Author: valfeldman

9-28-PPJ-Valentina Feldman

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The majority of my time and energy this week was spent on editing production documents and organizing our next sprint.

Task #1: Gantt Chart

  • Summary: I spent a lot of time this week getting our Gantt chart up to date and projecting our progress into future terms. I met with my team and determined milestones and goals, which have been indicated in the chart and communicated to the team. I then used this chart to set up task lists and sprints for everybody else on the team, structuring deliverables and due dates in terms of priority.
  • Positive Stuff: Upon updating our goals and actuals, I’m pleased to find that we have exceeded our intended summer deliverables and are well on track.
  • Problems / issues: It’s ugly! We need a properly illustrated Gantt chart for our presentation. I chose function over form with this one — it conveys a lot of information and is now my go-to document for planning out sprints, but I still need to design a more legible version for others to look at.

Hours: 4

Task #2: Master Task List

  • Summary: Our master task list needed a revamp. Two major flaws in my original design were brought to my attention — First, the layout did not allow for simultaneous status updates on each shot, which would be highly detrimental in the later stages of production when assets are rapidly bouncing back and forth between departments. Secondly, I accidentally used the same IDs for two scenes, leading to a duplicity in naming conventions. Whoops. Both were sorted out.
  • Positive Stuff: Fixed.
  • Problems / issues: The new MTL format means that I will need to make additional spreadsheets to track WIP status on a per-scene basis. As we only have seven scenes, I don’t see this being too much of an issue. Certain fields are still blank and will update pending approval of storyboards & animatic.

Hours: 2

Task #3: Presentation Pitch

  • Summary: We all worked on this pitch together, but I took the lead on assembling it into a visual format.
  • Positive Stuff: Looks good so far! I will be updating the pitch as deliverables start rolling in within the next week. We have some nice mood boards and more concept art in the works, and I’m excited to clean it up and make it look prettier.
  • Problems / issues: I’m mildly concerned with the amount of information we’re covering in our initial pitch. I have asked multiple faculty members for opinions on what to include and have received mixed responses — some said to stick to pre-production materials only, and others have told me to include turntables and our latest projects. I attempted to strike a middleground. We’ll see how I did on Tuesday.

Hours: 6 (includes Keynote, scriptwriting, scavenging assets together).

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

  1. Update website
  2. Begin to texture characters
  3. Create scene-specific subsheets for MTL

Week 1: Team Progress Summary

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Click to view Google Sheets file!

Click to view Google Sheets file!

This week marked the “official” start of our project! After presenting our topic to the class on Tuesday morning, we continued onward with our assigned tasks. On Wednesday we met with our adviser, Nick Jushchyshyn, and discussed where to continue from here.

We will be pitching our project to the Drexel Digital Media faculty on 10/13/2014. Because of this, we are switching priorities slightly and focusing on polishing our current work, preparing for Animation, and laying down the groundwork for a more permanent storage solution. Nick will be looking into acquiring 1 – 5 terabytes of dedicated server space for us to store our project, and we will be migrating our scene directories over as soon as possible. This allows for a MUCH greater storage capacity (as we are now limited to 120 gigabytes of cloud space), as well as a direct line to the Drexel render farm.

This week was spent establishing a projected timeline for the next nine months, developing a modeling asset list, iterating our animatic, polishing our concept art and mood swatches, rigging our characters, and working on scene layout. We intend to begin animation immediately upon the approval of our project! Because of this, we will need completed human rigs, 3D, scale-correct layouts of each environment, a workable shot list, and a file hierarchy solution completed by October 13th, the end of our first Fall sprint. Everybody who isn’t working on layout or rigging will be modeling assets and helping to polish our presentation pitch.

Please refer to our Gantt chart and our individual team entries for Week #1 for more information about our intended deliverables for the next week!