ANC220 - Week 09

This week has been the longest week of term so far. I clocked in nearly 30 hours on campus between Tuesday and Thursday and the unfortunate thing is it was all almost completely worthless.

Simon and I have Scene 2 in the Animation for Studio, and as of last week we had submitted our First Pass and Rob came back to us with feedback. I decided that we'd meet up early on Tuesday and work through the changes so that any questions we had or that arose, we could tackle in class the next day on Wednesday. During our time on Tuesday we decided that given the number of changes which included: re framing certain shots, changing animations from what we thought was best to Rob's direction among other things, as well as the fact that Rob told us that he'd created custom cams for everyone's scenes so that certain shots would be uniform throughout, and we never had the PC asset to work with which meant we had to wing the disk animations, with all that said we decided that it's better to just delete everything we had and start from scratch.

In class on Wednesday we thought we'd be ready to hit the ground running based on the prep we did the day before, but as usual, this was not the case - when we reopened our scene, certain objects had moved in world space. We don't know why, they just had, this screwed up the cameras we imported from Rob and cause some issues when we manually tried to re position things. With Rob's assistance in the morning we got things sorted (making Tuesday work practically irrelevant) and we began reanimating from scratch. We bugged Rob throughout the day to keep checking our shots because we wanted to minimise as much double handling as possible. The rest ofd that day was very stressful. We kept hearing the other students in class working on their individual projects and other work and this became rather upsetting for me at least - Simon and I were working our asses off to get this animation done for the studio project and other students were casually putting hours into their other work - work I sorely needed to catch up on. Nevertheless, we kept at it until 5 o'clock. ROb along with most of the class left but Simon and I still had a shit load of work to do. Further to that, Phil and Rob set the expectation that the 2nd pass was to be completed by COB that day and the 3rd pass to be completed by the end of the week. I asked Rob before he left, that based on the amount of input he had over the day, if Simon and I were to really put in the hours, could we expect our work on Wednesday to encapsulate the changes necessary for Pass 3 - Rob said that it more or less would but of course there may be changes he'd require once he sees the playblast. We agreed that this was the only course of action because both Simon and I were busy over the weekend. Having fun? No. Simon had to go back to his home town of Keynton to house sit for his parent while they are out of town and he has no access to a PC up there - I meanwhile, had to go to work as I do each weekend which give me very little time before and after my shifts to do work and to be frank, I don't work well, that is to say, effectively, when I know I only have an hour here before work to cram some work in, or 'if I rush home from work and quickly eat dinner then I can spend a couple hours on my work before i go to sleep and go to work again the next day'! I mean that's a terrible quality of life. Besides the point - that Wednesday we worked until 11pm to get those changes done and went home to prepare for Nigel's class the next day.

Come Thursday - Nigel set another weekly deliverable which was an unsurprising pain in the ass - this time, we'd be weight painting our rigs. Hours of work to look forward to. yay. Later that day however I received word from rob that the playblast wasn't up to scratch and many more changes were needed. Simon left that arvo and I wasn't prepared to do all the work myself that evening. Friday and Saturday passed and I was at work and as of this morning I see a message from Rob that he needed all those changes done by Saturday night - I'd already missed the deadline. I apologized that I hadn't seen it sooner but notified him that even if we had known, we didn't have the time to do it. He replied very graciously saying that after speaking with Tom, he was going to do all the fixes to everyone's animations himself - I immediately went to Simon and let him know because I felt that wasn't on. I really didn't and still don't want Rob to have to go through and fix our work because it's not fair to him or us - we put in a lot of work over the last two weeks to get this animation done and it turns out that we still haven't done it correctly. If we had more time we could go through the changes again but then I fear that we'd only AGAIN have to make changes, meaning more wasted time. And time really is the issue here now - as I said earlier, I'm already envious of the students who haven't been animating who've had this extra time to work on their independent study - we lost nearly 20 hours last week on an animation that Rob still isn't happy with and I'm not having a dig at Rob, not at all. I respect him so much for his work ethic and the responsibility he's taken on - I know he just wants the film to be as good as it can be - but there needs to be a compromise between quality and time, surely. It's the only way it'll get done. I still have this insane CIU project that needs a shit load of work and I haven't touched it yet and that's due in a few weeks!

Then there's my independent study - I don't even know where to begin 0- last week I had this spurt of inspiration that this week I would begin modelling some cool new assets and build towards that project yet I haven't had a chance to do anything. I can't even say that 'tomorrow I'll make a start on that' because I have a damn rig to weight paint and I can only image that'll take a half a dozen hours or so and that's assuming Maya doesn't play it's stupid game with me.

As it stands, I'm falling behind. And that's REALLY frustrating because I'm trying to keep this balancing act together and I am putting in the work, yet it seems to be a case of one step forward, two steps back. At the end of the term, noone is going to care that I put in a million hours of work if the work isn't completed. I'm worried about doing this animation Pass again, I'm worried about staying on top of Nigel's weekly workloads, I'm worried that this CIU project is going to fall apart (because I'm the team leader and each student there is feeling the pressures of week 9 as well and none of them are taking that project very seriously because each one is prioritizing their own studio units, like I am) and I'm very seriously worried about my independent study. The one thing I really want to work on, the thing that I'm enjoying the most because it's building up the skills that I want to hone, I can't find the time for it!

Ok, so I've vented - what's the next step? How do I fix this? Well, time management is the obvious answer right? I have tomorrow, Monday off from school and work, so I'll be studying all day - I aim to do Nigel's work, followed by some CIU work and hopefully I haven't set my self up too much there - it's entirely plausible that the weight painting could take all day or 8+ hours and that I won't have it in me to keep working on CIU after that. Then we have Tuesday, I need to find time to get CIU done and talk with Simon and Rob about the animation which I assume will have Simon and I working through that day. Then Wednesday, and at this point I still haven't touched my independent work - and Wednesday is terrifying me - because I can't plan PAST that point, because in that class I imagine there will be another pass, or more animation is needed and I just don't know if I can do another 12 hour day on campus. I won't even have time to cry about it though because the next day is Nigel's class and guess what? He'll set another task due the next week - likely this will be animation; hilarious! Luckily I have Friday off, so I can attempt to work on whatever has come up since Tuesday - likely more animation for Studio and then Nigel's work for Thursday, there's always CIU work to do and then maybe I'll find time to do my independent study? What about the weekend? Well you can find me at work. Possibly Sunday night, I'll write my blog and well...I just don't know what'll happen then.