It’s hard to even begin to describe the insurmountable amount of work and tumultuous stress that has gone into this past week, because every member of my collab group has been running around like chickens with our heads cut off. That being said, after a few sleepless nights, screensharing with tutors, and constant back-and-forth messaging, we were amazingly able to pull through victoriously with an entirely complete Act One.
To make a long story short, we were on track to finish at a leisurely pace until I, as the only group member with working knowledge of the render farm, began work on running all of our finished shots through the farm. To my utter horror, every single job repeatedly racked up two to three hundred errors, then crashed. Struggling to diagnose the problem with my group, we reworked our file paths and double-checked everything in the reference editor, but the problem persisted. Unable to work through the error ourselves, we reached out to our tutors for help. In the meantime, I raced through some edits on shots four and five, re-working the position to match up to Kamil’s work on shot six for continuity.
At the same time, Deadline was giving us trouble in the form of a ‘Cannot find procedure: Submit to Deadline’ error, and for a moment, the render farm was in effect entirely unusable, leaving us to face a full night with no assurance that we would have any semblance of even half of a final project to present for our hard work, and so we all rendered a shot using the Maya hardware overnight, just in case.
On Monday night, after nonstop efforts to decipher the root of the problem, me and Kamil were able to jump on a two-hour call with Luke, in which, after multiple hypotheses, we discovered that all of the VFX lighting Antoni had done was corrupted due to being converted from Maya 2020 to 2018.
This was a huge blow and a turning point at once. Once we got off the call with Luke, me and Kamil stayed in the voice chat and discussed our plan. Our path ahead was clear: throwing the project through the render farm without the VFX was our only option. With only three days to go before the deadline, we simply did not the time to render each shot without the help of the farm; each might take up to eight hours and we had twelve total. And so it was with trepidation that we decided we may have to sacrifice Antoni’s hard work. Making this decision felt awful, as he’d done a great job, and it wasn’t his fault- the VFX department rarely uses Maya and so many are likely unaware of Maya 2020’s shittiness.
And so, having made this decision, we raced to get a rough cut done, desperate for any kind of product that we could use as a baseline should we run into more unexpected setbacks.
While Gherardo finished his VFX work on shot eight (which includes shot 8a, 8b, 8c, and 8d) as well as shot nine, I spent the rest of Monday night putting all of our work through the render farm until the early hours of the morning. Although some of them were glitching with failed frames and the exposure of our skydome HDRI between shots was inconsistent, we finally had a very, very rough final cut to give the sound design team. I was nervous that our endless technical hurdles would end up with us not giving the sound designers enough time to review our finished product for any final adjustments, and was grateful to at least give them something to work on as we scrambled to work around the VFX corruption. This meant Kamil generously offering to help look at Antoni’s lighting files in Maya 2018 to try to recreate all of his work, as he pushed to finish his Houdini and Katana work for the end of this term, which me and Kamil are fortunate enough not to have to worry about. Below you’ll find our first cut. Acts two and three are entirely storyboarded, and Act 1 is a mishmash of playblasts, rough shots, and polished final shots with VFX and correct lighting.
*note- Cally’s name is spelled incorrectly here.
Although our tutors had reminded us several times that previs did not necessarily need to be complete and that this project is more about learning to pull together as a team than finish a picture-perfect project, we were hoping to salvage Antoni’s work if we possibly could, because all of us had put so much into it. At this point, it would be a shame to miss out on showing off that month’s worth of work and creative vision.
And so we spent another two days tirelessly working on creating our ideal final cut. Gherardo finished VFX work on shots 8 and 9, and I decided to give them a chance on the render farm. Although he also worked in Maya 2020, his work in shot 1 did not crash, and sure enough, neither did 8 or 9. It was incredibly refreshing to watch all five shots run seamlessly through the render farm (with only 30 errors each!)
As I fixed the failed frames, one by one, Kamil and Antoni rendered his corrupted VFX files the slow way, and Cally sent us the individual tracks for her work, so that Kamil could piece it together into a final product himself, as we didn’t want to throw the sound design team off with the potential of our timing changing as we made last minute tweaks.
And, around 8:20 PM on the 24th, Antoni’s snail-render of shot 2 completed, and I finished fixing the last glitching frame of shot 8d. At the same time, we all realized that Act 1 was completely finished, and we jumped the gun to celebrate.
