Reflective Report

In this report I will go through the various stages of our production with a focus on how it affected the project, the group, and how it affected Me and my way of thinking about working in a group and producing an animated short.

Going into this production phase from the previous Pre-production period where we storyboarded, wrote scripts and planned out how we were going to make our film, we went in pretty optimistic and i'd even say naive. We thought our planning was good enough and that we did everything very well and i remember being pretty confident about approaching production. When we began production we were a bit stagnant and lacked direction but around week 3 we picked up the pace and figured out what needed to be done and eventually got around to doing some solid work. However we soon realized that we were slowly slipping behind the schedule we had in place and with every setback we were losing more and more time till eventually we had to scrap the first 30 seconds of our animation. Cutting the animation was a bit of a kick in the pants and I was disappointed that we did it, but I later realized that if we didn't cut it we would have actually not been able to finish our film. Another thing that helped us out was that we already had our characters modelled going into the project which meant that we basically bypassed around 2-3 weeks of character modelling. I think that anything that can be done prior to starting the project is a huge help, even something as simple as a set design or some props help out by giving you more time to focus on other aspects of the project and even gives you a bit of wiggle room for troubleshooting which we had no idea would be such an obstacle and time sink.

Problems started arising when we were in our rigging stage, i successfully rigged all three characters but when we tried to apply a facial auto rig, we realized that the character models were not perfectly symmetrical which basically meant that the auto face rig wouldn't function as it needs symmetrical meshes for the script to work. At this point I continued looking for solutions for my character's rig but the others re-rigged theirs using a different auto-rigging plugin but we eventually all got mostly functioning rigs and began animation. The rigs at first were awful, they wouldn't deform well, they would often flip out, and we also realized that when the other characters were re-rigged that it affected the scale of the characters which  brought even more problems to the table as we needed to rescale everything including my rig to the new scales and a huge chunk of time was spent fixing, and finding alternate solutions to the huge rigging mess we had created. I really feel that we would've been better off either rigging the characters manually ourselves from the beginning or simply  doing a test rig before we got to the rigging stage to at least get an idea of which problems may arise and to find a way of making a rig work correctly the first time and not need fixing down the track. Unfortunately we didn't think of that because we went in believing auto rigs were magical one click solutions that worked perfectly every time and we couldn't have been more wrong.

Rigging ended up being a constant concern as we always had something to fix up or modify and it just continued chewing up production time. The next time i need a character rigged I'll definitely do a lot more tests and research into making rigs that will function correctly and be achievable within the time needed and there are various tutorials and tools online that would help achieve that. When we started running out of time it was becoming more and more apparent to us that we needed to be working a lot harder to achieve our goal and this just stressed out the whole team.  Once the stress began to rise our team had some freak outs and arguments and it mainly just made working on the project harder. Disagreements and issues within the group were settled through conversations and going to get our daily coffee actually helped us out with some of these problems because we actually had a bit of a break and a chance to talk about things that are concerning us and helped our mood because we were outside in the fresh air and not cooped up all the time.

When working with a team of people for an extended period of time you get to see what they're 'made of' in a way, it shows which people are prone to stress and pessimism, who is good at dealing with adversity, who can work under pressure, and how people function in a team environment. Even though we had a few shaky moments and disagreements, in the end we were able to come together and finish what we needed to do and our teamwork was generally adequate most of the time. We were fortunate not to have any horrible teammates that would for instance refuse to do work or constantly disrupt the creative process or anything like that.

We did however have some trouble outsourcing our audio work to other students, the lack of communication we had with them led to some confusion and the actual audio we got back wasn't what we were looking for initially. After some deliberation with the other students we were able to recieve a much better version of the audio track for our animation, however a little bit later than we had hoped. I think the fact that we 'hired' these students later into the project than we should've and the fact that we had minimal means of communicating with them is what caused the problems with getting audio. If we were to organize things earlier it would give us a bit more assurance that we will get what we need within a reasonable time frame because its not wise to rely on people external to the project, especially when they are working for free, without a backup plan for audio.

In the end we were able to get all that we needed for the project before the deadline and achieve our 'revised' project goals. All in all working on this group project was quite a roller-coaster ride with many ups like figuring out new things in Maya and actually learning more about the production process, and many downs like stress, technical issues and losing progress, but in the end i am actually thankful for encountering the problems we had because having  experienced adversity in trying to make something i think I've learnt more than if everything went smoothly, the experience has made me rely more on myself and my ability to adapt to changing situations and to really take important decision making much more seriously. From what I've experienced i think in the next project i undertake it is critical to have a completely solid plan for production along with backup plans and to maintain a realistic mindset when deciding on various elements that will be in the production to ensure that which ever project I embark on is well structured, well thought out, and achievable even if I was to encounter problems down the road, and in all aspects a much more solid end product.

Week 16

So this week was a wild scramble to get all of our renders done, and i'd have to say we did a pretty good job. I got the team together and we went into uni Saturday morning and cranked out about 6 scenes of renders with the help of Stuart who set up backburner for us. I was a little concerned that we would run out of time to render because lecturers were saying rendering could easily take up to a week or two but it seems we have everything rendered correctly at this point.

One of the few issues we encountered was actual render settings being slightly different between scenes so there is a small change in lighting throughout some scenes but it isn't too big of a problem because for one its not overly noticeable and two brightness can be altered in editing. Next time when working on anything with more than one environment set i think it would be smart to create a separate file for just lighting setup and render settings so that all scenes are consistent.

Another little hic up we had was that some of our scenes were just too much for the computers to handle and it resulted in 10-20 minute loading times just to open the scene or sometimes Maya would just straight up crash while trying to load the more graphics intensive scenes like my dragon landing scene which had hundreds of pieces of geometry, an animated rig and fire dynamics and shatter simulation all in the one scene.
I think another contributing factor was that our scenes had a lot of unnecessary history as well which didn't help and by that point it was a little too late to start going into all the scenes and deleting history, but it's definitely something i would avoid in the future and just keep my scenes as clean as possible to avoid trouble further down the line.

other than the handful of problems i think rendering was pretty successful and we're just waiting for the final video to be put together now.

(PS. This is not my final assessment post)

Week 15

So this week i have continued working on fixing up some animation scenes and polishing them off for rendering. We have begun rendering and have 2 scenes done so far. We had to re-render one of our scenes because of a camera angle issue that caused Tammy's fishing rod to get in the way of her face and basically block the view of Tammy's head. When i start rendering my scenes i will be careful to get all settings and elements of the shot completely ready before rendering to avoid losing what little time we have left. I also looked for some information regarding how to shoot an action scene and some examples on what camera angles to use and found a few really good links:

-http://www.video-boot-camp.com/how-to-shoot-a-fight-scene.html
-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATDnFr25JG8
-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1japIhKU9I

The point of looking into camera shots relates back to being able to get these scenes rendered as soon as possible without any problems and simply making our animation better with some simple camera techniques. Previously when working on other projects i'd just eyeball the camera and basically make up the camera movements on the spot, but after looking at these examples i think spending just a little bit of time to making the camera movements and shots a bit more solid in future projects can go a long way.