Film Room project: Postmortem

I believe our film room scene was quite successful considering we had never done anything like it. 

Our team was strong and varied and even though we are very different people, we worked very well together. 

Early on, we made sure we were available for each other. We would work together in the labs all day and later on at night we would keep talking to each other via facebook.

We gave constant feedback to each other which I thought it was great. We were learning together.

I     In other words, communication was great. We also organised our work very early on through flow charts, cascade charts and others. We made sure certain goals were reached on certain dates. The truth is that we didn't stick too much to those deadlines and that damaged our final outcome. 

I think that the fact that we knew we could get everything done in time made us more lax towards our deadlines. I tried to keep up with what was written on our charts but everyone worked at different speeds and we didn't want to pressure anyone.
We were ready to take on any work in case someone in the group started falling behind. 

Looking back I realise we should've been more strict on our deadlines because when we put the scene together there were many things that could've been solved if we had had a little more time spend on engine.

The major problem we stumbled upon was lighting our scene. Fabric is a complex material, the amount of light it lets through depends on its thickness and there's also subsurface scattering which we had to account for.

We underestimated the difficulty of this task and therefore we didn't give ourselves enough time to fix it. Jake who was doing most of the engine work spent the last two days playing around with lighting and we got pretty close to the lighting in the original picture but there were still things to polish.

I have learned a lot during this project but the one thing that I found very important is the skill to make good visual decisions and make them fast. Making those decisions early on are key to any project. If we had chosen the correct scene earlier we would've saved almost a whole week which we could've spent on perfecting the lighting in the scene.

Therefore, these are the key things I will implement into my future projects:

1. Make the right visual decisions early on. It is hard to know what works and what doesn't straight away but I shouldn't be afraid to ditch one idea and do something else.

2. Keep the communication going! Make sure I get feedback at every stage and make sure everyone is on the same page.

3. Work to meet group management deadlines. What's the point on doing lots of planning if no one is looking at it...?

4. Allow extra time for the unexpected. We had been testing our assets in engine for days but it wasn't until the day before hand in that we had all of the assets into our final scene and it is something I want to avoid in future projects. It was after we put everything together that we realised some assets needed slight modifications but it was too late to do anything about it.

This project is over but not forgotten. Time to take a deep breath, have a little celebration dance and move onto the next project!

See you soon! 

Carla.