later date.
Are you as much of a post-it fan? What do you use them for? What else could I use them for?