Personal showreel
Group showreel
Critical Review
This project has felt like a long journey squished in a really short period of time. At the beginning 10 weeks looked like plenty enough time to fulfill all required aspects for this project from gathering the group members, going through planning roles, tasks, and targets, to finishing up in time for the exhibition at the end of term 2. However, this was not the case for this group, since we started with several delays in getting the brief of this project and to get it going. This project has been exciting and inspiring, at the same time as draining and stressful. However, I feel like has been a good learning experience to know how to respond towards similar stressful situations that could be presented in future jobs in the industry.
The key aspects that I consider important for a collaborative project would be realistic time management and organisation of targets, prioritising most important tasks first, problem-solving skills, team work helping each others, and clear communication.
The time management and organisation in this project was difficult as we all had different schedules, other projects, and lectures, in addition to the fact that it was also a big group with 8 students, 2 lecturers, and 2 external studio partners involved. A good solution we came up from the beginning was the shared space we created in Miro where we could upload all our mood boards, references, links, tasks, and other important information for the group. Later on we came up with a fixed schedule for weekly meetings and if we could not attend, we could always check the recording of it. I feel like that helped a lot to keep all of us in the same page. We also learnt to prioritise tasks by level of importance in the project and to disregard other tasks that maybe were not doable or achievable for the time frame we had to finish the project.
Another aspect I learnt a lot from was the fact that nearly every task I had to make, would come with a technical problem: for example, the optimisation of the models for Unity, learning how to link textures in Unity, fixing UV maps in Maya, learning new programmes apart from Unity like Mudbox, or even learning new techniques in Maya like to generate hair with XGen to then optimise it for Unity.
One of the most important aspects in team work is communication and sometimes it was a bit difficult. As mentioned before, we all had different schedules and sometimes to receive an answer to a question could take hours or days to be answered. However, we tried to make the most of the weekly team meetings by preparing all the work in progress we had to show to the team, and reviewing all the tasks and targets we needed to get done every week (every weekly meeting would take between 2 to 3 hours).
Definitely, this has been a good project to get to know how working on the industry would feel like, and I can say that I have developed not only new technical and artistic knowledge, but also important soft skills needed to keep up with a professional VFX company pipeline.