What I planned to do:

Focus on my tent shots and get everything that wasn’t already at a first level of polish to a first level of polish.

What I did this week:

I spent most of my time wrestling with my tent interior shots.  They have proven to be my most difficult shots to work on and have needed much TLC.  I was able to get them to a level of polish that will be ready to show in class tomorrow and for Dave Mauriello to give me some good critique today.  Other than the tent stuff I tweaked some of my others shots and set up an animation schedule with Josh for when certain shots need to be LOCKED.  From there I spent a while going back through and playblasting all our shots so we can have a nice, cohesive edit to show on Tuesday.

What I plan to do next week:

First priority is getting shots locked so we can begin rendering.  I will also be helping knock out any small things that just need to get done.

Hours: 60

Goal for this week:

Work on my interior tent shots.

What I got done this week:

I spent all my time working on a single shot that proved to be incredibly difficult.  It’s my shot where Dyer collapses to his knees and Danforth bumping into the table.  I’ve finally worked out all my problems with dyer’s fall so now im tackling danforth and the table but this shot will be done by monday night thankfully.

What I plan to do next week:

Finish everything that isn’t quite done or to a first level of polish yet.  By class next week all of my shots will be at their first level of polish state and then I can move into adding that final level of polish while the team renders everything.

Hours: 20

Goal for this week:

Last week I said I was going to focus on my interior tent shots but instead it became priority to make sure all shots were in 3d for this weeks animation.

What I got done this week:

I will no longer have any shots represented by storyboards for this week’s edit.  I was able to take ELC 060 to a near finished polished state.  I also took EAC 070 & 080 to almost the same state but I still need to add some facial work to both shots and 080 needs a bit more body splines but overall they have come a long way and are close to finished.  ELC 045, 050, and 052 are super rough and will be polished easily once I ask my team what exactly the sequence should look like.  ILT 020 and IT 280 were my last two shots that I hadn’t had 3d for so those are now blocked in.

What I plan to do this week:

Since I switched my plans around for last week I plan on getting my ILT shots splined this week and I want to throw a few more touches onto my EAC shots.

Hours: 27

What I Planned to do this week

Move forward with polishing animation.

What I got done this week:

I was able to take two more shots from super rough to a polished state with facial animation.  ELC 020 and 030 are ready for one more look from the team for crit and one more round of polish before they will be ready to render.  I’m also currently in the process of redoing a couple shots because I’m unhappy with the initial result .  I also took some time to pose a shoggoth tentacle for a poster.  That took longer than expected because I ended up having to directly tweak the model because I couldn’t get it in the shape I wanted with just the rig.  Other than that I’ve planned out what I need to get done each week to stay on track and so far I’m on schedule.

What I plan to do next week:

This week I’ll be working on our interior tent scene.  I have three shots in this scene that I’ll have polished for next week’s crit.  I’ll also try and make some tweaks to last week’s shots.

Hours: 17

What I planned to get done:

I planned to continue chugging along at animating my shots.

What happened this week:

Instead…

Our team hit crisis mode because we had to get our wall put up in the URBN center lobby on Monday but on three different attempts the print center was closed so we ended up getting in some trouble.  I was also unfortunately busy during my team’s complete panic about the wall (which I feel bad about) but everyone pulled through and got stuff printed and put up.  What I ended up helping with this week was getting some stuff ready for our presentation on tuesday.  I animated a turntable for our shoggoth monster.  It’s tentacles move and flail while it’s body looks like it’s breathing.  I also threw together a couple reaction shots of our characters for our trailer.  Nothing fancy, just 24 frames of them gasping.

Next week:

Animate.

Total Hours: 16

What I set out to do this week:

I wanted to get all my tent scenes blocked in and spline at least two of my other shots.

What I got done this week:

I didn’t quite finish blocking in my camp scenes because we noticed some layout problems that needed to be fixed before I could finish blocking BUT those will be done by tomorrow.  I didn’t let it hold me back though so I worked on roughing in a few of my other shots.  I roughed in ET 020, ILT 030, and I spent a lot of time on ILT 010, and EAC 070.  Animating has been rough this week though.  I spent so many hours tweaking and tweaking and ended up filming more reference cause I couldn’t get my characters to do exactly what I wanted them to do.  I think i’m finally on the right track though.

