Shoulda done this ages ago whoopsie daisy! Better do it now before I forget anything else!
My shot is the 3rd one, with the focus on the twisted tree, which followed the passage I chose in the previous shot deconstruction blog.
Critical reflection on performance
While I’m really happy with the final result, our team had our fair share of issues along the way! The first big hurdle was that we struggled as a team to decide on a story to base our project around. This was mainly caused by clashing ideas of what each of us want to achieve and personal taste, though after searching for more stories, coming forward with what we each wanted out of the story and voting we came to the decision of Ex Oblivione, which I feel was a story very well suited to the brief. Solution: while I think it was important that we discussed and took our time coming to the right decision, we may have been able to save time by spending less time lingering on ideas that the majority of us weren’t satisfied with, and instead move straight along to the next or a new idea until we came across one that we all like the sound of.
We also had a slight shift in direction after receiving Craig’s feedback because we hadn’t considered certain things and our shots didn’t tie together as well as they should have. We altered our colour scheme and clarified the mood of our project to help unify in more, but we didn’t incorporate our shots in with each other when we really should have. Solution: Have an unreal scene straight from the start, blocked out, that we all progressively add our completed models to, instead of being left with the daunting task at the end of trying to combine all our different scenes. This also would have helped with ensuring our whole project remained unified in style and lighting.
Personally, I had a lot technical issues, first being with the Kite Demo assets that we decided to use to help help keep our scenes uniform, where either they weren’t displaying their textures or they were causing performance issues. As a work around solution I decided to just use the assets I had made, which kind of made my shot stick out from the rest in terms of quality but I was happy that I could say I made everything in the scene. My second technical hurdle was my PC’s hard drive giving out, which Was Not Fun, and I should have been more aware of the warning signs. Luckily because I was bringing my scene in to work at school so often I had a very recent copy of it on the drive, and finished it at school, solving that problem for the project, atleast. Lastly UE4’s sequencer was causing me issues, but after Steve kindly helped us I was able to sort it out and get my shot rendered out.
Creative work and processes used
We went through a number of creative processes during this project, namely concepting, project planning, 3D asset production and post production. For the most part these went well, though I feel everyone should have been more involved in the project planning part and we could have gone more in depth, as most of the documentation we had went unused or deviated from. I think if everyone was more familiar with the documentation through collaborating on it, it would have been more useful and helpful to us.
Personally I think need to improve my skills in Unreal as I feel the final shot of my scene could have much more polished if I had a better understanding and more control in the engine. Most of what I achieved was through trial and error and it was a really slow process, and I think if I researched more about it I would have been more efficient and ended up with a nicer looking final product.
Roles in the animation production process
In terms of key performance indicators, I feel like I did a satisfactory job overall. I think I did enough in the areas of work ethic and time management to end up with a good quality end product but definitely feel I could have put more in to them to have ended up with a better polished product overall. I think I handled communication skills, attitude and acting as a team player rather well, as there wasn’t many huge roadblocks we had due to communication or other interpersonal issues, and any we did have I made sure to work through by talking it out. For problem solving, flexibility and working under pressure, even though I had my fair share of significant issues I was able to solve them or work around them despite working on a limited timeline, so I feel I did that quite well also. In terms of accepting and learning from criticism, I think I was able to apply some of the feedback we received successfully but should have tried harder and pushed for taking aboard more suggestions we received as I think it really could have helped our project.
For strategies to improve my performance in each of these indicators, next time I would definitely set up a grey box scene in unreal or similar gradual additive process for the project so I would have had to spend less time on sorting out all the objects at the end of the timeline, and instead have more time allotted to polishing. I could have also benefited from a stricter schedule so I could have gotten more assets done in the first place, which would have also helped with creating a more finished looking final product. As for the communication and interpersonal indicators, I could make more of an effort letting the team know where my progress is at and also make my assets more readily available for them to use if they need to, instead of just posting them when I’m done without notifying anyone. I feel researching more in the first place would have helped me with problem solving and flexibility, as I would have a more knowledgeable basis to troubleshoot on and it may have helped remove a lot of the pressure that came from these issues. I think a good way to ensure I follow criticism I receive is to alter whatever documentation I’m following to appropriately reflect the change I want to make to the project, to make it more ‘official’ and accessible. Having meeting to discuss the changes and make sure everyone’s on the same page would be very helpful too.
CAYEL 