Extended Practice: Belated Weekly Blogpost

I realise that I am a couple weeks late for this blogpost, but a chunk of this time was used on work experience.

Managing my Time

I am now heavily into my animation production and feel like even though I am behind on schedule, now I have fully learnt the animation software, understand the character designs I'm working with, understand the background aesthetics I'm working with, the process is now beginning to snowball. Furthermore, the third shot I animated took a week to animate due to the fact it featured both characters on screen, interacting with the background designs, and approaching the camera. All these aspects make for a complicated shot and made this by far the most complicated shot I have animated yet and one of the most complicated shots I will probably animate in this project. I did not give myself enough time for this shot.

Okay, so looking at my schedule (dark green highlights the tasks I've completed) I am a few weeks behind. But if there's one thing that's encouraging from looking at this schedule is that if I complete all of Week Two's shots then the next weeks shots in comparison look pretty easy to me to get finished.

Most of the above shots that need to be animated contain limited to no movement whatsoever which means I maybe able to complete a week's task in only a few days which will mean I can begin to catch up with my gantt chart.

Reflecting on the shots I have been animating

With the understanding of the amount (or increasingly lack thereof) of time I have to complete all my shots, I have begun to gradually alter my work ethic. Up till recently I was animating everything completely chronologically and while I am admittedly still  doing this, how I've gone about it has changed. Before hand I would take a scene from my storyboard, animate the roughs, then animate the neats, then colour the neats, then draw and colour the background before compiling that one scene together and placing it in the animatic.

Although this is a way I like to work so I can stay completely organised and not lose track. Admittedly it was proving to not be time efficient. I have begun now almost subconsciously to do multiples of a similar task. For example, just the other day I finished the roughs for one scene but instead of scanning those frames and working on neats I decided to get the roughs for the next couple of frames out the way so I could scan them altogether, saving time. Furthermore, instead of just working on one background today, I worked on five.

It's interesting animating shots once you've animated quite a few in a scene. I'm finding that the more shots I complete for Scene 3 in which is set in the cop's living room, the more rules I need to follow. There are multiple different angles of shots in the scene and I found today that I broke the 180 degree rule. 

So I wouldn't break it again I drew the above diagram of where exactly I can point the camera, and I also needed to flip horizontally one set of roughs so the daughter is looking a different direction.