Semester 2 Blog Post 4 - The Mid Semester Self Doubt and Birthday Celebrations!!

Once again it has somehow become the middle of the semester, and once again I find myself doubting what I do, if I do enough, if I'm doing anything correctly, and more. Ah, the wonderful feeling of good old self doubt. I've noticed this tends to happen a lot with me in the middle of a semester. Which isn't bad, persay, but I'm kind of sick of second guessing myself so much. I feel like I haven't been doing enough for my Thesis group lately, even though I created a whole new doc for Isabel and also have been working on animations. It just always seems like the others have done more than I have, you know?? And I'm sure that's really mostly a matter of perspective, and that since this is a feeling I'm getting in ALL of my classes, it's probably not true. I'm probably just having a bit of self doubt. But that doesn't mean I like it. I want to make everyone happy and proud. I really hate letting people down, group partners, teachers, or otherwise.

It's also been super hard for me to focus and get stuff done since it became October. I'm blaming my birthday for that. It's on October 9th, and I'm turning 22 (22!!!!!). I don't know how to feel about this. I'm excited and dreading it in equal measure. I feel old and also like I'm a kid trapped in an adult body simultaneously. But everyone's birthday gives them a bit of an existential crisis, yeah?? I'm sure it does. And while that's not an issue by any means, I've been having a really hard time focusing on my schoolwork because of it. It's like since it's my birthday month, my brain just wants to shut off completely and do nothing but party. (And by party I mean stay in my bedroom and play video games and eat cake.). This is not condusive to a productive semester. It's been like pulling teeth, getting myself to do things even as simple as writing this blog post. But, I'm still doing it, so I guess it's not that big of an issue?? And everyone struggles with motivation sometimes.

Anyways, back to the Thesis film. Our group decided, after all the notes we got on the previous production pass, that we were gonna go through our whole animatic and discuss the cinematography, focal length, camera position, and blocking of the shots. This is important. And considering the shots haven't really changed since the first time we playblasted each one in the middle of last semester, it's in dire need of updates and restructuring. So as we go back in and add blocking animation, a lot of these new cinematographic changes will be noticeable. We had a LOT of notes and ideas on how to improve all of this, and I'm looking forward to seeing what all the new shots will look like. Everyone is really leaning into the animation now, and it's so cool to see all our characters coming to life!!!

Other things are getting done too. I'm so so proud of everyone for the fact that the UVs for everything are almost done. We just have a couple more things, and then they'll be out of sight out of mind!! Sam and Ash have been the biggest help in this section, as they've done pretty much half of the UVs each, give or take. Others have worked on them, but not nearly to the degree these two have. And Rianne has rigged up all our main yarnballs to a point of pretty decent usability!! A lot of the original issues have been fixed and their bodies move great!! And she's started working on the hardest body rig of all, Bartholemew. It's looking amazing so far, and she and Lucy are troubleshooting it constantly and messing with it to check its workability. I'm assuming by next production pass we'll have at least some of our cat animation done!! Isabel fully reorganized our files and I made her a new document to keep track of what has and hasn't been moved into our reference folder in the assets section. She's done a good job with that. Cal has been animating and also working on 2D decals to put on top of our 3D stuff in comp, Ash has been doing textures, and more!! Everyone is doing so well and I am so proud of them.

We're still working on our sound design, but we're hoping that the mixer will assist us in getting the voice actor and music we need. So there's that. Comp has been discussed a lot too, and it seems Ash, Cal, and Lucy are all going to be in charge of different aspects of comp. Lucy will probably do most of the lighting both pre and post comp. Ash wants to edit, and Cal is in charge of all the little 2D details we're adding. It's a nice little group effort. I'm excited to see how far we get by next production pass.