SunCoast Production Log #011

FEB 17 - FEB 23

ETHEN DENT

Website

Parallel companies and other animation studios, such as Jumbla and Pixar studios, offer a much more simpler website experience. To adhere to the conventions of other websites, we have chosen to overhaul designs, reducing the amount of clutter and tailoring the experience to be much more simple and concise. The home page is the first to be overhauled.

[SunCoast Studios, website home page redesign]

During a feedback session, it was advised to construct a brand identity document and implement it onto the website. This would make the design of the website consistent throughout.

[SunCoast Studios, website home page redesign (lower)]

Gantt Chart

To increase the efficiency of the Gantt chart, I have used conditional formatting across the whole Gantt Chart to fill in a specific colour when a value is inputted in the cell. (+Key events, Schedule adjustments). Additionally, schedule adjustments have been made to the facial rigging and modelling sections.

[Master Spreadsheet, Gantt Chart, conditional formatting implementation]

Key events have now been finalized and added to the production checklist. This gives an overview of deadlines that are much more digestible.

[Master Spreadsheet, Gantt Chart, conditional formatting implementation]

Shot Breakdown

A shot breakdown has been made to have a digestible format for shot information. This includes shot thumbnails, duration and the characters that are visible in each shot.

Additionally, in order to get this spreadsheet page to work, I had to research additional aggregate functions.

[Master Spreadsheet, Gantt Chart, conditional formatting implementation]

[research citations]
https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2014/07/10/excel-countifs-multiple-criteria/
https://exceljet.net/formula/range-contains-specific-text
https://exceljet.net/formula/count-rows-that-contain-specific-values

Planned Event - Talks have commenced about the event that will debut ‘Our Ocean’ and SunCoast Studios.

What I’ve been listening to this week:

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GEORGE MORRIS

Test Rendering (& Voice Acting)

"As a team we all had to design some posters for the company to showcase our business “SunCoast Studios” and our short film “Our Ocean”."

"The designs I looked at for inspiration included the same sort of thing, rubbish or plastic to some degree, a marine life animal etc. I wanted to be a bit more artistic with my posters, utilising symbols and Icons more."

"Using the Branding research sheet I kept to the colours of our business."

These are my final designs:

What I’ve been listening to this week:

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JACK DEVEREUX

“Recieved first unreal shot to add into the edit and cut some shots down to make the film shorter.”

What I’ve been listening to this week:

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JESSICA HILES

Weight Painting

“Re-made the logo as vector art, Posters, Brand identity research”

"I took a slight break from rigging to focus on the Suncoast Studios business side of things. This week I was told my role in the company had changed and was no longer business analyst and was instead branding. Because of this, I looked at where we were at in terms of the company brand guideline sheet and the Logo. I found out that we were still using a pixel image for all the posters that didn’t have any colour variations (black/white). We didn’t have a colour palette and the brand guideline sheet hadn’t been started. We were pretty far into the project ‌and we were experimenting with poster designs. With this in mind, I realised I needed to fix this asap."

"I started with the logo, having made these before in illustrator I knew a vector image would help us out much better than a normal ‘.png, or ‘.jpeg’ would. This is because unlike those formats that use pixels to show an image and can only be resized to a certain size before it loses quality, a vector image relies on a ‘path’, this means it can be resized to whatever size is needed. Plus, with the Illustrator file, we could easily re-colour the logo if we needed to. This fixed the first two problems."

"The next issues were the branding guidelines and colour pallet. For the colour pallet, I used a mix of Adobe Colour and Pantone. I did this by selecting a few images of beaches at sunset and extracting the colour palette from them. Then I had a look at them collectively and created a similar colour palette from those samples on Pantone."

"Here was the finished product:"

What I’ve been listening to this week:

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MUHAMAD USMAN

"When completing the model for the banner, I have decided to move on to another crucial asset that is needed for the animation scene which is the shipping container. Since the shot is much closer to the container, I will need to add a little more detail to the model than usual. I have done half of the model for now, as I have been busy finding rock assets and placing them in the scene."

What I’ve been listening to this week:

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PRIYA SHAH

"In terms of the film, Daniel Waterman, one of our mentors stated whether we could make it shorter, in a sense of cut it off when you believe when it’s going too long. I thought about this and I agreed with Daniel. The movie could be set shorter yet sharper. Since this was an ambitious project, the less shots the better the quality it will be. I decided to cut it off from when the net falls on to Troy as it ends with a cliffhanger and fades well into the black screen cut we originally had planned. Presenting this at dailies, the team and supervisors preferred this v version. Thus, it was easier to work with the previs now knowing we can continue with working in this method. Other feedback included flipping the camera around so all shots go from left to right instead of having them turned around one another. It creates chaos which would be a good reference but at the same time does break the theory about composition so I flipped the camera around in those shots which had inconsistency with the other shots."

"In terms of development on the business, our supervisor Mike Gulvin like the idea of sticking with the colour scheme of blue and orange as I stated it matched with our name Suncoast’. He suggested making some posters and flyers to put into the website and start promoting the business. Surprisingly, Both Ash and Mike told to remove the box from the logo as it is holding the logo in rather than letting it express what it is. I agree on this as now I see the logo without it and it looks much better, the box was definitely restraining the logo."

What I’ve been listening to this week:

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