My Role within this production team

This trimester has been one “rollercoaster” of a ride, quite literally!

Although a lot went down this trimester, I am amazed at how much I have grown and learnt through it all! This was an experience I will hold valuable in my learning towards creating something new and unique. We, as a team, faced a lot of mental, physical and emotional backlash at the prime thought of being different and creative! Halfway through, we wanted to give up but weren’t in a position to do that! Here’s why. This blog will involve my reflections on my role in the team…

Taking on the role as a team leader hasn’t been easy, since day one. I have been the team leader for all projects at SAE - so far - and although I enjoy leading the team into the right goal and direction of the project, sometimes I wish I could just lay back and focus on myself to complete my tasks on time!

Communication and clarity is essential within a team and that’s something I highlighted at the beginning with my team. I had to ensure I got frequent updates from all of them and updated them with my work as well. As all of us are specializing in modeling, so we were all meant to be 3d modelers and texturing artists. But, apart from this I took on the role to do most of the pre-production work as a concept artist, storyboard artist, previsualisation of the animatic, scouting for good sound designers/collaborators; and post production work such as lighting, editing in VR and promotional tasks. Personally, I feel this clouded my time and ability to work and reflect on my specialization - modeling. I wish I spent more time on modeling more assets for the team.

On the contrary, I am really proud of all the work I have achieved this trimester. I enjoyed doing a lot of different tasks, although the quality of each of them could’ve been improved if I didn’t have my mind all over the place and had some more time to spare. I am impressed at how our vision was actually coming to life. It excites me to see the VR environments working really well and creating that “WOW” effect!

Moreover, in WEEK 7 we had to reflect and focus on three important KPIs. Mine were time management, communication and flexibility/adaptability. I believe I have achieved all of these successfully, even masterfully in Communication, but not in time management. I still have to work on my time management abilities. In addition to these, my problem solving skills, acting as a team player, self-confidence and working well under pressure have drastically improved as well. The most evident being problem solving skills due to our numerous brainstorming sessions for solutions to fix the things that went wrong.

We chose to strategize our workflow at the beginning of the trimester with having scenes done quickly and put to render immediately. Although this worked for a bit, things didn’t go too well later on. Once we took 3 weeks or so just to put the living room scene to render, that’s when our production started wearing off. We still implemented best practices through constantly finding solutions, working around feedback given and keeping a positive attitude through it all!

We couldn’t give up because each member’s presence in the team affects everyone else. Hence, if either one of us failed to perform, it would’ve burdened the others - which is what happened. We faced 2 weeks of delay because our team member’s props had technical issues that cost a lot of rendering time. Moreover, I recently got a foot fracture that disrupted my workflow for the team as well. I personally felt way too much of a burden to my team to let myself rest. So I worked harder than I did the previous two weeks. Thankfully, I got a lot of work done and we were able to finish our end of the work by Tuesday of Week 12. We still applied for special consideration and got that approved. SO we still have until 26th December 2019, to finish up the last parts of our project. I hope we can still make it!!!