Hours: 32 hours

What I plan to get done next week:

I’ve got six shots left that need a rough polish before I can go back and start polishing so I’m going to get half of them done by next week and the other half of them done by finals week.  So I’m right on track 🙂

Goal for the past week:

The plan was to get all my shots blocked in for the camp/ tent scene, throw the finishing touches onto the elder thing model, and fix my references.

What I got done:

I didn’t end up getting blocking done for the camp/ tent scene because layout got delayed but it’s suppose to be finished by the end of tonight so I’ll be working on getting as much of that blocked in before our meeting with our adviser on Wednesday.  Dave and I did film new reference for that scene so we are ready to go as soon as layout is finished.  Since I couldn’t work on blocking I continued to work on roughing in the animation for my scenes in the trench.  I did fix my references for Josh, which was a stupid error on my part because I forgot a folder in the reference path.  I finished the elder thing model which I’ll hand over as soon as I’m instructed what to do with the UV’s.

Hours: ~10

What I plan to get done throughout the next week:

This coming week I plan to definitely have everything blocked for the camp/ tent scene and I’m going to try and get the rough animation done for EAC 070 and ET 020, faces and all.

Oh, and a big factor for why I only have about 10 hours for my PPJ this week is because I ended up having to spend about 40 this week fixing a lot of problems for an independent study I’m currently enrolled in (rig issues).  BUT all that has been solved so as part of my plan for this week I’m going to dedicate 30 hours minimum to just animating for senior project. There I’ve said it! Now I must do it!

Goal for this past week:

I wanted to get 2-3 shots roughed in for this week.

What I got done:

I got EAC 070 and ET 020 splined and ready for crit.  I was hoping to do a bit more than I initially planned to because I thought I was going to have some extra time this weekend but I ended up having to take my girlfriend to urgent care.  I still have work to show for this week though!

Thoughts:

On top of my weekend trip to the doctor I also struggled with some laptop issues this week where my computer crashed a couple times and files were getting corrupt.  I think I have that under control though and it was after all that when I finally made progress this week.  Also, my sprint 2 to-do list is fairly small because the majority of the rest of my shots are in the camp/ tent scene (sprint 3).  Since I have a fairly small sprint 2 I plan on being able to get all my shots to a rough polish with about another 1.5 weeks of work.  I need to shift gears for the upcoming week though since we are going to be blocking in the rest of our film before doing anymore rough animation but I’m really comfortable with where we are sitting with everything.

Hours: 10

What I plan to get done throughout the next week:

I will be getting half of my remaining shots blocked in for next week (I believe that’s about 6-7 shots.)  Ideally I’d like to get everything blocked from our camp and tent scene but I know I’ll at least be able to get half of it done.  I also am going to be throwing final details on the Elder Thing model I made a few months ago so that can be passed on to the rest of the team.  Oh! And I have some referencing problems that I need to fix for Josh.  Busy week ahead! (but arn’t they all?)

Goal for this past week:

Get all my shots for our interior tower scene to a first level of polish and pass those shots off to the rest of the team to start render testing and an initial render pass.

What I got done:

I was in charge of IT 010, 020, 060, 080, 090, 180 (180-200), and 300 and I was able to get all these shots handed off by our February 6th deadline.  They are at a level of polish that I would consider done (minus a few tweaks to make sure they all work in sync).

Thoughts:

I am happy with most of what I got done, and I was slightly disorganized during this first sprint so things weren’t going as smoothly as I had hoped.  I still got my shots ‘done for now’ and luckily we have almost 2 weeks of wiggle room to go back and do another layer of polish.  I initially thought we were going to use one of our wiggle weeks now but after meeting with the team we decided to move onto the next chunk of our animation and then save final polish for the end of the term.

Hours: 17

What I plan to get done throughout the next week:

If anything needs to be immediately tweaked from the previous sprint I’ll make sure those get done first.  Other than that I plan on getting two-three shots from the next sprint roughed in and ready for crit from Dave Mauriello and the rest of the team/ Nick.

