Saturday, 25 May 2013

Tracking Documentaion

Remember when I did my pre porduction plan, laying out my plans for design, data management and file naming? Yeah me neither, well now it's time to look back and see how well I kept to that plan.



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.
 



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