Foxhole

Story Boards

We took a big step this week in establishing rough storyboards.  By finishing rough storyboards, we were able to start focusing in on art styles and music.  We believe that music will really shape the tone and style of the story and will also play a vital role in our end of semester deliverable.

Artwork

Our storyboards were rough storyboards, but while we were working on storyboards we were also working on concept art for the main character.  Several passes have been made at the concept art, and we are narrowing in on what our main character will look like in the upcoming week.

With the rough storyboards completed, our director (along with the rest of the team),  was able to start exploring camera angles and what will be seen by the viewers.  In doing so, minor changes to the story were made to reduce our overall length of the story.  Our goal is to be able to establish the setting and story as concisely and clearly as possible.  The storyboards will go through several iterations, but we have found the storyboards have been an extremely helpful tool in furthering and clarifying our story.

Next Week

Next week we will have our moving storyboards, a first pass at music, character concepts, and environment concepts.  With the completion of the above tasks, we will be in excellent shape for our halves presentations.

Story Lock

This week, our team has locked down the first draft of our story, and we will be moving onto story refinement and initial storyboards.  We had the good fortune of meeting Evan, from Jib Jab, and he offered to share feedback with us as the story progresses.  We plan on utilizing him as an outside resource and as someone who will give us honest feedback.

Conferences

This week was limited due to the SATE conference as well as IndieCade.  We had several team members attend these conferences and were limited in our progress for our project this week.

Next Week

This coming week we plan to start on rough storyboards, as well as start on the soundtrack for our animation.  The script will go through iterations and refinement, but will still stay within the basic structure of the story defined by storylock.  We believe the music and sound will shape the art style and that after this week, we will take steps toward the foundation for our halves presentations.

Quarters

This week marked quarter walk-arounds.  Our team went into quarters prepared to give a pitch of our two stories, as well as a high level description of what the project is and what are our metrics for success.  We received a lot of feedback from the faculty regarding our pitches, and the overall reaction to our stories were positive.  We also learned the importance of being enthusiastic about pitch ideas from beginning to end.  The feedback from faculty will help us to make our halves presentation a success.

Birds of a Feather or Night Witches?

After five weeks into the semester, we narrowed down our stories to these two pitches.  After long deliberation, and many meetings, and hearing almost everyone’s opinion on both stories, we have decided to go with Birds of a Feather… kind of.  We used the dystopian setting of Birds of a Feather, and the writing team has morphed it into a story that focuses on the belief that “The Grass is Always Greener”.

This process of transforming a story, iteration after iteration, came naturally, with no destructive conflict, to our writing team.  They will be working to get a first script out by Wednesday of next week, and we seem to be on task to meet our deadlines.

Next Week

Next week we will look to getting a first draft of the script completed, as well as continue to look into art styles.  This coming week we will also look into possibly hiring an additional artist as a contractor.  For our project to move forward, we will need to have additional artists on the team.  This week will be a big week for the team, and we are ready to meet the upcoming challenges head on.

This week, we refined our ideas a little more, prepared for client pitches, as well as prepared for quarter walk-arounds.

In order to get our stories prepared to pitch to our advisers/ clients, we had to focus on presenting our stories in a more streamline fashion.  To do so, we had our writers pair up with our concept artist to create preliminary storyboards.  By doing so, we were able to give a visual representation of the stories, and therefore, cut down our overall presentation times.

 

On Thursday, we had some outside advisers and guests attend our weekly meeting.  Jim Duesing, our external adviser from Carnegie Mellon Main Campus, Carl Rosendahl, ETC professor at the Silicon Valley campus, Tina Blaine, and Michael Tsai, ETC alumni 2012 and Schell Games employee, attended our weekly meeting, in addition to our advisers, John and Ralph.  We pitched our two ideas to the group and received some valuable feedback as to which idea to use, how to make the stories more interesting, and possibly most importantly, which pitfalls we will need to look out for.

We completed and submitted our branding and team photo this week as well.  Our website has been set up, and we are in good shape for quarters requirements.

We also had our first retrospective for the semester.  We hold bi-weekly meetings and discuss what went right and what needs to be improved upon.  Because of the setup time, the rearranging of the rooms, and getting our footing, we did not have a retrospective during our first two weeks.  We believe holding bi-weekly meetings will help us to avoid future problems before they happen.

