Week 2 (9/2-9/6)

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.

Poster concept, font unsure.
Poster concept, font unsure.

 

Implement a small zoetrope.
Implement a small zoetrope.

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.