Week 10
It feels like so much has happened in this last Sprint. We have made a lot of progress.
We went through several iterations of our storyboard and animatic over the last few weeks. I’m the Editor, Josie is our storyboard artist, and Jordan is our Sound Designer. We had a bit of a slow start, honestly, but have picked up the pace this past week. We met in person for the first time to work on the animatic together and I think that helped a lot, since we had so little communication over Spring Break. Being able to go back and forth, face to face, in real time, was extremely helpful in quickly iterating the video and ending up with something we finally felt was complete.
During the first two weeks of this sprint, we had made the following progress: Richard and Blaise had begun putting together the environment in Unreal Engine; we had our initial versions of our animatic with scratch audio; Michael was familiarizing himself with MetaHumans; Mahsa was planning matte paintings.
Like I mentioned, Spring Break was slow, which brought production to a standstill. We ended up deciding to pause detailed work on any matte paintings until the animatic is finalized. Instead, Mahsa began work on the design for our screen divider. It turned out beautifully! I think Richard was the only one to do any real work over the break—he did a lot of water simulations that look pretty cool and are getting close to what we need for our animation.
We had our client presentation yesterday, on March 25th. I am very happy how it went. We had spent the two days leading up to it working hard on the animatic, presentation, and putting everything together for our client. It was the most efficient we had been as a team in some time and I would like to keep that momentum going. We received good feedback and are very close to locking preproduction.
We plan on meeting tomorrow and planning our next steps and choosing what feedback we wish to implement based on the scope of our project and our timeline. We also decided to meet more frequently in person, which should help with the timeliness of the feedback we give each other. Richard and I have reworked our scrum log process and I will be finishing up our production tracking document—hopefully we will only get better as a team from here.,
Photo credits to Professor Lim!