Whilst in the pre-production stage of the film, the script was an ambitious 9 pages long and made the story about 4 minutes long, Which for a 3 month production time, was going to be nearly impossible to achieve even with the 20 people we have on board. After a story reshuffle I was able to cut off about a minute of the run time whilst still keeping the story the exact same, but it still was too long.
The aim of the story is to shed some light on the internal struggles that the LGBTQ+ community can go through when faced with "coming out", and the original story did just that! It featured internalised homophobia, fear of "coming out" to family members and the fear of what friend and peers at school will think of you. With the overall message of the story being self acceptance.
With the runtime still at 3 minutes, I decided that the story needed to be shortened yet again. So over a weekend, I took the story, and condensed it down to about 2 minutes and 30 seconds, but we had to say goodbye to the sequence that involved Quinn's Dad, which freed up about 3 weeks of work that can now be used somewhere else. The story didn't lose its charm, the tale of self acceptance still stayed the same, the elements that were cut, have been placed into more subtle details throughout the film.
However, changing the story produced another issue. All of the animators had to be assigned different shots, which meant that all their pre-production work that they spent hours on, was now useless. After some team work and meetings, the film is now back on track and production is going well.