2 posts tagged “production journal”

Confidence is a dangerous thing to have, as someone who often lacks that all important sense of self worth, suddenly having a lot of it leads to believing you are capable in executing many complicated, difficult and often foolish endeavors.

Case in point, my thesis film.

I've been warned, since the very second I first stepped into the NYU CADA labs: "Be realistic with your goals, you will not have enough time to work on your thesis."

"Ha! That will never happen to me!" said confident me, "I have four years experience in 'The Industry"! I've completed a many spots, I've done so much work for (name drop here), I know what I'm doing! Now move aside and let me kick your ass!"

With confidence on my side, I spend the next 18 months telling everyone that I know what I'm doing, that my experience in broadcast design will allow me to complete any thing thrown at me, I'll be untouchable.

18 months later confident me realized a major flaw in my plan, this film is not a motion graphics project, this film is not produced, art directed or worked on by anyone else other than me. My Maya skills is rather week, my understanding in rendering is elementary.

My naive vision of confidence have led to one thing, I don't have enough time to do all the things I want to do in this film, I'm scaling back even further from the original idea, instead of kicking ass, now I'm getting my ass kicked into another compromise.

Well watch for my CG wireframe film about cubes moving around bigger cubes inside a even bigger cube.

Had our first thesis production meeting tonight, got what I'd say a heavy dose of reality check as to how much time I have to actually work on my project.

I've been relatively optimistic about the render times on this piece. I've known throughout previs that this project is going to be render intensive, and have consciously been taking notes on optimizing the models, textures and renders to tackle that. I thought that I'll be able to achieve the look I'm going for in final composite, overall that perception still holds true, but I'm starting to realize realistically how much I still have to do in CG in order to get to the point where I can work on the images effectively in composite.

I really have to take my head out of the photography/retouching mindset and think more in terms of actually generating imagery from scratch rather than working with a base image.

One of the first thing I'm going to do is to rework the piece by scaling down the scale of the space. I've mainly focused on wider and grand cityscape framing covering massive virtual areas, which just means the amount of buildings I'll need to create to fill the space increases exponentially. By changing the type of framing I'm working with, mainly by switching to a tighter lens and narrowing distances between objects, will significantly scale down the amount of models I'll have to build and reduce render times.

One of the benefits from this scaling down is that it also solves a lot of the problems I've been having with the virtual camera moves. Currently my camera have a very short time to travel a massive distance, where the camera ends up speeding pass objects that really requires more screen time. Also the speed of the camera feels unnatural and draws attention to the fact that the scene is CG more than it is necessary, the slower and more realistic camera moves should better facilitate the viewer's suspension of disbelieve.