The year in reflection

Just submitted my work! Wow.

It's been an incredibly gruelling term (and more to the point year) and I've literally had no sleep the past 2 weeks to ensure I'm as far along with the project as I could be.

The bottom line is we were unable to finish the film for submission, which both myself and Guy were annoyed about. We had animated about 30 shots altogether over the past few weeks, and I think we did pretty decently especially considering we were just a group of 2 people (with some additional help for 4 shots from Nick and Joe from the second year!). As for submission I'm disappointed with how it turned out as the shots I submitted in my folders were not what I'd consider the standard of work I can actually achieve. A lot of the shots were reworked upon quite a few times because I didn't have the right mindset when working on them. It's best to animate "slowly" and calmly but I panicked quite a few times which caused the quality of animation to suffer.

We had a few compatibility problems when Guy gave me his shots to render, the problems we were having were related to the 2012 mental ray and caused all of Guys shots to become over saturated when rendered. This halted things a bit because I had to find a workable solution, and I eventually did. What seemed to fix this was to render the master layer out as Maya Software, and luckily the ambient occlusion wasn't affected by this weird glitch. In terms of the rendering I was initially going to render off the shots with the renderfarm at college but the renderfarm was having a lot of issues and I later decided to do it on my home computer, which luckily doesn't take too long to render with.

I sadly doubt we'll get the film done for the degree show now, aside from a quick 30 second trailer demonstrating some of the "finished" work in rendered form. I will be still animating all week as much as I can, but there's a lot I want to do to some of the shots I've already animated. I believe we can finish the majority of the shots by thursday but the rendering and sound are the biggest reasons it wont get done for then. This is incredibly disappointing but it WILL be done for Skillset since it gives us a few more weeks to work on the film and finesse what we have. We've got to both maintain the pace we've had over the past few weeks whilst also going through every shot with as much attention to detail we can. I'll be working heavily under schedule and ensure the film is to a great standard for the 10th July which would be just in time for Skillset.

So what would I do if I had the chance to start from scratch? Well for starters I'd have a larger group of people working on the film, which I did try to get in the first term but most people were already taken by other groups. If this was the case we would've been able to speed up the process a bit because we'd have a dedicated team working on it like a few of the other groups. Alternatively having a small group made the film feel far more personal and meant I only had to rely on Guy and myself (and the additional people who made a few assets for the film). I've also learnt directing really isn't for me (at least not yet).

Aside from the problems it's been a great year and it's such a shame these 3 years are up. It's been a pleasure working with some great people which will make leaving even harder.