Blog

a CMU ETC Production

Week 16

Without Further Ado… We proudly present our final product, the animated short Sirena! The Last Week So, how did we get here? Well, our final push was pretty intense. The final shot, where Sirena is a full mermaid, took a bunch of iterations to get out the door. At a certain point, though, we just…
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Week 15

That’s a Wrap! We’ve done it! Sirena— all 2+ minutes of it— is in the bag. As is our Pre-production content. However, you’ll need to wait until next week to see our unveiling of the final product— we don’t want to upload it until after our Final Presentation. The team is very proud of what…
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Week 14

Back in the (Seahorse?) Saddle Monday night ended our mad rush to get our content to a completed state for Soft opening. By the end, we had put together all of our scenes; three were left incomplete, but we were able to show the in-progress versions along with a “% completion” number so our audience…
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Week 13

The Tempest Cometh This has been the final week before our Softs showcase, where we are expected to have everything we’ve worked on put together. For us at this point, this is about the process over the product; we want to have all our scenes in succession telling a cohesive story. After our showcase, we…
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Week 12

Kid Tested, Mermaid Approved To follow up on last week’s blog, this past weekend’s Playtest Day was a success. The average age of our playtesters was 10, so we had to present our material accordingly. We tried to make the experience a mix of storytelling and engagement— we presented our Pre-Production narrative as a story…
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Week 11

On the Road Again Everyone continued plugging away at their respective parts of the pipeline this week. We are getting more shots into motion thanks to Niharika’s animation, and are starting to integrate them with Yikai’s waves shown last week. Muhammad finished the mermaid rig, and designed a first version of the mermaid’s textures. We…
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Week 10

All Together Now This week we were finally back as a whole team! This meant that we could finally reconvene and get on the same page for production moving forward. On the other hand, this meant crunch time has officially started, and so we had to create firm deadlines and take them seriously. We began…
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Week 9

The Next Chapter We’ve made it through the first half of the semester, and are now starting to tackle the second half. To recap, we created our Halves presentation was a success! ETC faculty and peers were excited with where the project is headed and the progress we’ve made thus far. From the feedback we…
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Week 8

When Push Comes to Shove As we brought up in the previous blog post, this week was our team’s Halves presentation. We had to present to our faculty and peers everything we had worked on up to this point, and give a clear idea of our roadmap for the second half of the semester. Since…
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Week 7

Diving Into Production This week was challenging but productive. We started off with a bit of a handicap, because two of our team members (Jared and Niharika) came down with a bad cold going around Pittsburgh. As a result, not as much progress was made on scheduling and animation as we may have liked. However,…
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