Once I had been introduced to this project, I immediately began to offer ideas and suggestions. My goal was to look at this project as a whole and to see if I could forsee potential pitfalls down the road.

Long term thinking.

Having seen both good and bad examples in a production environment, I knew that those kinds of people who could forsee problems and solve them EARLY, made the better visual effects supervisors; and the show succeeded or failed because of that.

I wanted practice at this.

So I looked over the project and saw  a few things and made several suggestions.

• Project length
• Shot pre-vis
• Lighting/Time of day
  

Project length

At first, the project was supposed to have 3 shots. Based on the numerous shots in the reference video, and the fact that we are essentially making a still scene, I thought it would take minimal effort to add one or two more shots to our sequence in order to show off more of what we had. It would also give us more to tell in our story. This would be even easier if we used locked off shots; thus eliminating any tracking.

Shot pre-vis

Previs for this project was in a rough form. Great start, but we needed more to work with. I also knew, based on experience, that you did not want to be out there on the day of your shoot deciding where to shoot your scenes. This would be a huge waste of time that day while leaving more time between shots for the sky and lighting conditions to change drastically.

We needed to have this setup asap. So I pushed to get this taken care of as early as possible.

Several days later we went out and spent several hours on location with the DVX100 and picking out spots to shoot. We went back that weekend and Brendan cut together a better previs reel out of that.

I think that the effort we put into doing that paid off in the long run as it helped us to narrow down exactly what we wanted to do.

We had to wait 2 weeks to shoot our footage. We had Jaimie volunteer to film for us, and he had access to equipment we couldnt get ourselves. I had known him from another class, so it was great to work with him again.

Lighting/Time of day

Another thing that I didnt really think was attractive was the idea of having our shot be in mid day. From a lighting prespective, its really a boring time to shoot. So I pressed for a magic hour type of setting, and we agreed at very early morning to shoot.

------------------------------

References

I went through one day and found several possible references to our project. Having a military background, I was able to look for images that I figure would represent what we were trying to achieve.










------------------------------

Depth of Field Test

One of the first tasks I was assigned was to do a depth of field test. We had decided to shoot everything so that it would be in focus, so when we put our CG characters and vehicles in, we had a shot that was in focus, and that we could control ANY focus we wanted in post.

So I did a test to see if this was a viable option. I created a scene with proxy geometry and rendered a zdepth pass, and ran it through shake. The result was exactly what we predicted and was enough to make everyone happy with the concept of post focus effects.





This is extremely crude, but it does work.


----------------

Asset creation

Some other work I did during this time was to model and texture a few background assets. Some barricades that we will have located strategically in our scene.








Shooting

Brendan was unable to come to our shoot, and so I made it a point to take charge and make sure that we had everything we needed for it. I setup a meeting a few days before te shoot so we could all meet Jaimie and coordinate our schedules for that saturday. Because we were filming at 7am, we had to check out the equipment on the day before. One set of gear was picked up at 5 and another set at 7. Bryan had a truck that we needed to get the dolly track.

We got all the gear on saturday and everyone helped out where needed. We did the same for the next morning. We were due to meet at 7am and start shooting right away.

Everyone arrived ontime. We unloaded the equipment in minutes. The weather was great. (A benefit from shooting so early) And we shot our stuff. The clouds posed some problems. We had to work fast and get things done when it was cloudy, while also making sure no cars were coming down the road into our shot.

We did go through 5 batteries within our 2 hour shoot.. with the last batery dieing on us at the end. Any fewer batteries and we would have not gotten all we needed.

Overall the shoot went extremely well. We knew exactly where to shoot and what we wanted to get. So it was a simple matter of setting up the camera, taking the shots a few times and setting up a reference shot. Everyone helped out and there were no real issues.

We did have to stay an hour after everyone else left to turn in the equipment for the Jen Library to open so we could get our final shot on a still camera. But by then the clouds has disapeared and we had no choice but to get a sun light scene.

This shot will have to be redone.

But we do have an earlier shot we took, the previs copy that we may use after all...



--------

This is a brief intro to the second project that I am working on. The first of course being 2012, the project with Brendan, Bryan and Paul. Their news and this page has the bulk of the information for that project.

Captain -

Animation grad student Neil Helm has been working on this as his grad thesis. I was introduced to the project back in the fall quarter and was instantly hooked. What I liked best, was that Neil can animate. He didnt have a project typical of students around here. His work was great. So I came on as a lighter.



So here is an intro to what we have. This is the animatic we have so far with some of the rendered work cut in. Not finalized of course.



And here is some of our references, the look we are going for and color pallete.






I spent the last part of fall quarter setting up the lighting rig for the environment and the character.

We have several people now working on this project. (Many more  were on this project earlier)

Neil Helm - project creator and animator
Monica Cappiello - matte painter, lighter
Katie Green - lighter, textures
Jesse Weglein - lighter
Jordan Rempel - lighter
Brandon Martin - lighter

----

The plan

The first week of class was a bit hectic, with two projects forming and the job fair around the corner. I tracked down Neil and got an overview of whats been going on since I had left in the fall. Neil was still animating but almost complete. He explained to me that what he needs is simply playblasts of the animation in order to get a job. Final renderings would be nice, but not needed for what he was doing.