This week is going to be a similar post to last week.  I animated for the entire week, again.  I worked on getting another 5 of my 8 shots polished.  I finished one shot which was about 7 seconds of animation.  I also got 4 other shots almost finished and those equal about 15-20 seconds of animation.  All in all it was a super productive week but I couldn’t quite get everything done by tonight like I had hoped.  I learned we have a week of leeway for this sprint though so I’ll be putting all the final bells and whistles on everything this week and then moving on to another scene the week after!  I also hope to be able to add one more round of polish to what I’m calling my big big shot for this sprint, this week.  As of right now I have about 20 seconds of animation that I can call done and by the end of tomorrow I’ll have about 30 seconds I can call done and then by the end of the week I’ll have my entire 40-ish seconds for this sprint finished.

Hours: 25

So I did a lot of animating this week, but there isn’t much to actually talk about so I apologize for my short post!  I’ve got about 30 seconds of animation to do for this sprint and I got about 10 seconds of that done this weekend.  I’m not going to call it “done done” but its at the level where’d I’d be happy with calling it done if I don’t have time to give it one more level of polish.  I did spent all my time polishing it from the body to the face and while I’d like to spend as much time as I spent this weekend, again, tweaking it in the graph editor I need to call it done for now and continue with my next shots.  My plan is to get all my stuff to the quality of the shot I did this week and then use whatever time is left to really polish the most important shots (ex: Danforth going crazy.)

Pros: I made good progress and I’m really proud of my work.

Cons: It still doesn’t look like I’ve even made a dent in my pile of animation.

Hours: 20

This week was crazy productive!

Animation

Summary:  This was probably the first week I really sat down and created a lot of animation.  I finished blocking a few shots for the tower and jumped right into smoothing it out.  I was able to rough in about 5 shots which was about 23ish seconds of animation.  I also shot some reference for a couple shots with Pat and Dave and then cut my references so they could be added to the animatic.

Pros: I didn’t expect to be able to start splining this week so that was great!

Cons: Facial rigs were still being polished so I couldn’t start facial animation, but they will be done within the next day or two!

Hours: 17

Misc (rigs, meetings, and storyboards)

Summary:  On top of animation we have figured out a solution to the problems with the first part of our story.  Dave and I figured out storyboards before calling the group together for the final decision.  I’ve also been in contact with Anthony all week so we can make sure the facial rigs get done soon.

Pros: The restructuring we did of our story really works well and will cut out some animation work which will definitely help us!  Rigs are almost finished.

Cons: n/a

Hours: 5

This week wasn’t a production heavy week but it was productive in the planning and organizing department.  We started the week off with a team meeting to see where everyone was sitting after the long winter break. There we decided upon a new production cycle where we will break up our production into smaller chunks but this will allow us to start rendering sooner.  I then spent a few hours organizing all my files from last term, setting up a more workable file structure, and compiling playblasts for Ethan to implement into the animatic. I also took one of my shots to the point where I am ready to begin splining. (minus facial animation).  My ppj will be of more detail next week because the next couple will be full of productivity!  Go team!

Animation (cont)

Summary:  This week was not the most productive weeks due to the holiday.  I lost 5 of the days this week due to my father visiting Philly for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Anyways

I continued to work on blocking out my shots and I’ve got all but 4-5 of them initially roughed in.  This was the first week with our character body rigs done (we have hands and eyes now and Anthony did a great job working out all the kinks) so that made the couple shots I blocked in this week just look so much better.  I worked on part of the final sequence where Danforth goes crazy at the end.  I also began to go back through my previous shots and update the rig references with the newest version.  I wish I had more to say but all I did was work on animation

.

Pros: I’ve got most of my initial blocking done so I’m going to have time to go back through and refine my blocking before the end of term.

Cons: Lost a lot of days but luckily I planned ahead so I’m not behind.

Hours: ~4.5

Upcoming:  Finish the shots left that need initial blocking, go back through updating rigs and refining blocking.  I also haven’t gotten to finishing weight painting so I’m going to try and get to that this week but worst case it will be done by the end of term.

Animation

Summary:   This week all I did was animate.  I’ve almost finished another 8 of my shots. (premature blocking I mean).  We are trying to get a rough blocking pass done by the final fall presentation so Dave, Pat, and I have been working hard to get that done!  In order to block I’ve had to go through all our reference footage and then cut together the parts that I want to use. I also helped Anthony out a bit with the rigs but I didn’t quite get to weight painting this week, I plan on polishing the weights within the next couple days.  I’ve also started thinking about a plan for next quarter’s in terms of animation schedule.

