It is the 12 to 18 June 2016 and off we go. Pointy is very talkative today.

At the last blog I had 55 shots covered in layout. As of right now I’ve got 64 shots covered and 14 more shots to go. Five of those are titles of one sort or another, and nine are narrative shots. Five of the narrative shots use a camera framing that I’ve already established, and after that there’s four shots with framings that I’ve yet to set up.

Let’s talk production management for a bit.

How do I choose which shot to work on next, given that not all of my days have an equal amount of time?

Here’s the shot list for scene 1 as of today. Completed shots are buttery yellow. Shots which already have a complete camera setup in another shot (e.g. all the 01_03 shots) are white. Shots with no camera setup are coloured anything but yellow or white.

Note the one row second from the right with single letters in it. y means “shot’s done”, e means “easy”, t means “tricky”, h means “hard”. (That should really be two rows.)

For weekday evenings after the day job (Mon-Fri), I tend to tackle e shots
where the camera and assets are already in place. On Sundays and public holidays, I tend to do new camera setups or tackle tricky/hard shots. The idea is to create as many easy shots as possible for the coming week so that I can maintain some kind of momentum even when on days when my time and energy are limited.

For example, dialogue shots and simple reaction shots are best left for weekdays. Camera moves, complicated animation, character interaction, sims and anything else with the potential to be a runaway timesink is better left for days when I have the time and energy to stick with it.

For instance, last Sunday I was using particles to roughly simulate flying dirt. You can key a texture that controls Density with a cyclic F-Curve which makes particles emit in discrete puffs instead of flowing at a constant rate.

But in the actual animation file where Gronky’s digging, I could only manage a stream of dirt. What worked in the test file didn’t work where I needed it to. Since it’s only layout, I postponed any final solution to when it’s time to do it for real. It was definitely a timesink. And hence, something better attempted on a weekend where I have time to sink.

So why not stick with the particles and fix them? Again, it’s a question of setting priorities and maintaining momentum.

During this first pass, it’s OK if shots are less than perfect – if sims malfunction, if the action is underpolished, etc. It’s more important right now to get coverage in layout rather than slowing down to nail any given shot on the first try. That means embracing the reality that anything could be redone – even a really nice shot might not work in the edit. Nothing has to be perfect yet. It just needs to be there at all.

Even though I’m only creating one tree at a time, the forest has to look nice too.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you again next week. 🙂