Planning
Calenders, so, so many calenders. Batman's most famous nemesis Caledner man himself would be put to shame
This page will show how I planned my time and myself in and out of uni. You'll get specific dates, or vague timeframes. Hell you may even get how the plans themselves have changed over time and why they changed? Maybe, if I can be bothered to plan that far ahead.
Now just to start of before I show you my planning and talk about it I want to get it on the record that personally I don't like planning and am not great at it. Not that I can’t and won't do it, I realise it’s necessity and i won’t start a project without atlear enough of a plan. But I don't like doing it because I have always been aware and experienced it enough that when one makes a plan it is 90% of the time impossible to stick to it. Because life just gets in the way in either direct or indirect ways. So when I plan while I may have specific dates I will try to keep to I don't follow it religiously. I think keeping a vague plan that is loose enough to be changed ,sometimes daily, to best fit the current scenario is the best way to have a plan. Making a plan that can and will change is my approach to planning. On the flip side I also am not great at planning. Most of the time I take longer to do stuff then I set out. that's just because when I plan I plan with the notion that I will be running at 100% all the time. I now this isn't true and I'm trying to get better at planning by accounting this into my plans, but it's something I’m still learning. So my approach in general is to make vague plans to allow them to change since the inevitably will. Also I'm trying to get better at planning by trying to be more realistic with myself and the speed and rate at which I can perform.
So this is admittedly probably gonna be the most boring part of this unit that I’m gonna talk about, the planning. So expect to hear a lot of dates and how they worked or didn't work. Here is a spoiler most of them, didn't as life tends to have a propensity for screwing with your plans. Additionally not trying to pile on but the whole Coronavirus situation threw a bit of spanner in the works, thankfully though since a majority of this unit is being done by soly me I was able to continue on with my work at home mostly unaffected by Coronavirus. It was more in the indirect ways that it affected me anyway. Above you will see my initial plans for January. On Tuesdays I set a weekly thing for me to write a general update for my sake of where I'm at in the unit and what I've done in the week and what I plan to do in the coming week. On the most part I have kept to that sometimes doing it a day late but that is the most consistent thing that has been maintained throughout the unit. Now the writing there isn't for you to see but rather for me. To take note of important things, some of which you will have read about on my website. I had to pick and choose what was relevant, most of it was not.
Starting on the 8th taking a week I wanted the character design to be done. It took longer. Then again the entire pre production took longer than a month. I think it was naive looking at it now to assume I could get all the pre production done in a month especially since I involved Matt. Not saying that he took to long but whenever you involve a second party I think best to from now on give some extra time allotted to it. Since they have their own life with their own issues that may cause them to take extra time. The character design took roughly two weeks not one. The the story board took about a week and a half so not much more than anticipated. Lastly the animatic didn't get started until february. Obviously it didn't happen when intended. To compensate for that however I did merge blocking and the animatic together which I’d say saved me about 5-7 days of extra work so that was just me being efficient with time and readjusting my plans accordingly.
Here we have the initial plan I made at the start of the year for February. By the end of January I had all the collaboration with Matt sorted thus I finished up what little I still had left to do for the character designs and concepts. Including the backstory behind them. Which greatly helped with the finishing of the animatic. So starting february I did the animatic and blocking combined. That took me all the way from the beginning of February to roughly somewhere between the 15 and the 20, I think the reason it took as long as it did was because of my tendency to be a perfectionist even the animatic while not clean had to be really good. As a general approximation lets just say it took 2 and a bit weeks? So safe to say I took up most of february the last bit of february maybe about 2-4 days preparing the presentation that I gave to the class in early march before the end of term break. Again each Tuesday I did a little update more for my own sake and then also to keep track of things I can write down here.
Now onto march. So on the 10th and 11th of march was the end of term assessment I guess you could call it? Basically all it is, is that we had to make a presentation of what we had done so far and how what we plan to do when we go forward. Besides preparing for that which I did at the very end of february I spent the first 9 days of March correcting the mistakes that I had made in the animatic as well as amending it based of criticism I received from peers. Basically again I just wanted to get as much of my work ready and as good as it can be for the presentation so that is what took up the first 10 days till the presentation.. Upon giving the presentation and getting feedback from both my tutors and my peers I then adjusted my plans accordingly you'll see those adjusted plans in a bit, I just wanna go over my original plan I made first in january and then you'll be able to see how they changed. For the first four days after 10th I did the basic work that they asked me to do.