Pros:   I am making lots of progress and the more I get into it the less I’m worried about getting everything done.

Cons:   I’m probably going to have to go back in, when we start polishing, and re-block in some of my shots because I don’t quite like how they look and I’d like to record some different reference.  This isn’t really a con, but this seemed like the best place to put this.

Hours: ~8

Upcoming:   My main job is to keep animating but I also plan on polishing up the weights for our characters.

This week I finally got to animate!  I’ve also worked a lot with Anthony, assisting him with weight painting, and double checking things so we can get these body rigs done and allow Anthony to get started on the character’s faces!

Animation

Last week we got the story boards and proxy rigs finished, so we have stated animating!  On Monday Dave, Pat, and I met and divided up all the shots and we made sure we all got an even amount of action shots and acting shots.  We each have about 21 shots to work on, which is pushing it, but I’m not worried because we have a very competent team.  I’m also going to be keeping on top of all the animation to make sure everything gets done and done well!  We have set up twice a week ‘crits’ but since we are only in a rough blocking stage we arn’t going to have actually crit meetings until we have more to crit.  Right now our two day a week deadlines are primarily to keep us on track in order to get our entire short blocked out by the end of term.  I’ve also gotten 5 of my 21 shots roughly blocked in this week.

Pros: It’s cool to start seeing our animation come together.

Cons: Well, there is A LOT to animate.

Hours: 7 hours

Rig Stuff (weight painting)

On top of animating I have worked a lot with Anthony this week with our rigs.  Dave, Pat, and I had played around a lot with the proxy rigs before we started to animate, but some issues came up that we couldn’t have foreseen until we reached this point in the process.  Anthony has been doing a great job addressing all these problems this week!  I’ve also done A TON of weight painting to help Anthony keep his sanity.  We want to make sure the rigs work perfectly and I’m confident all these little issues will be resolved within the next week.

Pros: We’ve got some really nice deformations happening

Cons: Painting weights is time consuming, but necessary

Hours: 8

Upcoming Tasks:

1.) Fine tune the weight maps of our characters

2.) Block in another 3-5 shots

3). Model boots (meant to do that this week but other tasks took longer than initially projected)

This week we have finally transitioned into animation mode.  Dave, Pat, and myself finished recording reference for the pop through while Ethan, Val, and Josh worked on layout/ setting up our environment scenes for animation.  Anthony has also gotten us some proxy rigs and we’ve been able to start blocking.

Recording Reference

Dave, Pat, and I spent a while filming ourselves acting out the scenes.  We had gotten through about half of the scenes last week so we finished the other half of the movie this week.  We now have over 100 takes to go through and use for our initial blocking.  More reference will need to be filmed in the future, especially when we get to lip sync, but we have a lot to work with for now.  Since the plan is to get our project completely blocked out by the end of term I need to go through the scenes with the other animators so we can decide who will work on what shots (that is happening tomorrow) and after that it’s off to the races!

Pros: We got a lot of interesting takes and shots to use for blocking.

Cons: Acting is haaaaaaaard!

Hours: 4.5

Animating

This morning we had a quick layout meeting with the team and then I started to work on one of our shots.  For now myself and the other animators only have a shot or two to work on, but after tomorrow I’ll be able to work on blocking all my shots together (because we are dividing up shots tomorrow).

Pros: So happy to finally be doing the best part of the project

Cons: Need to know which shots I’ll be working on before I can make drastic progress/ waiting for the final parts of layout to get done.

Hours: 2.5

Next week:

-Animating A LOT!

-Maybe helping Anthony paint weights (Not entirely sure yet)

This week was all about prepping for animation.  We plan to start animating this coming week so I recorded some placeholder dialogue with Ethan and then reference with Dave and Pat.

Ethan and I ran through the script a couple times just to get some spacing for the animatic.  We plan to bring in our voice actors within the next couple weeks to record our final dialogue.

