Blog Nine - More Scheduling, and mega layout time!
This week definitely felt like the start of a push for finals, and boy am I feeling the heat! I tend to get anxious around finals, so I am really trying to channel that nervous energy into completing work! With that being said, this week was incredibly productive! We started with some precise allocation of shots to not only put ourselves on a pace for completion, but to also make sure that everyone got an even workload to work with, because we have a loooot of shots. Once we got that figured out, it was full steam ahead with the layout! For this week, I got assigned the scene in which David meets the gals for the first time in the magical world, which has been a lot of fun!
Scheduling Bonanza
The first order of business for the group this week was really making sure that each of us didn’t get screwed over when allocating scenes for the 3D animatic. I was pretty nervous about the amount of work we had to do, but after really crunching the numbers, it made things seem a lot easier! We started with our most updated and fleshed-out shot list, and divided that number of shots by eight. This gave us a total of 27 shots each, which we decided to divide throughout the duration of two weeks. With that, we had a week to complete 13 shots!
In order to make sure everyone had a chance to lay out at least some of the scenes they wanted, we didn’t follow any particular orders when assigning shots, but rather asked who wanted what part of each scene based on each person's wants and needs. This way, everyone had the scenes they wanted for the layout! I am a firm believer that people do better work when they have an interest in the task, and this is no exception!
Laying out my scene
The next big task I had for this week was laying out the shots I was allocated. Specifically, I was tasked with laying out David and the gals in their initial meetup in the magical world. Honestly, the biggest push was just getting everything scaled and referenced correctly!
Before putting everything together, we needed to make sure everything was scaled to real life. This started with making sure the gals were around 4’11 to 5’1 to be the size of real-world pre-teen girls. With that, they served as our “anchor” models, around which we could correctly scale the sets we made around them. This took longer than expected, and needed a lot of communication throughout the group, but I think we’re still in a good spot! Scaling things also made some of our files open much quicker, which was a great bonus.
After scaling everything correctly, the task was now to reference and lay everything out together. Luckily, our sets are already super pretty and put together, so all it took was simply getting all of the assets I needed together in one place! Once everything was put together, I then started the animation layout process with cameras.
I have a lot of knowledge on cameras, camera cuts, and camera movement, so this part was actually pretty relaxing for me! Most dialogue shots are pretty simple to lay out, and it's fun to take creative control when placing cameras to convey emotion, story, or an overall vibe. Placing those cameras really helped me pace out these scenes and really gave new life to the animatic scenes! I am especially excited to show off this POV shot from a sword careening towards David; it has a lot of movement and was a lot of fun to lay out!