It’s always the same – every project has that annoying last few days where everything’s in place and all you want to do is write it to a disk and get it out the door. Unfortunately, the more you look at it the more you see wrong with it. Tiny little errors creep in, things you either hadn’t noticed before, or had thought you could easily solve suddenly become time consuming and unsolvable.

Well, it’s that day for the trilobite animation. The deadline is close (I’d hoped to get it finished yesterday, but the real deadline is the weekend when I have to take it to Mexico).

Putting the voiceover in turned out to be a problem – I think my camcorder really does have a problem with it. Bits of audio keep disappearing and it’s only because I got the voiceover artist to record everything twice that I’ve got the script covered.

But also, there’s a recurring problem with bands of colour on my animations – they only seem to occur when I’m trying to do underwater scenes and there are large areas of empty ocean fading down into the darkness – and I think it’s got something to do with only having a limited number of shades of blue available on a TV screen.

Anyway, there’s also a problem with the depth of field effect I’ve used in After Effects – it doesn’t handle the edges of areas with different focus very well – and there’s a problem with flickering on some of the animations.

I’ve solved this by adding a slight grain to the image – which has the advantage of softening the CGI and making the whole thing a little grittier.

Also, there’s the old problem that Premiere won’t export more than a couple of minutes of finished work at a time, so I have to compile it in sections.

All of which adds up to about a day of extra work that I didn’t think I’d have to do. Luckily I’ve got that day in hand because I’ve scheduled everything with a bit of space.

The trouble with all this is that it focuses you on the bad points of your work and you end up not being able to appreciate the quality of what you’ve done. You feel disappointed with it and it seems to be rather tatty round the edges – despite the fact that looked at with fresh eyes, it looks really good.