HOWDY DOODY How the fuck is it Friday (Saturday) again. This week has been all about problem solving. As we rocket to our hopeful December
HOWDY DOODY
How the fuck is it Friday (Saturday) again.
This week has been all about problem solving. As we rocket to our hopeful December deadline, more and more we start to have to think creatively to bring a project like this to fruition. Whether that means trying to distribute the art leads duties among more people, or cutting whole shots that maybe aren't 100% necessary to the story or just plain old fashioned working ourselves even faster to death (at least with the last one, we could milk it for more views).
In the chaos however comes opportunity! Nothing will foster innovation and new practices like an impending doom deadline. For example, usually on each animation shot we give a couple rounds of feedback per every stage. However due to time limitations we are doing ONE round of notes per stage AND we're skipping 2 stages.
The notes might look something like this (this is a fairly small amount of notes, some have less, some have like 15):
Despite the much reduced level of note-giving, due to the trust in our team and leads that we've been building throughout the course of this year we are smashing through the shots in record speed. It's still going to be touchy but animation currently is in a great place.
Another lesson we learned from Space King 1 was trying to build out better standardized settings for people to use to give consistency across the project. For example, its one thing to hand people a reference and say "match this", it's much better to have ONE person figure it all out with their gigabrain and make handy little settings and plugins to just do it all at once.
For example, check out these comp tests. The lead artist is setting these core looks so when their underlings come in to make the shots look pretty, all they have to do is paste the settings and decide the angle of light! Pretty cool right?
One of the most fun things about getting to this sort of project endgame is stuff starts flooding in fast. So allow me to give you a smattering of fun and finished backgrounds!
And for good measure check out this sick FX of a mass of bugs crawling World War Z style along a bridge!
I don't know if you guys geek out about shit like that as much as me but that's a really tough effect to pull off.
Unfortunately for this week we'll have to keep the update brief! As you can tell we're in crunch mode and every minute counts.
We'll see you next week where we'll have a much clearer view of just how close to hitting the deadline we are. This episode is gonna rock your balls off. Get ready. Praise be.