ANIMATION COLLABORATING WITH OTHER ANIMATORS
My animation time was greatly hindered by the computer issues I had in the final
3rd of my project. I reminded myself that for the overall success of my project in
the future, the delays were necessary, however, this did significantly diminish my
morale and I found it hard to get back into the process of animation after this, as
the deadline became worryingly close. This resulted in my shortening the fight
scene so that I could still hit the same narrative beats and hopefully have it
finished for the degree show. I am first and foremost an animator, so no matter
how much I managed to animate, still wanted to produce good quality material
that I could be proud of. Animating for my project allowed me to work with a
more diverse range of character types and movement types, helping me gain more
experience in both character driven animation and locomotion. This was in part
due to the fact that I created the rigs from scratch, it gave me an in-depth
understanding of how the rig worked and what I needed to do to achieve a pose. With this aspect of the project, I really wanted to test my skill as a
producer and director.
As a director, I wanted ascertain if I had the skills to competently direct
another animator on what I wanted to get out of a scene. I think I
achieved this with my collaboration with Zuheb; I am satisfied with the
work he produced for my project. To help achieve a successful final
product, Zuheb and I had multiple meetings where we would both work
on Ghosted, I worked on my sections and he worked on his, this way I
was able to give immediate feedback on his work, and Zuheb was able to
match my style. I also created scenes that were fully referenced, with
render ready camera and character picker shelves so that both Zuheb
and Reece could get straight into animating
As a producer, I feel that my time management when it came to
animation collaboration, still needs a lot of work, I lacked the rigidity to
relay the importance of these deadlines to my colleagues. I often tried to
organise meetings with Reece that he did not turn up for, I think that
was because I did not fully emphasise the urgency of the situation.
Because of this lack of communication Reece, who did not have
experience using a file with references, did not realise that I had created
an animation-ready scene for him, this resulted in him double
referencing a scene and animation. This problem could have been
spotted earlier if he had attended the meetings, instead an error was not
noticed until the penultimate week and took 3 hours to fix. Luckily
because of how I set up my rigs, it was fairly straightforward
transferring his animation to the correct scene. But this delay could
have easily been avoided.
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