This is a post of the progress of week one. So far things are not good in my opinion. I remember during pre production I said time and time again that I am concerned with project scopes and how people don’t realise that less is more. I even asked my lecturers about their thoughts on the fact that I have concern. One lecturer stated in week one of pre-production “don’t think about the scope in your project at this point because it can effect creative out comes”. I totally understand, yes don’t let concerns of scope let a quality film suffer. However now that we are in week one of production and we have those same lectures now telling us the project has too much to achieve the same lecturer said “I don’t understand why this happens every year students always make animatics which are too big for themselves” If it happens every year why don’t you improve preproduction to avoid it from happening year after year. I don’t currently feel confident in my lectures ability’s to manage a project. They are talented in their own fields modelling animation and whatever but they show very limited knowledge of management. I am taking a big risk in saying this in a blog which is to be assessed by them but I have to express my opinion.
This brings me to another point. They are also the cause of major procrastination in the project in my opinion. We had an animatic to finish which was due last semester but for some reason we spent one and a half hours talking about motion capture equipment which has not even been tested and talking about the technicalities of it when we still needed to finish the next draft animatic. We ended up having to do the animatic over the week end when we could have done it in a group during our class with communication not having to be digital over face book which takes more time.
Here is a great piece of advice I got from the former project manager of a hospital in Brisbane who was my teacher during cert 4 information technology during a project management class. He said ‘Murphy’s law’ if it can go wrong it will go wrong. So if motion captures doesn’t work have a back-up plan. It goes without saying motion capture is just a tool if it doesn’t work use 3d traditional animation instead. That should have been the end of the motion capture conversation. And we should have then got back to work and had a finished animatic by now. Instead there was major procrastination, and the group is no closer to their goal. Especially if the motion capture equipment had not been tested yet and we had more pressing matters like the need for the animatic.
There is also the issue of incentive. What I mean is if the film project fails the people who are affected are the student’s not the teachers. The teachers still get paid and still come back next semester. While if the film fails the students have to pay another 7000 thousand dollars and fail the course. If you’re thinking “but in the industry” well guess what this game proves my point ET on the Atari. If you watch this documentary you will understand that it is considered the worst game ever made because the staff had no incentive to do a good job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxXEidtxHk
The programmer for the game was paid a massive sum of money now matter how good the game was. Sorry to say the teachers are going to get paid no matter how good the film will be. This is why incentive is required in order to manage a project. What incentive do the teachers have to do a good film none and I don’t blame them there responsibility’s lie elsewhere. They are not here to do the job for us. But my point is they should not manage the project or even what is done in class time for example could have avoided wasting time about motion capture. It should be us who manages the daily roster so we don’t have procrastination.
Other than that I am now in the stage of creating the 2d animation scene I am up to the long hours of clean-up and in betweening and will post a breakdown of the scene.
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