So I offered to get back onto this project and 'get things done'. We had hoped to get this done in the fall, but that obviously didnt happen, and then oped to get it done during fall, but that still didnt happen.

So my task was this. "Finish it once and for all"

So my first goal was to take a look at the project and spead with the group to see where we stood. Katie and Neil were the two people actively working at this time. So we took a look.

• Animation was done on slightly more that half of the 1 shots. Well on its way.
• Assets were almost entirely finished.
  
• Textures were almost finished.
• Camera moves were going to be changed slightly
  
• The bird at the end was going to be redone and finalized.

We were well on our way. I wanted to spend a week or two getting the pipeline laid out so that when we brought on more people, they could hit the ground running.

Week 2 - The second week of classes I spoke to one of Prof. Gaynors classes and gave a quick spiel of the project and told them I was looking for lighters. I got half of the class on a list as potential lighters. A lot of them seemed fairly interested.

During the remainder of this week, of the job fair, I had two students take the initiative and go out of their way to track me down - wanting to get on this project. This to me shows that they really wanted in. I only needed 2-3 people, so this fit in.

Week 3 - Neil also had a few students who wanted in on the project. One was jesse Weglein and the other Rose Ibiama. We setup a meeting that friday.

This was the first meeting with all of our new talent and so we showed off the project for about an hour. Everyone was interested. Jordan stood out the most and had a lot of ideas to offer towards lighting. While this was not my intention, I had to adapt to this new found source of ideas. So at the meeting, I decided to spend this next week as a test and intro week. Jordan would take one of the scene I rendered previously (shot3) and redo the lighting in order to get the same effect, but make it more effecient without the use of final gather. He would also test the following:

• scene optimization
  
• light bloom
• depth of field passes
• hangar environment fog effect
• non maya motion blur

Brandan and Rose would take the week to dive into the project folders and start getting used to our complex project. Neil has outstanding organization, but the project itself is rather large. So new people need a few days to get used to our structure.

Before the meeting ended, we assigned shots to everyone based off what was currently finished being animated. They are as follows:

• Shot 1 and 2 - Katie (lighting)
  
• Shot 3 - Jordan (used for testing)(lighting)
• Shot 4 - Rose (lighting)
• Shot 5 - Jordan (lighting)
• Shot 6 - Jordan (lighting)
• Shot 7 - Jesse Weglin (lighting)
• Shot 8 - Brandon (lighting)
• Shot 9 - Myself (lighting)
• Shot 10 - Myself (lighting)
• Shot 11 - Myself (lighting)
• Shot 12-17 - Neil (animation)

During the week. I checked in on Jordan and Brandon. Jordan was making excellent progress and was clearly going to be a valuable asset to the project. He had the light bloom and environment effect looking good and render times were less than 10 minutes. We still needed work getting the airplane to look brighter, so I tasked him with that. He also hadnt gotten to the motion blur yet.

Brandon was doing well, but having some trouble with the insane 5k texture used for the chalkboard. We resized it down to a more effecient 2k texture and he is now testing to make sure that doesnt crash maya.

I also stoped by to see neil once or twice, who was busy animating and getting the bird rig to look good.

Katie was starting work on the bird textures.

Shot 13 animation was finaled during this week.

Week 4 -

We met last saturday, (the 19th) to see where everyone was at, and to get people up to speed on what Jordan had done for us so we could all begin our shots.

He showed us his progress on everything and his light rig. He hadnt yet extracted it so it was its own asset, but I tasked him with that.

We setup a plan for this week. Katie was to do some texture work to the hangar building master file asap and get the runway textures into the same master file.

Jordan was to make his light rig available and a document to go with it explaining how it works.

Neil made a production plan for us to used. It has us spending 4 weeks on shots. 2 weeks for each of us to do a shot. Leaving the last 2 weeks of the quarter available for sound and editing.

Our primary goal is to complete rendering before finals hit. This is key to project success and absolutely critical.

So, we all left the meeting with the task of getting the first pass of our shots done this week for our meeting on friday.

And thats about where we stand right now on ths project.

Came in and Brendan's group project was shown to me and I offered to help out.

My goal for Studio 2 is to work on my skills as a pseudo-visual effects supervisor. I say that because both projects I am working on are not my own, I have been asked by each to help out, not to take over. Its a fine line to walk.

So, contrary to what i typically do in a group setting, I am offering my advice, leadership and creative input into getting these projects to be done the best way the can be. And of course, being a lighter, there isnt much work for me to do until the assets are created and its time to light and comp the shots anyways.

What I noticed in the production environment at DD was just how critical and potentially catastrophic group management and implimentation of ideas can be towards a project. A simple solution, poorly planed, can waste days or weeks of time - only needing to be fixed in the end which causes more problems.

This supervisory type role is something I have little experience at and that is why this is my focus for studio 2 - to help get these projects done.

This crash course in taking a more active role will certainly help me in the long run when I go back to a production environment and can relate back to these successes or fails in order to learn from my mistakes.