Hours: 1

I then recorded a lot of film reference for animation.  We got through half of the script and we plan on finishing the other half this coming week.  We took multiple takes of each shot and switched who acted so we could get a variety of actions to choose from.  We plan on using this mostly for initial blocking of our scenes and gesture drawings.  We will tighten up the blocking once we get the actual timing of the scenes with the final recording of our voice actors.

Pros: Got a lot of good reference

Cons: Takes a loooooong time and only halfway done

Hours: 3

Moving forward:

1. Animation, animation, animation!

This week I worked a lot with the team on our script (I know, I want to finish it too), storyboards, nCloth testing, and finishing the Elder Thing model.

Script

Summary:  We now have a ‘final’ draft!  We sat down as a team and went line by line until we compiled a script that everyone is happy with.  We had a lot of bouncing ideas off each other, making personal compromises in terms of certain dialogue choices, and overall creating the best version of our script to date.  At this point we can move forward onto storyboards, scene blocking, and getting started on blocking out our animation.  No more drastic changes will need to be made from here.

Pros: Our script is awesome and we are all super proud of it.

Cons: We need to re-record our voice actors

Hours: 3

Storyboards

Summary: Now that we have finally completed our ‘final’ draft of our script, Dave, val, and I sat down and blocked out all the changes we made to the story so we can update our storyboards.  Dave has taken the lead on inking in all the boards and as he has completed them I have gone through and added some simple value.

Pros: We didn’t end up having to redo as many boards as we thought

Cons: It is still time consuming, especially for Dave.

Hours: 5

Cloth Test

Summary: This was basically my first time ever messing with nCloth but we are all testing it to see if we want to use it for our characters clothing.  I am going to try a style of clothing that’s closer to our character’s actually clothing, this week.

Pros: I learned about how to better control the cloth

Cons: I had no idea what I was doing

Hours: 3

Modeling

Summary: I basically finished the Elder thing model (finally).  I just need to make any tweaks requested from the team and then UV it.

Pros: It came out looking really interesting

Cons: Lots of geo to work with.

Hours: 4

Upcoming Tasks:

1.) Finishing up the storyboards with Dave

2.)Starting to work on our pop through!

3.)Test more cloth.

4.) Anything else Val assigns me to do.

I still put our script as priority #1.  We are meeting as a group tomorrow to finalize our script so we should finally be able to move forward. Anyways, I started the week by writing a new version of our script after meeting with the group and discussing all the changes we wanted to make.  That has led us to our meeting tomorrow to hopefully finalize our script.  Other than that I continued to work on modeling the Elder Thing.

Script

Summary:  I spent a few hours going through the old script and restructuring our scenes.  We spent a lot of time talking about the problems with our script as a group so I took all our decisions and typed up the new draft.  I then spent time talking with Ethan, Val, and Dave about the state of the new script and where we want it to be as we create the final draft.

Pros: I’ve never been happier with the state of our script, I’m finally really proud of it.

Cons: We had a couple disconnects on some things and we need to finalize this now.

Time: ~5-6 hours

Modeling

Summary:  I just kept working on the model of the Elder Thing.  I’ve gotten the mesh just about finished and I’ve started to use joints to pose the creature.  I plan to have this model done by next week at the latest.

Pro:  I think it’s coming alone great.

Con: It’s taking more time to finish because of all the script stuff we’ve been doing.

hours: ~3-4

Moving forward

1. Finalize the script, knock out the storyboards with Dave, and get cracking on the animatic.

2.Finish Elder Thing Model

3.Start animating if the above get finished and if the character base rigs are done.

This week I did a lot of work on the script and I spent a while working on one of the creature models for our animation.

Script:

Ethan and I met with a film professor to discuss problems with our story.  He had a lot of useful critiques and it has led us to completely changing our script yet again.  We lacked not only character conflict but character motivation, two very important story telling elements.  After two meetings with the entire group we discussed ways to solve all our problems and we now have an outline for the new version of the script.

Pros:  Our story is really coming together and I think with just a bit more push it will be great!

Cons: Gonna be some more work fixing up the script but it needs to be done.

Time: ~4-5 hours

Modeling:

I worked on the model of the Elder thing.  I’ve just about got the base mesh finished and once that is done I will be throwing in some quick and dirty joint chains to pose the model as if it is trapped in the ice.  Once this model is done, posed, and UV’d I will be moving onto helping Pat with other models from our master asset list.