It was mainly written stuff and stuff to do with my process rather than the animating itself. Stuff like making a comprehensive shot list with markers to indicate what is done and what not. I also made a list of the shots that could be gotten rid of if time was getting tight, Which it did and thusly because of that advice the shots I assigned to be removed were removed. Other stuff such as a list of the collaboration I have done and the collaboration that still needed to be done. You can see more on that in the collaboration page. That being written stuff I got done within those four days following the presentation. After that I then got to animating. For the first week after that I was attempting to complete another animation test but that was taking too long roughly, I was working on that for 5-6 days, thus I decided to leave it where it was and focus on stuff that was actually gonna be in my FMP. After that per the request I got to work on three shots completing them to full one shot from each scene. The first shot I started was shot 2 that took about 3-4 days also. Bringing me up to roughly april 20th-22nd. The next week and a bit I was working on shot nine. This took longer as it was much more to animate and much more detail and such. Shot 2 in comparison was a really simple shot. That shot got completed around the 5-6th of April.
So now onto April still within the the term break but still continuously working. After completing shot 9 I then got to work on the longest shot of the FMP shot 23 that also took roughly a week and a bit due to the length I would assume. It’s a simple shot but it's just long. It got completed roughly around a week and a bit finishing it roughly on the 18th-20th, around this time is also when I first got put into contact with Arkin. After completing the three shots I then decided to get some work done on the non animation side of the unit. So I got the business card, invoice and CV design complete that took roughly 3 days landing me on the 23rd. From there I went onto doing the basics for my website. As well as a little of my report no not that much for the report as in order to write that I needed most of the FMP to be over to make comments on it and such. After completing what I could have for my website and report, given what I had done at the time, I then got onto doing more non animation based stuff just so I could get that out of the way. Such as my LinkedIn profile that in conjunction with work on my profesional instagram took a day so with that plus the website work I was now on the 26th. For the last four days of April I worked on my entry for the SEED competition thingy? called Tales From The Lockdown. I had to animate a four second thing of what the lockdown has me doing differently. The animation itself only took about 3-4 days taking me all the way to the end of april. So at this point the end of april consisted of non FMP based work. The website and report, he invoice, CV, business card. My online presence in linkedin and instagram as well as the competition.
Now onto the last month, May. So as soon as this month began I got back to work on animating for my FMP. I realised at this point I wasn't gonna get anywhere near as much of it done as I originally wanted to but I still used to time to complete as much of my FMP as possible. I was working from the first all the way through to the 19th on animating. Getting the line work done for shots 1,3,4,5,6,7. Once reaching the 20th I stopped animating and then got to work on finishing my website and report. As well as doing the last other couple things such as uploading my work to the shared Gdrive. Converting my work and editing it together as well and making it presentable and readable. I also spent a day editing together my process video of me animating. I was recording myself animating from the 15th of April to the 19th of May. Even though I wasn't animating for all of those days. It still provided me with enough footage to merge with my previs work and various other things to make a competent video of my process from start to finish. I also converted a bunch of my non animation work to PDFs.
updated plans
Now while I have already talked about what I did in march here I'm just gonna comment on how I updated the plans upon the presentation I gave and feedback from it. So first of I added some dates to contact my background artist which I did but that fell through in the end thus later in early to mid April I made contact with another one you can read more about that in my collaboration page. Besides that I also pushed back the second pass. As well as the non animation based stuff.
The updated version of April sees the changes of the second pass and other non animation based stuff just dip into the very beginning of April. Following on from that I added a third pass. I also added a polish time frame to. You'll notice I put down the days I was planning on having a holiday abroad but due to quarantine that fell through. Still though that just meant four extra days then I had originally planned.
The last month to be updated was the month of May. So to start the time allocated to work on the report has been added going from the first all the way up until the 24th. Keep in mind this was before the extension was given. So when this first update happened the deadline was still the exact same. Other than that nothing else has changed for the first update of my plan for May.
Now this last update is quite the stark contrast from the last to say the least. So to start the polish time window has been moved from April to may starting on the 10 going to the 30th. The deadline has been updated by a week now being on the 2nd of June. This wasn’t just for me but for my entire class due to the quarantine. Additionally, the working on the report has been extended to the deadline. The final editing of my animation has been moved down to the 24 to the 31st. As has the website work also been moved to start on the 24 and run till the deadline. Other than that there really aren't many other changes to mention.
