With the synoptic project finally at an end, I thought that I would make a blog post to talk about the overall experience. This blog post will be addressing all aspects of the project from teamwork, to my own personal development.
Teamwork & Communication
It goes without saying that teamwork and communication is key in any project, no matter what industry you’re in. For our project, I’d say that we worked and communicated well as a team for the most part. From the get go, it was going to be a somewhat difficult task to communicate with two members of our team, considering that they were both in a different class and were timetabled into college on different days; this was overcome almost immediately and we figured a way around this by creating a timetable for our group. However as we got further into the project, teamwork and communication dropped slightly. This was mainly due to team members not turning up on time to sessions, or simply just not turning up at all; whether this being due to personal issues or even just not bothering to contribute to the project and when they did, the work was rushed and broken. This is mainly directed at one team member.
On the other hand, another team member would not take into account feedback or suggestions from myself or other members of the team to help improve their work and if improvements were made they were unnoticeable, which to say the least was irritating. This resulted in constant misunderstandings and therefore lack of good communication between this individual and the rest of the team. As well as this the work ethic for these team members were appalling and their priorities were certainly in the wrong place. Hopefully these team members know who they are. Due to these individuals, the teamwork and communication dropped within our team resulting in only 3 out of 5 us actually communicating properly and managing to work together. Despite the two team members who I spoke about previously, I’d say that the rest of us did quite well with working together on trying to get the project done on time. If I’m completely honest, I think that we could’ve done better if the team was made of solid members throughout instead of just having 2 who didn’t have a clue what they were doing half of the time. If you exclude these members and their complete incompetence however, we did well to communicate and work together.
My Contribution
For this section I’m simply going to be listing my contribution throughout the production stages:
- Storyboard Draft
- Concept Art (Character wardrobe and Mirror scene)
- Compiling Storyboard images to create final storyboard
- Refined story
- Photoshop concept tests
- The Script
- TV VFX test
- Scene correction Grain Removal
- Team Production Logo
- Clock Model
- Clock implementation
- Screen assets (later placed on computer screen)
- Mirror scene re-done
- Adding assets (news scene)
- Marketing Posters x3
- Rough/Submission Edit
- Final Edit Assist (With Jacob)
Documentation:
- Scrum Summary
- Script
- Short Film Inspirations sheet
- Weekly Jobs List
- Risk Assessment Part A and Part B
Personal development
If I’m completely honest, I think I’ve definitely improved since the beginning of the project. In some areas I do believe I could’ve done better. Time management was one thing that I kind of struggled with at first, but I think now I’m more confident in using my time as evenly as I can. I also think that more to the end of the project my management skills have improved as well. I say this because near the beginning of the project I was more lenient towards my team mates which isn’t really ideal when having the role as project lead; so I believe that with me cracking down on team mates really helped me develop my team management skills and act more like a project lead.
Not only have I improved in these areas as a leader, but I have also improved in different programs as well, these being ones I’m familiar with already: After Effects, Premier Pro and Maya. I believe that in after effects my skills have improved even more than before using a variety of different effects to help blend objects into a scene, such as my clock model. In premier I believe that my edits have improved drastically as well, with me making more refined edits in footage in order to set up scenes correctly and etc. Finally, my skills in Maya have improved in the sense that I’ve managed to create nicer looking models and rendering them out to a high standard, using 3 point lighting and so on.
Conclusion
If I were to sum the project up as a whole, it’s definitely been a notable experience for everyone. We’ve experienced the difficulty of recruiting actors and even working together as a team. I believe that if we had a smaller team with more enthusiastic teammates then I think that the overall production process would’ve turned out a lot better, this is because closer to the end of the project, only a couple of us were actually determined to finish the project off to a high standard. Overall though the project has definitely been a roller-coaster of an experience.
Josh CG-Next Gen Blog 