Update on backgrounds/New Schedule!

After realising mid-week that my dissertation draft hand-in is in just over 2 weeks, I have decided to halt progress on backgrounds. They are pretty much all finalized design wise anyway, and I figured that they don't actually need to be completely finished so early on in the production stages. Furthermore, as we have agreed that as we're working chronologically, it means we're starting from the beach scenes so it is just under 50 seconds in before we hit the village in our film. But because we need to completely finish at least 50% of the film, there will of course be a few scenes in the village which we need backgrounds for. So I will create those few in the days after my dissertation draft hand-in, which is on the 5th. I will give myself a maximum time of a week to create those 7-8 backgrounds, which will then give me 10 days to help with the rest of my team, making any inbetween animations, cleaning any up and editing it together and making a final render. Hopefully the animatic will be completely finished for today as well, which was the most important thing to be done as I will need it to know exactly what the backgrounds/camera angles are.

I know this is less time than I had already scheduled, but it's difficult for me to concentrate on the backgrounds when my head is always thinking about the dissertation, and I don't want to do a rush job on them. I've realised many other people/teams are doing the same thing, so it isn't like we're losing ground/time on others. The dissertation is important and I am really worrying about it, so from now up until 5th (unless I find any free time to work on backgrounds, which is admittingly a big if) I will be solely working on my dissertation.

 

This is my new schedule for Team Candy Island. I updated it for 2 reasons. One was so it was up to date with my re-scheduling of the backgrounds (due to dissertation) and two was because the previous schedule wasn't detailed enough on exactly what I would like done for each day.

Now, basically from now until the 5th I will be working just on my dissertation, which is the area marked in grey. I would expect Jayce and Jack to do the same, but of course if they decide to do anything else that is fine. Starting from the 7th, we will then properly begin production on our film and for the next 3 weeks animate and complete half of hour film. For one of those weeks I will be creating the backgrounds, whilst Jayce animates and hands his scenes to Jack to add any inbetween animation and to clean them up. In the second week I will then join Jack and be an inbetween animator, and may also animate myself any small shots which haven't been done. This will be the case for the whole of that week. Then into the final week, we will be hopefully finalizing animations and getting work together so we're all organised for Wednesday and Thursday. Ideally I would like all animation to be finished by Tuesday, but if it has to run over to Wednesday that isn't too big a deal. The reason why is because I want two days spare for us to edit the film and create the final render. As well as this, we will collect up all our work over the past few months (including all pre work) and put them onto discs. I know from experience that leaving work to be put together on the day of the hand-in is a very bad thing to do! Which is why I want everything finished by Thursday night. 

I think this is a good schedule and hopefully it's easy to understand. I've think I've set just about the right time for the work for everybody. I'm hoping we can get maybe a couple more people on board, and I'm slightly worried about who will be Colour Artist. I think for the hand-in on the 25th one of us will do the colouring, especially as we're not going to do any shading. But I think after that we will need someone to specifically do that.