Lists Galore
So what you can see here is my shot list that I have colour coded. Red is for havent started, orange is for currently doing, and green is for done. Simple traffic light system. This was the graph/shot list come submission. I will keep working on this as the year goes on, I mean calendar year, not academic. Ideally I’ll have it all finished at some point later this year. This idea was something that my tutor Sanjey advised me to do around the halfway mark of the project. They suggested this so I wouldn't get overwhelmed with the work and also to stay on top of it. I took that advice to heart and made this, as you can see here it's mostly red but keep in mind that some of the red slots can be completed in a day or two so not all the red spaces are massive tasks in and of themselves. That being said though if I planned better and also was more realistic on top of being more efficient thus sparing up some time I could of completed more. But no point complaining about it now. Best to learn from my mistakes rather than lament in them. Anyway while this certainly helped me prioritize. It also really helped in that it was a great visual representation of my time management and how long it would take each task. Which is good for me considering I'm a visual based thinker. This then allowed me to make the informed decisions I did. If I were to change this I’d just give it more details. and maybe even put some words in to better state where I'm at each shot.
This here is my shot list in reference to cutting. What shots can afford to be cut and why and what ones can't afford to be cut and why and so on. I kept it purposefully simple as to not want to write a bunch of stuff no one would see. The reason I did this in the first place was at the advice of my tutors to make this when I started animating just in case due to time constraints I have to cut shot. Which of course I ended up doing and I'm glad I did certainly. It saved me time for having to think about what to cut and allowed me to know in advance thereby reducing the stress and time spent thinking about cuts. Proactive not reactive as it were? As you can see I had made 4 shots good for cutting. Reducing the number of shots down to 19. Most of the shots that were cut, where cut due to them not having a major impact on the visually based narrative I was telling. The shots themselves are mainly filler and are there to give breaks to quick bursts of action. Some shots had some minor foreshadowing in them but nothing to major that it would detriment the visual narrative and ambience if it were to go. Some of the shots that went where just meant to be nice visual shots but have no overall impact of the narrative. Some just served the purpose of atmosphere. Which along with narrative were the two key words I was trying to follow. But seeing that I prioritised narrative, they had to be cut.
Relevance, reflection, application and future
Relevance. So there is only one real relevance to planning and it’s rather self explanatory. You always need some sort of plan when working. A notepad you keep things in or maybe even a calendar. Whatever planning it is it's all good stuff. It will inform most if not all decisions made during the project. For me I used a calendar that I updated as the project passed. It certainly helped me be able to make informed and rational decisions. It helped me prioritise and manage my time.
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Reflection. That being said for the all help it gave me there where some mistakes that were made and learning from them I now know how I would've done it differently. Some of the main things I would of changed. The main one being my time management. Specifically when this project first started and I came up with my first calendar the time I assiened myself to do certain tasks was way to short. I took longer than I expected on most of my tasks. Be fair I feel the corona got in the way of my time closer to the end but still throughout the project I was overestimating the speed at which I could get tasks done. From now on I'll be more realistic with myself about the time it takes for me to do a task and put that amount of time allocated to that task. There by being able to plan better with a more accurate schedule. Additionally I felt it would of been better if I did more calendar updates all throughout the process maybe like a update every two weeks or something just to be more clear on a daily basis what I'm gonna be working on with a better sense of time. Lastly even though I was quite regular with my weekly written reports I did miss some and lag behind more around the end of the FMP. Next project I have I’ll endeavor to me consistant and even with them.
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Application. My first strategy for application of what I've learnt is by being more honest about the time I take to complete a task this will allow me to schedule time frames more accurately thus leading to me feeling more confident helping me get tasks done within allocated time frames at a more consistent rate. There by freeing up more time to ideally help complete more than I did. I'll take a half an hour every two weeks to update my calendar to be more specific to the next two weeks, specifically having a more exact time schedule and plans thereby allowing me to get more work done due to tasks being completed more efficiently due to the more specific smaller time scale plans. It will also hopefully reduce stress from me. Lastly, within those two week plans I shall include specific times and dates for my weekly written report on the unit as the unit goes along.
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Future. Future wise planning will play huge part. Mainly because I'll need to plan my future. Regardless of professional career this also affects my personal life to. So yes my future shall be effected by planning and taking what I've learnt here I'll be able to plan more realistically and make my process more streamlined and efficient yielding quicker results ideally opening up more time to do more things. On top of that the mistakes have taught me now what to avoid and how to avoid it. Planning is also a skill that any CV would benefit from. Other then that not much to say really. Just that all my future will be more reliant on my planning.