My Role in the Production Pipeline

Coming to an end with this trimester, I feel that I have learnt quite a lot through the experiences and challenges that came along the way. From improvements to my modeling work to my KPIs, I have advanced and progressed a lot. I am proud of where I have reached.

Production Roles

To begin with, I served numerous roles in the production pipeline for the project this trimester. Since we were a team of two, we had to take on tasks with various roles ranging from directing to animating to vfx compositing and post production. To be more precise, here are a list of roles I took on:

1. Project & team lead

2. Story Development

3. Robot Concept Development - Concept Artist

4. Lighting artist

5. Modeling and Texturing Artist

6. Rigging artist

7. Animator

8. Compositing and VFX artist

9. Marketing

10. Director

11. Producer

12. Casting Director

13. Editor

14. Production Designer

15. Storyboard Artist

16. Cinematographer

17. Art Director

18. Costume Director

These were the roles I played in part of the making of this project. Some of these were virtual such as Directing, Cinematography, art directing and costume directing. This is because I wasn't able to physically be on set due to the current Covid-19 situation but I was able to guide my team member in doing so.

From the animation standpoint, being the concept, lighting, modeling/texturing, rigging artist and animator was challenging in itself. These are a lot of roles that require specialization in their own fields. But in doing all of these - sometimes even multitasking the roles simultaneously - I can comfortably call myself a 3D Generalist. It gives me a vast area of experience in various fields that will probably benefit me a lot in the long run, especially with landing myself in a good company.

The newer roles that I took on were film related. This is because we didn't have the opportunity to collaborate with film students even though in Week 4 and 5 I vigorously scouted for potential film students. When I ended up finding a handful of experienced students, we were forced into lockdown. It really struck me at the time and stressed me out with how the progress of this project would go. That's when I realized the only way to go about it is to take on the roles after a little research into what the different aspects of a film production crew is needed.

I have a little experience in directing since I was young as I always was passionate for film making from a younger age. I put on a few plays with friends and was always the director on set. Hence, this role wasn't very challenging as I knew how to go about it. Editing, likewise, was not as challenging since I do a couple of edits on the side too.

However, being a casting director, production designer and cinematographer was a bit challenging since it was either new to me or I didn't have control over it. Casting was challenging when we were at SAE because it was hard to find good actors/actresses. Even though we conducted auditions, we weren't quite happy with them. I took on that extra task of scouting for people through networking and word of mouth, but landed on nothing. Moreover, with the covid situation, nothing was helping. Lastly we decided to settle on my teammate and her brother even though they had no experience whatsoever. They surprisingly did a fantastic job with their acting. Production designing in our case was the storyboarding and how the shots would flow when filming - cinematography. I did a lot of research on this aspect to help me think of dynamic angles to capture the shots.

I remember from the first feedback we received that the shots were too flat and wanted this new storyboarding phase to help ease the flow of production. Also, because I am not fully aware of the space of the set, it was hard to visualize the spacial environment through a panoramic picture. But i still made it through.

Art directing in this production was fairly simple because we only needed a few props and some adjustments to the original structure of the living room. The cinematography was enhanced by Ahmed Mohamed who was the one filming the whole thing. he added his input which made the shots look stronger. Costume designing was also simple as we needed the characters to wear blue and red.

Key Performance Indicators

My communication for the trimester is masterful as I have managed to communicate my intentions clearly to my lecturer as well as my teammate. From emails to whatsapp messages, through google meet and voice notes, everything was communicated clearly. At the beginning of the trimester, there were a lot of friction between us but I managed to resolve them through these techniques of communication. My work ethics have also grown stronger as I manage to finish my tasks on time, take on more tasks and am always willing to help whenever needed. This allows me to act as a strong team player as well as being able to guide my team mate when issues arise, thus helping me build my self confidence.

Moreover, this trimester has helped me get extremely good at problem solving. Issues would arise every single day. Literally. And I, as a team leader, had to tackle them head on every single day. This has helped me get into the practice of thinking of variety of solutions to a problem and also keep backup plans ready in case any should fail. It has also enabled me to be one step ahead of the game and take precautionary measures like when I decided to change the story a bit before week 10 in case we had to adapt to an indoor shoot - which actually happened. Because of that decisions we were able to change up tasks in advance before we were informed that SAE wouldn't reopen. This helped me be more flexible from home and also work well under pressure as the challenges would rise everyday.

Lastly, feedback was always taken positively and worked on immediately. From last trimester and the trimester before, I realized that I hadn't been working on feedback immediately and that would slow my progress down. For the last two trimesters, my time management has been very poor. This trimester, It was an aim to get better and managing my time and stay ahead of tasks. Despite our production being slow at first, after taking on the team leadership, I was able to revamp the schedule and ensure we push ourselves to sticking with those deadlines. because of that, we were able to finish on time.

* All performance indicators and ownership of responsibilities were reflected in previous blog posts as well *

In conclusion, I am happy at where i have reached through the series of trials and struggles. It has helped me get better at being a team player as well as working on myself in concerns to time management and self confidence. I hope in the future I am able to get better at this, now that I have acquired the skills of problem solving and the various roles in the trimester.