Journeyman - Week 3
Receiving Character Sheets
This week we wanted all the character sheets in, needed them perfect. Early on in the week, I scheduled a meeting between the character art leads and the animation leads. I thought this was crucial, the animations and characters were so directly tied together. I wanted feasibility, this was a 12 week project, theoretically the character art team would need to have finished their models by week 8 which means that we would have 5 weeks to finish 42 character models. Animations needed to have been finished by week 11 so they needed the more difficult models done quickly and these would need to be constantly checked by both teams.
This meeting was vital to make sure all of the team’s models were feasible to complete within the timeframe. The meeting was held on Friday evening, that day was also the deadline for the character sheets. The meeting lasted nearly 4 hours! We discussed a lot of things during this, how difficult is each model to make, how difficult is it to rig and skin, how does it fit the theme of each team, how does it fit the team of Astrobot as a whole. This made for a very lengthy discussion going in-depth to every single character, led by myself and Kit, the animation lead.
Before the meeting, Kit and I created presentations to make it easier to showcase all the ideas that the teams had given to us. I also did chase-ups on getting the design sheets from the other team leads. If there was any immediate problems, which there was, I made sure to do physical meetings before the meeting which made my Friday so very packed.
MY AWFUL FRIDAY SCHEDULE:
10am-11am - Went to every team to see how they were getting along with the character sheets
11am-1pm - Our team was presenting that day, so Evan, myself and someone on the character team (Eugene) was preparing (TO BE THE BEST)
1pm-2pm - We presented the creating of the Astrobot, the sexy spreadsheets and finally showcasing the design sheets to people who weren’t leads (and begged for the sheets to be done by 4pm)
2pm-4pm - Held multiple meetings on issues and concerns other team leads had to make receiving the sheets seamless.
4pm-6pm - Kit and I created (awful looking) presentations for the outsource leads to review which were very rushed because we had to make 7 presentations within 2 hours and both of us are far too chatty!
6pm-9.30pm - The two of us presented and discussed the characters in detail with all outsource leads.
9.30pm - 10pm Ate like a sandwich and then slept lmao, literally nonstop talking all day
Issues and Concerns
There were more issues than we initially expected, but that’s why it was so important to hold this meeting. The next day we sent out messages to the leads either confirming or denying certain aspects. One of the biggest things we discussed was Team 1 who wanted 3 friends and a very detailed main character costume swap as Sly Cooper. We decided to trim this down by recommending removing a friend that we thought was unnecessary. Another was the giant mechanical owl, which would’ve been far too difficult to model and rig but we knew that this was a key model for the team so we discussed options to reduce the workload and make a concept that was more feasible. There were many key talking points that we discussed and sent out the next day.