This entire project was a great experience giving both good and bad experiences.
From the get go, our group was risk based. We all had the determination to do a project we were passionate about which for our personal benefit was a 2D project pitch with somewhat similar story ideas. The risk factor was the fact that we were all good friends.
Now being good friends doesn’t necessarily mean that we won’t all work well together, it just opens up the risk factor of falling out with one another if something goes wrong or being lack luster with time keeping or…etc and personally one of few risk factors did come into play. It wasn’t a fatal blow to the project but it did damage the time keeping and the quality of the work we started out with. For me, one of those problems was lack luster with managing consistency and time keeping.
There wasn’t a leader for this project but I found myself becoming the leader of the project and I’d say this was mainly due to the fact that the synoptic idea we all agreed to do was a story I had came up with, so it only made sense that I would have the main say in how this project would go. This was a slight problem for me because I haven’t always been comfortable in taking the lead in things due to my conscientiousness of being too dominant and not allowing room for change if it’s even slightly different to how I originally intend or not knowing what to do at all with the combination of my passive nature, causing the project to fall as a result of indecisiveness.
I’d say I’m the type of person that will take a task given to me and get on with it on my own accord. That being said, as mentioned in my pre-production post, I assigned tasks to everyone including myself and got on with it. I found from this project that taking on a leading role shifts how the communication goes because everyone has one person to answer to instead of each other; that or we all just lack communication skills.
In outcome of us all as a group not communicating well between each of our departments, we went into the pre-production phase with, inconsistent work as if we weren’t in a group at all and were just assigned similar tasks like it was dragons den; inconsistent in quality and quantity between us all not to mention this was the same time period one of our members was on scheduled educational trip. So as expected, the pre-production presentation was a kick in the balls to all of us- but, it was a needed kick in the balls because it told us all in that sitting how real this is and how much worse it could’ve gone in the acutal industry. Presenting something like we did the way it was then would have started in a boot instead of ending in one.
After that meeting, we as a group had time to ourselves to really discuss how we were going to fix this mess, because there was no turning back at this point and I for one was not willing to fail. This essentially was our first ever scrum meeting. We created a shared drive so that all of our work could be evident, picked up our communication skills to further than just a group chat, and fixed up what we had created. From then on out, I made consistent checks on each member of the group to make sure their work was up to date and consistent, as a leader should, the other members made sure to ask of each other and myself for the assets they needed in order to complete their tasks, and everyone made sure they were on time with their things which, in a way, lessened my role as a leader since everyone eventually became teamwork-friendly self reliant which i did not and do not consider a problem; after all this did come in handy later on in the project, however this was more of a waterfall workflow.
What would have been better would be to have worked in a agile workflow.
How this would work in our project would be, from the production phase, create a project within two weeks being a rough or beta if you will and then come back to it and work on it within the same time period to better the product until it is perfect. This allows us to have a complete product as early as possible, which definitely would have helped in the presentations, and essentially gives us time to later perfect the animation as time goes on. What it cuts out is having a waterfall workflow and having any of us rely on one another to get something done just so we can get started on another task. It also rules out the role of there being a leader, which definitely cuts the pressure it puts on one person.
Next time I do a group project, I will definitely take this approach to ease things that were unnecessarily stressful.
After our fix up from the pre-production phase, which had a slight change in story to best fit our time, it was time to get down to the real thing. From doing a bit of research, we all agreed to animate with a “fun” and free software known as OpenToonz. Observing how well each of us did when making the animatic (three of us due to one being on a trip), I thought it’d be best to have myself and one other of the members handle the animation side of things in OpenToonz and the other two handle the other requirements to this animation. One of those two members took it upon himself to learn how to animate in OpenToonz should we need him after running into any difficulties which I would say makes him a reliable team member to our group; I would say he should exercise that trait in the industry in the future including myself.
My other animating team mate remade the animatic with the shortened story in mind and separated it into four scenes several shots in each (up to 8 per scene), we split the scenes between us both, leaving me to animate the first and the fourth scene and him to animate the second and third scene. The other two we assigned to do backgrounds that we would require later, simple tasks at that which gave them enough room for quality.
This point is where the problems started.
At that point in time, I had only just learnt how to rig in OpenToonz and likewise for the other two members, however, I was still learning on the go. I ran into problems such as OpenToonz not saving levels that had vectors everytime I opened up a scene, not being able to save in external project folders, having to rearrange the level order every time I opened a folder, so on so forth…
To briefly explain how I go around those problems, since they were all similar and simple fixes. In order to get around missing vector levels, or any at that, you must first save and name every vector level you have and that includes changes to the levels you make, you must also remember to save the scene as well and that should prevent any losses to levels on a scene however there is a primal step to this prevention depending on where you animate.
In order to get around the external project folder denial problem, the first thing you do before even starting a scene is, on start up, go straight to preferences, select a custom location and locate and select where you wanna root your project folder; Just to mention, every so often the computers would crash so I would checkbox auto save and set it to every 10 minutes at this point too. After that is selected, remember to close down OpenToonz as none of this goes into effect until the next time you open OpenToonz.
I didn’t find out these fixes till late after the production phase sadly, so as you can imagine, the actual animation didn’t start till late; this information was relayed to the others once I actually figured it out. I was actually stuck on creating the character model angles for a long while for each of the characters and again, because I didn’t figure out a fix to the problems I had till late, saying that this was time consuming is an understatement, come to find that there was a different pathway that we could’ve taken from the very get go which was to only rig the parts that move and draw the rest, an idea suggested by a friend outside of our group; a great idea at that because vector layers have consistent quality no matter who draws in them, which doesn’t differentiate the skill level between us all. As great as it would’ve been to know this sooner, we wouldn’t have known at all if we hadn’t done what we did in the first place. These events took place just before half term so we had time to recollect ourselves and get cracking again.
A good point about this time period is, the other animating member had figured out how to tween levels and we had both gotten better at OpenToonz.
A bad point is the same member who was absent previously had started to be more absent in our group. Some explained and validated and some not. It was also at this point in time where we would three-man team the project whenever our fourth member wasn’t here.
Over the course of doing this project, with the situations we as a group came to face, I think this further developed our team working skills as a whole. It showed us how reliant we were on one another to get things done, such as splitting up work between us to get things done in time, keeping the flow of our work and also easing stress off of one another and considering that this project caused us all a lot of stress from learning new software on the go and constantly running into problems, it sure did help.
I can confidently say that it has prepared me as a team member for what I could be up against in the actual industry, and from experience from the group project and knowing how the professionals deal with situation from research and questions. I’m looking forward to being in a team in the industry.
Over all, I enjoyed this project and it taught me a lot and I think everyone who plans to get into the creative media industry should do something like this.
I would count our project as a whole a success from how well the parts turned out after all the hard work we did; Sure the parts weren’t all together due to time but a project well done.
NESCOT NEXGEN Course Blog (Andrew) 