It's that time to write something about mimes task.
Here we go!
Story
I can't count how many times we changed our ideas. And it is amazing, right? How we developed, changed minor parts because this and that. I absolutely loved Siobhan's idea about mime monster instead of mime being late. Then, RRR! came to conclusion that making mime death fest is an awesome idea and should totally develop that.
Then, some minor changes like in disarming bomb, mime #2 stopping half way or mime #3 dying inside the box.
All this little things made our story much more interesting and which is more important - CLEAR.
Two days ago I showed finished piece to all my friends. No body questioned what mimes are doing and why they get injured.
We're awesome!
My contribution
I really don't like this part, because we're a team and everybody did a hard job but... but..
From the beginning:
I was that 'Maya expert' in our team. Teaching how Maya can destroy your life is fun!
Also, Rachel R helped the other Rachel faster than I did! Aaand, British Rachel became friends with Maya so fast that my tutor job was really little. Good for all of us!
I've made Gantt chart with all milestones and weekly meetings. As I planned, I started rendering a week before the deadline just to have some more time for final touches. And guess what? I was right!
To make our team more awesome I did a poster with catchy phrase 'They're dying to get that job'. I still love it :-). Of course it was not required by our team, but I had some free time to do it.
Then, I've created really simple theatre stage (and later Rachel R changed it colours) with lighting and render settings.
Every combined version you saw was sacrificed with my tears and swears. Every time I've imported other mimes, handled multiple Maya crashes, playblasted 4 gig files and edited it in Premiere. Worth it!
Then, the hardest part. Rendering.
To show my suffering I present how my 3x14 hour marathon looked like:
1. Combining three Maya files into one long animation
2. Checking cameras, safe playblasts etc.
3. Changing texture paths to render space due to rendering in Qube
4. Rendering on render farm!
5. Rendering failed frames again
6. Checking failed frames again and again
7. Copying frames from render space to local computer. Our network is SO slow that editing it from render space was pain
8. Baking frames into H.264 file. Working on 20 gigs of frames on our machines was even more painful
9. Editing movie, postproduction - fun part
10. Rendering finished film
And I had to go through that process three times. Gah!
But still.. Totally worth it!
My animation
To be honest I didn't like it AT ALL until we added director and sound effects. It was.. umm.. bland. That's the right word. When the other's stories were hm.. fun (?) my was.. I don't know. I didn't enjoyed it like the other projects.
But.. suddenly.. We've added all these sounds and.. I'm really happy with the results.
Of course if I had more time, I would work on every part and polish it until death. Defining the box could be more interesting (the animation would be longer, though) or there could be more interaction with the director.
There are some parts that I totally love like crawling, running, shaking or walking. I spent some time on polishing these moments and I'm happy with the results.
Team work
I think we're awesome.
Okay, we.. or.. I had a crisis with rushing with animation. Yeah, about that.
Why I work so fast? The answer is simple:
I worked in advertisement and post-production studio. We had maximum 7 days before the deadlines. So, we had to do really fast our work, which normally was for at least a month.
As I worked there for a year it is my habit working fast now.
Okay, I had also a bad workflow before (which worked perfectly for me when I was working alone), but I'm really happy that I switched to traditional one now.
Continuing about the team work.. we've met twice a week to discuss our ideas, sketches and animation.
On our Facebook group we kept informing each other how our latest version looks like. In that way everybody had a constant feedback and our animations were better and better. So, even when Rachel R went to France (business, not pleasure! - She studied mimes in their natural habitat) we had weekly meetings on Facebook chat.
I really wanted to learn how to work in a group and how I should adjust my workflow. Now I know! Other two R's! did awesome job. Thanks for a great time spent together.
Summary
It was really great to wok on some body physics. We've worked with professional voice artists and recorded our own sounds in a studio.
That gave experience, which I'm going to use in the final project.
About the final project - if I want to work in a group - now I know how!
Really nice module with great task ideas.
Again - learnt a lot. That's why we're all here for.
