Extended Practice: Creating a Gantt Chart

One of my main criticisms is that I am not particularly good at organisation or time management, particularly in an animation project. I find myself becoming so invested in the work that I rarely stop to think about how I'm managing my time. For example, I'll often get carried away working on one particular shot, never leaving it alone till I'm certain it's perfect, even if the shot is small and not an integral part of the narrative and then the rest of the animation will suffer.

During my time on the course I became infamous for having spent two years of my life on a twenty second animation, admittedly most of that time was spent on hand shading every single frame but definitely taught me some important life lessons. Extended Practice is the last project I'll be working on at uni so it's essentially my last chance to prove that I can mange my time effectively on a project so I was given advice to create a gantt chart.

Every task that I need to complete is laid out here. Now looking at the chart, the amount of shots I need to physically animate are large in quantity if I'm thinking about how many I need to produce a week. However the lengthiness and complexity of each shot differ significantly. Some shots are complex and feature a lot of movement, others however contain minimal if no movement at all. The idea of which order to animate which shots in was thought about. 

An idea that was given to me was to animate the most complicated shots first so I get them out the way and then the less complicated shots last. I thought about this but decided against it since I felt that by working that way I would find the animation process an incredibly laborious task for a significant amount of time. I wanted to work chronologically because I felt like it would hep me understand how the flow of my narrative was developing ad how my characters were developing based on what came before. Furthermore it would mean that almost as a reward for taking a lot of time over a complicated shot I might then only have to animate a static shot immediately after. Annabeth recommended to me however that if I didn't want to work in the way of getting the complicated shots out the way first I should still break up my shots list into categories of 'very complicated', 'moderate' and 'simple shots' just so I can get an idea of how many shots, in particular, complicated shots I still had left to do so I could manage my time better.