All that was left to do was to compile our shots into a final cut. We waited eagerly for Kamil to substitute in our polished shots, each one of us excited to see the product of our hard work, knowing already that it was going to look amazing.
And finally, Act 1 is complete. I’m beyond blown away by how good it looks and what an amazing job everyone’s done, I’m just at a loss for words to describe it.
Reflection
When I had the idea for this story, I had no idea whether my narrative was even good, let alone executable, and I was overjoyed when a full team of sound designers, VFX artists, and animators jumped on it. I had high hopes for my project, and, on our first ever call, it was so gratifying to see the optimism, friendliness, and enthusiasm for the project that each team member had, not to mention how exciting it was that each one was so talented in their individual fields.
My decision to lead this project was mainly influenced by my anxiousness as to whether I’d find another one to join, but no small part was played by my enjoyment of narrative writing and filmography. As a group leader, I did somewhat have to fall into the role of director as well, and found myself slightly uncomfortable with the responsibility of assigning tasks, as I believed almost everyone else to possess more skill and technical knowledge than I did. I think that over time, my teammates finally began to believe me when I told them that I was open to all of their ideas, changes, and suggestions, and I also began to gain some confidence in my ability to judge whether the work we produced met my original vision.
Only once or twice was I required to speak on behalf of the team- a specific example of this would be our meeting with the sound design team’s leader Ingrid, in which I was surprised to find myself having to explain our narrative structure at the end of the final act and prove that our level of communication met expectations, but after my initial hesitation, I found myself more than able to defend and promote our work, because I firmly believed that our story was interesting, our workflow was above adequate, and we were working towards an impressive output, and I had the receipts to prove it in the phenomenal storyboard Kamil had helped me create.
I was also required to make a tough call in our decision to cut Antoni’s VFX from our shots, and it definitely wasn’t easy to be the one to explain that necessary choice, especially as I felt so sorry for him. Thankfully, he was incredibly understanding, and in the end, we were able to include them after all.
I found that my group mates were very easy to talk to, and in only a few days we were even friendly enough to give our characters joke names, as they would never be spoken aloud or shown on screen. We met once, sometimes twice a week on video chat, as well as discussing our progress nearly every day via Discord. We uploaded our projects to OneDrive as well as creating a shared folder on the school network for reference files.
When the project first started lifting off the ground, I was slightly out of my element, despite our team’s general aura of communicative honesty. I still am learning so much about Maya, and I came in with next to no knowledge about referencing and file paths. Kamil restructured my folder setup to allow for feasible referencing, and I felt a little self-conscious about my lack of significant professional experience. But I admitted that I was not sure why or how the different structures advantaged us, and he screenshared with me to demonstrate how file referencing works. After that, I felt much more confident about my ability to quickly absorb new information from the wealth of knowledge that each of my respective teammates brought to the table.
Several weeks in the middle of our project consisted of talks in divvying up the work, critiques of technical output, and requests for changes to be made in order to make file access easier or to produce better consistency. During this time, we were mostly absorbed in the allotted work we had assigned ourselves, and many of our video calls were simple repetitions of what we’d already been chatting about on Discord, “I finished shot 3, now I’m working on shot 4,” or “I’m meeting with Mehdi to discuss a sandstorm particle simulation,” with the varying interjection of questions and suggestions regarding one another’s process.
During this time, I would describe my experience as consistently smooth, but not as abrasively, yet beneficially, educational as what came afterwards.
It wasn’t until this past week that the rubber met the road. As I’ve described above, these past several days have been one long flurry of constant communication, hard compromise, and fast-paced brainstorming. We’ve been discussing the project nonstop from 9 AM to 3 AM, and rushing to get our work through to its destination all day long in order to meet our deadline despite the unexpected turn of events regarding our VFX files. It got to the point where we’d tell one another when we had to get on a train or take another call, because every hour was precious and each teammate was a crucial cog in our process. Through this excruciating stress, we were forced to re-evaluate and support one another through twists and turns. At the end of it, I have to say that as nervous as I had gotten, I actually had a lot of fun working frantically, hand-in-hand with my teammates, as we watched each shot, frame by frame, come out on the other end more beautiful than we had hoped for. The fact that, with only two days left to go, we actually managed to finish all of our first act with the full VFX and lighting included is a testament to my teammate’s incredible hard work and talent, and for that I am so grateful. It couldn’t be what it is without every single person.