Category: Collab Unit

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.

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.

The most notable update as far as work that we’ve completed this week would be the final version of our first shot. We’ve finished applying the VFX, animation, and sound to Act 1 Shot 1, and can present it as the first look at our final piece. Our VFX team’s course leader, Christos, asked us to darken the space HDRI we’d originally used (taken from the European Southern Observatory),

As he pointed out, space is a lot darker than that, and when I went into Photoshop to adjust the curves on the file, the result looks a lot more realistic.

The physical realities of space have been something that we’ve been playing with a lot. As Ingrid mentioned to us also, space has no sound, so it really is an interesting blank slate for the sound design team to work with in creating sound in this entirely malleable setting.

This is a visualization the sound design team gave us of what the first act could possibly look like with sound. That element is almost entirely done, and they are mostly just waiting for us to finish running everything through the render farm.

This isn’t completed yet, but here’s a look at the exhaust fume simulation that Gherardo has been working on for our space buggy. Our VFX team has nearly completed all of their work for the first shot.

This is a first look at the hazy, mirage-esque effect on the scene that Antoni created in Houdini. I intended the planet to feel hot, dizzying, uncomfortable and foreign, and this certainly delivers. I’m excited to see how the rest of our shots will look with the simulations applied.

With only two weeks left to go of our collab unit, we’ve got a lot left to cover before the project’s due date on the 25th. For me, personally, there’s three things that I need to do:

• Go into Act 1 Shot 1 and finish the animation on the spaceship- the VFX team has finished constructing the setup and all that still needs to be done is the simple animation. When this is done, I’ll render it out, and deliver it to the sound design team, and we’ll have our first finished shot by the middle of the week. Yay!
• For the spaceship landing shot in Act 1 Shot 2, Antoni mentioned to me that he’d prefer if the ship hovers over the ground for a little bit longer to convey weight. I’m going to tweak that animation a bit and send it over to him. He’s said that he can work on his simulation without the animation needing to be done, so this takes a second priority after the Act 1 Shot 1 work.
• Kamil and I need to match up our character positioning for Shots 5 & 6 for continuity purposes. I’ve already worked on Shot 4, which involves Jordan walking to the place she will be in Shot 5, so I need to take a look into Kamil’s file and reposition the character.

As for the rest of the group, the VFX team is working on an exhaust fume simulation for the buggy instead of tire tread marks, and Kamil is finishing up his work at the end of Act 1. The sound design team will be able to put their work into Act 1 Shot 1 as soon as it’s rendered out.

I’m very excited to see our first finished shot, and will update this blog with it as soon as it’s done!

On March 2nd, Ben and Callum (our sound designers) invited us to attend a meeting with their tutor, Ingrid, to talk about our project. Some of the topics that we discussed were our narrative/stylistic choices (especially pertaining to the reveal of the transformation at the end), reviewed our storyboard PDF once again, and analyzed our workflow and communication, and ways to incorporate creepy sound into this story. The feedback that we received was overwhelmingly positive with regards to the way we’ve split up the work, share files, and document our progression, but we did receive a tip that we should try screensharing more often to get a better understanding of what our teammates are working on.

Explaining our process and output helped me check in once again with where my teammates are at on the project and visualize our final product. As I’ve said before, I’m very proud of our daily communication. Here are some examples of the work each team has been doing this week:

We had our weekly collaboration group catch up on Friday this week. As we’d all been sharing our progress with one another via OneDrive and the school network, there wasn’t much that we had to go over, but a quick check-in is essential for everyone to stay on the same page.

The VFX team discussed with us their thoughts on particle simulation. They’d decided that the best way to go would be to create the work in Maya rather than Houdini, and probably rely on simulations more often than zoetropes. Below is a prototype of the sandstorm effect.

Gherardo has also been working on setting up Act 1 Shot 1, and I’m really impressed with how well it’s come out so far.

It looks great and only requires animation on the spaceship. We talked a little bit about different ways to hide lights on solid objects, specifically in this case, the planets.

As for the animation team, my plan over the weekend is to learn to put some motion capture on Jordan in Act 1 Shot 4. Once I’ve got the hang of motion capture, things will run a lot faster.

