Dim Progress Check #3 - Re-establishing Our Ground

Between the previous progress check and this one, my group needed a little grounding session. Our previous meetings outside of class revealed that we need to nip the issue of time management in the bud now before it gets out of hand going forward. This was brought to our attention thanks to Andy, who is a stern but careful tone reminded us that having other classes and working outside of this class isn’t a good enough excuse to not be presenting or working on anything between our in class meetings. Our group discussed a new procedure where we have weekly projects that are due on Fridays, rather than Wednesdays. Wednesdays will be revised to not only showcase what progress we have made on our weekly projects, but to assign new projects for those who completed theirs prior to the deadline. I think this will be a positive change going forward. 

Ari and I have worked to make accurate size charts and placeholder models for our characters. This comes from the need to differentiate our characters in these early stages of our animatic to those outside the project. Additionally, the placeholder models are viable blocking assets for when we do start the major character creation process.

We have acknowledged the need to re-prioritize the development of our story, something that our professor Howard especially has expressed the need to do. While we have changed the story slightly from the original animatic, we plan on starting small group sessions with the professors to develop our story following this week’s upcoming iterative animatic pass. 

As we get closer to that date, my individual amount of work does increase. Using the new placeholder character models and updated sets, we now must go in and essentially redo all the animation from our previous iterative pass. Thankfully, it isn’t nearly as much of a race against the clock compared to last time, the amount of changes in camera positions and shot length is a decent amount of work. I worked with our professor Jeremy to create a specific way to create our playblasts. Following this iterative pass, I will work with him to discover new ways of compiling and editing that will hopefully be beneficial to the short going forward. 

In short, it's been a rocky couple of weeks, but we are determined to fix what was broken and be careful moving forward.