Blog Post 10 - Preparing for Final Production Pass

This is once again a blog post being written by almost-done-with-finals Mack. I'm sorry. I know I probably won't get a high grade for these because of the time I'm turning them in, but I don't care so I will still try my best to turn in something so that I at least don't have any missing assignments completely tanking my grade. I'd prefer not to get zeroes if I can help it.

Anyways, preparation for the last production pass hit a couple of road blocks the week before we had to present. The first thing we noticed, and was brought up by Lucy, was that we had a LOT of continuity errors in our 3D animatic. Like, a LOT. And so we ended up having a super long discussion about it on Monday before finals and deciding what to do about it. As you saw in the production pass, our strategy was to make a map animatic of sorts, so we'd always know where the characters were. It's pretty helpful, I think. We'd been discussing it a bit the week before but it only really came to a head on Monday when we noticed just how bad it was. I'm glad we figured out a way to fix it without stepping on anyone's toes, so to speak. It was an issue we all to an extent saw.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not a creative enough person to be working on stuff such as animation and movies. I struggle a lot without proper direction, and even when I make my own direction, I noticeably struggle with more. . .open ended aspects of projects. The storyboard of ours is a great example, because I'm having a really hard time seeing the reasons for a lot of the changes we've made over the semester. Concept art too, was a hard one. I didn't do any of it because I just. . .can't picture something like that in my mind without extensive research or interest. It doesn't work. I also can't draw very fast. I am good at the spreadsheets and schedules, and when I have directions to follow I'm capable of doing a very good job, but less structure makes it so much harder, and I wish I had a way to quantify creativity somehow. I think I'd be able to figure things out on my own easier. I can do modeling and animation too, but that's after all the hard stuff is done, like storyboarding, figuring out camera angles,etc. And I can't do sculpting if we're going to be using the models. Retoppologizing scares me. And so does texturing, it's just. . .so much to keep track of. My brain hurts just thinking about it. I wish I could do a better job, and help my group out more. I don't want to be the one person in the group who slacks off. I have such bad imposter syndrome right now.

But, I'm going to go into the summer with the mindset of preparing myself for next semester by relaxing and giving my brain the chance to stop thinking for a while, so that when I do have to think again, I'll be able to do so more effectively, and won't forget homework assignments like this again. It is not a fun feeling in my opinion. I hope next semester it'll be a little easier for me to keep myself on track.