Kamil and I spent some time discussing how our spaceship was rigged. Because I’d found that the doors weren’t moving as I needed them to, I’d animated them separately with my own parent constraints in my shots, and I’d done it rather loosely, too, only for the purposes of what I needed in each scene. But what I didn’t realize was that when Kamil then went in to update the rig, it broke the work I’d done on my shot because it was referenced in. So we spent some time discussing the resolution of the issue, and our spaceship is now good to go.

This week will be challenging to make progress as we balance it with our performance animations. My biggest goal is to teach myself motion capture, and we’ll take it from there.

Over the past week:

we’ve all gotten a lot done.

Using the animated storyboard as a reference, Callum and Ben created a suspenseful theme to be used in Act 2, which I’m very excited about. It’s exactly what I was envisioning for the story.

In the meantime, I put together a set, and began working on rough blocking animation for Act 1 Shots 2 & 3.

Kamil then reached out to us with some suggestions for changes to the file structure, models, and set. He was able to reduce file size tremendously by referencing in each element of our scene:

In this setup, we use the animation file anim_act01_shot00 to work on the blocking, incrementing it for each shot so that eventually we have a new anim file for each one. The character, background, and spaceship are all referenced in. This way, we can work on updates to the set or character and have them update in all of our animation files. This is not only more efficient, but it allows us to get the animations to the VFX and sound design teams quicker so that they may begin working without waiting for us finalize every aspect of the scene.

He also updated the ship so that the shaders were applied correctly:

And began working on the colony. We still have some ways to go on this, but with our new referencing format, we can start animating without worrying about that yet.

The group expressed an interest, however, in keeping the large cliffs and canyons visible in the original set, as they had been planned into the storyboard. Kamil sent us an updated version with a possible way to lay this out:

While me and Kamil worked on set design and beginning animation, Antoni and Gherardo have been working on particle simulation ideas for the space dust and sandstorm scenes. This morning, we learned that we have a sandstorm zoetrope available on the class resource share folder, which is incredibly lucky for us.

During the meeting today, we decided on this plan for next week:

Kamil and Emma (Animation Team): We will split Act 1 so that I do shots 2-5 and Kamil does shots 6-9. We have all been discussing using an entirely different set for shot 1, so this doesn’t concern us yet. Kamil shared his screen with us during the call to demo how to use the pipeline for our work. I will transfer my previous animation to the new scene using Studio Library and get shot 2 to the rest of other teams by Thursday or Friday so that they can each begin working in it.

Ben and Callum (Sound Design Team): Once Ben and Callum have shot 2, they will start working on sound effects for it (spaceship whirring, wind, music, etc).

Antoni and Gherardo (VFX): This week, they will also take a look into shot 2 and begin working on their simulations in it, as well as settle on the most time and space efficient way to store these simulations (Zoetrope vs created in Maya or Houdini).

Once the rest of the group has shot 2, we can really begin getting a sense of transferring our work between teams and feeling out what our finished product will look like for each shot.

We are also meeting with Luke on Thursday to discuss all of these plans and take any feedback or suggestions necessary to better our project.

These are the decisions reached by the group during today’s call.

This Week’s Work:

Monday to Tuesday- Emma creates an animatic from the storyboard with consideration of timing so that our Sound Designers can begin working with a clearer idea of what is needed and when.

Tuesday- Gherardo and Antoni attend 3D lesson, possibly meet with professor one on one to ask about rocket simulation aspect.

Wednesday- Kamil and Emma attend mocap lesson, learn more about the projected length of time it will take us to animate each shot.

Thursday- Entire group meets with Luke to discuss project.

Wednesday to next Monday- Kamil and Emma begin building the set for Act I. VFX team works on space simulation for first shot and finding 3D assets to incorporate for the set. On Monday we meet back up to discuss whether our set is done and plan to begin animation.

During our meeting we went through the storyboard and discussed any possible changes or updates on our shots, found some 3D interior models to use for our sets, and discussed a realistic output for the project. Our goal is to have at least one act fully finished for our showreels by the end of the project.