Time: ~7-8 hours

Next week:

1. Writing a new draft of the script and editing it with the team

2.Finishing the Elder thing model and posing it

3.Any other models I can help with

This week I focused A LOT on our script.  I had three separate meetings, two with group members to discussed how we wanted to change our script to better tell our story/ cut down on dialogue and one with a film student to fix all the general formatting errors.  I then created a new version of our script with all the edits.  Aside from that I didn’t get as much modeling done as I had liked, but I finished our main character’s hat and began working on the model of the Elder Thing.

Script

• I met with Pat, Ethan, and Dave early in the week.  After much discussion we decided to completely cut all narration.  We also had to address some story points that were not coming across as strongly as we wanted along with restructuring a couple scenes.  We fine tuned the dialogue throughout the script and made some cuts there as well.
• I emailed a film faculty member and asked him if he would sit down and go over the script with us.  He has responded and agreed to meet with us, which will take place on Thursday.
• I then went through and created an edited draft of the script with all the discussed changes.
• After that I met with just Ethan to finalize all the choices we made in the previous meeting.  We basically went line by line throughout the entire script and made decisions on what we should/ shouldn’t cut.  We also went through all my changes to the script and decided which of those changes we wanted to implement into an updated draft. Another thing we touched on was what places music and silence were important.
• The next day I met with my film student friend and showed her all our notes.  This meeting went very well.  She said our script is much more readable and interesting.  She also gave me general screenwriting formatting tips.
• With all the notes from the previous three meetings I typed up the tenth version of the script in Celtx.  I reworded some things, added everything discussed with the group, and edited all the formatting errors.
• Pros: Lots of good decisions were made, our story is stronger than ever.  Made a lot of progress.
• Cons:Still can’t say the script is ‘finished.’
• Hours: ~8

Modeling

• Finished our main character’s hat.  There are a surprisingly small amount of orthographic photos for old hats.

  

• Started working on the model for the Elder Thing.
• Pros: Haven’t run into any issues so far.
• Cons: N/A
• Hours: ~2

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:

1. Meet with film faculty to further refine our script.
2. Revise shot list w/Ethan and Dave.
3. 2d assets for the animatic
4. Continue modeling!

This week my primary focus was thoroughly going through the script and animatic.  Now that we have a WIP animatic we can start working on the overall pacing of our story and dialogue.  This unfortunately brought up some unnoticed problems with the script and I spent a lot of time figuring out how to address these problems in order to strengthen our story, which I then presented to the group.  I also gathered clothing sketches from our clothing designer and made sure they matched our character’s bodies (see picture from Dave’s post).  I also began modeling clothing assets for our characters such as hats and boots.  Lastly, I tested the current state of our character rigs.

Script Issues

• Summary: I had a new pair of eyes look over our animatic and script which brought some unnoticed problems to light.  I then spent quite a few hours going through the script/ animatic myself and discussing the story with this new pair of eyes (a senior film student). Lots of wordy dialogue can be shortened or cut, character progression can be strengthened, and more powerful imagery can be used.
• Positive Stuff:  The story itself is solid, so ultimately no changes will add large amounts of work to our plate.  Minus one potentially major dialogue reformat we are basically polishing our script not changing the story structure.
• Problems / issues:  Lots of screenwriting formatting problems will need to be addressed along with cutting down dialogue.
• Hours: 5-6 hours

Getting clothing designs/ testing rigs

• Summary:  Gathered clothing designs from the designer and worked with Dave to make sure they were correct/ fit the characters. I tested the character rig and suggested some changes to make animating easier.
• Positive Stuff:  Looked great.
• Problems / issues: Some rotation orient problems but those were quickly fixed.
• Hours: 1.5 hours

Modeling!

• Summary: Started working on extra models needed for the characters.
• Positive Stuff:  Just need to keep chugging away.
• Problems / issues: Not yet!
• Hours: 3-4 hours

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Cleaning up the script, working on refining dialogue, and scheduling a meeting with a film professor in order to make final decisions.
2. Modeling, I have a large list of props and character things to model/ UV.
3. Continue testing the character rigs and updates become available