Blog Post 1 - Planning and Scheduling

The Beginning of The End

A table of my sorting methods for tasks in the schedule.

I am honestly surprised we’re already here at this point. It seemed like just last year I was trying to get into the CU Denver animation major, and now we’re starting our thesis films?? Crazy. I was actually pretty worried when we got started last week because I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to organize ourselves properly. I mean, I love doing that type of stuff, but I didn’t want to take that role over if someone else also wanted to do it or help with it, you know?? But I did end up being the only one who wanted to do the scheduling and the general organizational document keeping, so that helped a bit.

All things considered, this has actually gone fairly well so far!!! Last Friday, we all met and hashed out the plan and parameters for the story, courtesy of Rianne. It helped me figure out what in general we are going for, so that I could start to put together the schedule. I made an availablity sheet that gave me the time everyone had to work on each day, and what days they needed/wanted off, and I also had them tell me generally what they’d prefer to do, what they are willing to help with, and what, under no circumstances, they didn’t want to touch. It turns out we have people who are happy in every step of the pipeline, which is great, because we’re not all stacked into one spot!!! So everyone gets things to do relatively equally.

I made the templates for the schedule, asset list, and the shot list over the weekend. Then on Monday we started filling out the asset list, and I got going on filling in the schedule as best I could. Of course, due to my other classes and other homework, I didn’t get very far on that until Wednesday, where I managed to hash out the first week of work for everyone, organizing it as evenly as I could and giving whoever wanted certain things to them without leaving anyone unhappy with what they were doing. Rianne has taken over story direction and director roles, which is great help because I don’t have to worry about checking the quality of anything in that sense. I just need to focus on the schedule, assets, and shots as they are, without checking the style, the script, or the storyboard, because Rianne is doing all of that. It’s nice.

I’m trying my best to pull my own weight without completely taking over the project. I struggle with being able to tell if I’m doing too much or too little so it’s definately something I have been worrying about quite a bit. I told everyone to tell me if I’m doing too much or if I’m not doing enough, and I hope they’ll listen and do so instead of just stewing in it until it boils over. I just hope I’m doing things right. . .I don’t want to hurt the group or drag it down because of issues that I have.

I’m hoping to get the schedule tentatively finished by Monday, with at least a month’s worth of tasks and planning done. If I get to that, I will be very happy. I also want to see the asset list filled with in progress models instead of concept art by Monday the 10th of February!!! That means we’ll be on track!! At least, that’s my hope. I know things always take longer than you think they will, because of issues like human error, inefficiency, life. Other life things, etc etc.

All in all though, I’m very proud of and very happy with my group!!!

What the asset list currently looks like.