At this point in the semester, we are closing in our which story we will be using, and at this point, and we  will have it settled shortly after quarters.  Our team is very positive that we are in a good place will continue to take this momentum and move closer to a successful first half of this year long animation project.

Week 3 consisted of more meetings to narrow down stories, and pitching to our client/ advisers the two stories we decided to go with.  The two stories were iterated upon by our team of writers, and then the rest of the group gave feedback on the more refined versions.  The refined versions were then pitched to our client/ advisers. We are happy to say both stories were ok’d to go into further refining.

Our branding is almost complete, and is ready for board reviews this coming Monday.  We were also able to get our team photo shot, and composited.

This coming week, we will look to choose one of our two stories to move into full pre-production.  We will also move onto more in depth concept art, and hope to be able to begin storyboarding toward the end of the week.  To be able to move into pre-production, we will need to get our story  approved by our clients/advisers. While we will be refining our pitches, this will also serve in a dual role to prepare us for the upcoming quarters presentations.

Brainstorming

After having a productive first week, week 2 is continuing along the same path.  We have been able to narrow down our 5 concept ideas to 2.  Five ideas were pared down to 3, which we pitched to our advisers.  The pitches were high level, and raw, but it got the basic story principles across. From here, with the help of our advisers, we narrowed our ideas down to 2.  Our goal is to be focused on a singular idea that we can begin writing by the middle of week 3.  At this time, we appear to be on track to meet this goal.

Branding

Our team has come up with several concepts for our team poster, and we will be deciding on our final branding early next week.  It has been a challenge to come up with branding when we still do not have a clear view as to what our project will become, but we do believe our branding represents our team represents that our project is an animation project.  We believe we are right on schedule to have our branding completed earlier than the ETC deadline.

 

Role Assignments

This week we were able to finalize team make up and role assignments.  We decided on the roles as follows:

• Paul Navarro: Director, Writer, and Sound Designer
• Himanshu Vartak: Assistant Director, Writer, and VFX Artist
• Regis Frey: Primary Writer
• Chen Yang: Editor, and VFX Artist
• Zhenyi Wang: Concept Artist
• Jim Vollberg: Producer

Equipment and Software Arrive!

We received our Wacom Tablet, Cintiq, and Hansoft this week.  Our team is excited to get the tools we feel are vital to having a successful project.

The Wacom and Cintiq have already proven to be useful in the creation of our branding concepts, as well as some preliminary concept art for our story ideas.

Our team will be using Hansoft as a project management software and a progress tracker.  Although Hansoft is geared more toward games and software, we have been able to use it effectively to run scrum, assign tasks, and to be able to head off concerns before they become serious issues.  We will be using Agile and Scrum to organize our team, and plan on continuing to do so throughout the duration of the project.

Next Week

For week 3, we plan on deciding on a story idea and to begin to write.  We also anticipate our branding and description will be completed.  A high level schedule and project milestones will be finalized on Monday.  No major setbacks have occurred this week, and we are right on schedule to start week 3.

Kick Off

This week marks the beginning of the first ever year-long animation project at the ETC.  We used this week to get organized, assign roles, establish high level goals for the semester, and to start brainstorming sessions.  The team met with the project advisors, who are also serving as the project clients as well.

Our team came up with the team name “Foxhole”, and from here on out, the name of our project room has been established as, and will be referred to as “The Foxhole”.  We have also began to brainstorm ideas for branding and ways to make our project room reflect our teams’ personality and project goals.

After we took care of the housekeeping items, our team jumped into brainstorming sessions to try to shape what this project will be.  Over a dozen ideas were put on the table by several team members.  We practiced the “yes and…” principle and used a separate meeting to start paring down ideas.  After several meetings, we settled on 5 general concept ideas.

Over this coming weekend, our writers will each write outlines on at least two of the five ideas.  They will choose which ideas to write about, without informing each other until Tuesday’s meeting.  We hope this will help pare down our ideas even further, as well as see different takes on different ideas.

The challenges we faced in week 1 were minimal.  The only issue we have had is having to wait for our requisitioned software and equipment.  We believe we would have been able to use the requested software and equipment immediately in the first week had it been available.  As of now, there are no major concerns on the team regarding the project.  We believe we are right on schedule, if not a little ahead, at this point.

This coming week we plan to set up our sprint schedule and high level overview, outline project milestones, establish branding, and hope to have begin developing a script.