Production Management Plan
Tracking Documentation.
Design
There are two
different worlds that my characters inhabit one is a grey drab bedroom in a
high rise apartment and the other is a bright and colourful medieval fantasy
world. To differentiate between the two worlds there will be drastic visual
differences in both colour and animation style, the fantasy world is designed
to look like a combination of shadow puppets and pop-up books, looking simple
and childlike as if it was drawn by her.
I have kept to this visual design with some changes, I have
toned down the use of shadow puppets and pop-up book designs.
The choice to use
Photoshop for the animation of the real world is because it allows me to
achieve a natural hand drawn effect. The choice for Photoshop is that it will
play to my strengths helping to ensure a swifter and hassle-free production.
I have kept to this plan.
The choice to use
Photoshop and After Effects to animate the fantasy world is to create a look of
similar to shadow puppets with backgrounds and the transitions looking like a
pop-up book. After Effects allows me to create a 2.5D effect.
As I said before I have toned down the concept of pop-up
books for both the backgrounds and transitions. I will continue to use a 2.5D
effect with After Effects.
Character designs and
animations
·
Real World
Character Design
1. The girl, the teddy bear and her brother
will be built and animated in 2D using Photoshop.
·
Fantasy
World Character Design
1. The girl, her bear and the monster they
confront will be built in Photoshop and animated in After Effects using the
puppet tool or a better equivalent.
Backgrounds
·
Fantasy
World
1. The fantasy world background will be created
in Photoshop and later comped into 3D layers in After Effects.
·
Real World
1. The real world environment will be created
in Photoshop and later comped into 3D layers in After Effects.
Transition Animation
§
The
transition between the fantasy world and the real world will be animated in
After Effects but built in Photoshop using the background and animation builds.
Character designs plans have not changed but once again the
transition effects have been removed to help blend more smoothly between
worlds.
Soundtrack
The music for my animation will be
out-sourced to Matt Serpel as like last year. This year I will work with Matt
earlier on during the pre production phase so that he doesn’t have to rush my
entire animation soundtrack last minute. I intend to keep him up to date with
scripts, character designs, storyboards and any material that inspires me.
I have yet
to contact Matt Serpel about doing the music for the animation. This is
something I must do soon to give him as much time as possible to work on it. If
Matt is unable to do it I need time to search for another musician.
Data Management
With the majority of
my animation and assets being digital my data management will be entirely on
folders across several hard drives. My
files will be distributed into folders:
·
Photoshop
files
o
Fantasy
World
§
Pre
production
·
Concept
art
o
Characters
o
Backgrounds
·
Character
build
·
Pencil
tests
§
Production
·
Backgrounds
o
Real World
§
Pre
production
·
Concept
art
o
Characters
o
Backgrounds
·
Character
art
§
Production
·
Animation
·
Backgrounds
·
After
Effects comps
o
Fantasy
World
o
Real World
o
Transitions
·
Audio
o
Sound Effects
o
Score
·
Story
o
Script
o
Thumbnails
o
Storyboard
o
Video
Block
o
Animatic
The file extension I
intend to use for the pencil tests, coloured and final comped animations will
be:
·
fallenheroes_penciltest_SC01_SH01
·
fallenheroes_coloured_SC01_SH01
·
fallenheroes
_SC01_SH01
I have been terrible with file management so far everything
is clumped into one folder that covers all my subjects. I have also been bad
with file naming which has caused me to having trouble remembering what the
name of a file is. This of course is making it hard to find files; I cannot
afford to do this again next semester.
Potential Disasters
There are plenty of
thing that can go wrong during production, most of these problems can be
resolved through better time management but the two greatest issues that I will
most likely face will be file and equipment failure or loss.
·
To prevent
the loss of files or file corruption I will have my files on three hard drives.
I will work mostly from my 64GB USB stick. At the end of every week on Friday
I’ll backup my files to a 360GB hard drive, my laptop computer and my desktop
PC. The folder on my desktop PC will connected to a Dropbox account. To help ensure that I actually go through with
this plan I will have a reminder to pop up on my desktop PC every Friday
evening at 8:00pm.
·
The use of
multiple file storage devices will help should one of the hard drives is
broken, lost or stolen. Most of my work will be done on a desktop PC should
that fail I have a laptop as a backup that has the same programs so that I can
continue work until the desktop gets fixed. This process should also cover me
should my computer ever get stolen.
I have also been a bit slack with my backup plans. I have
purchased more space on Dropbox and have been uploading my files onto it but
not as often as I should. I have not implemented my reminder plan yet. I also
haven’t backed up onto my hardrives.
So I guess it was a 50/50 adherence to the plan. I kept to my plan for the visual look and feel for the animation as well as the process I intend to create it but I have been very slack when it comes to managing the files.
