"CHERRY" CHENWEI ZHOU
Production Management Portfolio
Bearly
Roles: Director, 3D Producer
SCAD, Sep 2019 - May 2020
Film Details
Bearly was the first film produced by SCAD Animation Studios. The production was transferred to an online system in March 2019 after COVID-19 started. The animation was done in Autodesk Maya and lit in Foundry Katana.
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Team size: 59 students
Film length: 3.5 min 3D&2D hybrid animated musical film
Production time: 9 months
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My Management Work
Click Images to Expand
As the Director, I directed the film team which consisted of 59 visual artists, and worked with the composer and singer closely. During the production, I edited all animatics for dailies.
As the 3D Producer, I managed the 3D team which consisted of myself, the 3D lead, and 18 animators. I distributed the initial animation files to make sure all files had the correct naming and reference and camera set up.
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The team used Shotgun and SyncSketch for artwork reviews, and Slack for team communication.
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Using Shotgun
We set up tasks for all assets and shots and assigned them to artists. For some assets we set up due dates and changed status when they were approved.
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Because the producers and I self-taught Shotgun, we may not used the most correct tools for some functions. However, I believe making it work for what we wanted was the most important part. With some guidance, I would also comprehend the correct tool quickly.
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In the 3D team, I also put in the 3D lead Peter Kerkvliet and myself so we can get notifications on any updates for each shot, although later I figured using "cc" or "Reviewer" would be a better way.
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Peter and I made review comments on each version of the animation shots. The notes were more detailed after the production became remote.
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We would change the status of each version after reviewing them to make the process clear.
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To review all shots together, I requested the animators to upload their versions to a "3D Animation Review" playlist. Before each dailies I would delete the older versions and keep only the newest version in the playlist. In dailies, I used Shotgun Screening Room to play all shots in order.
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After a Shotgun update, the playlist kept sorting by Date Created, and I spent some time to find the "Save Current Sort as Sort Order" option.
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Production Tutorials
I worked with the department leads and designed the production workflow, including the file delivery between departments, the asset and shot priorities, and human resource management.
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I created 7 tutorial files totaling 30 pages that explain details of pipeline to different group of artists.
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I made a FileZilla tutorial for remote production.
PDF tutorials I made
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Environment Population
The environment in Bearly was a huge forest, and to make the film look pretty it is ideal to create shot-based sets. However, we didn't have enough artists on the environment team.
After several discussions in the lead board, we decided to use a "set populator" script written by the technical director to generate an initial large forest, and cut it to smaller pieces when artists in other departments become available.
After some animators finished their shots, I chose some of the most responsible ones to help on the environment. I cut the intial forest to shot-based sets, then asked the animators to adjust the set for the best look from the camera and populate the sets with small objects such as leaves, rocks, twigs, mushrooms and pinecones. At then end I brought all the populated items back to the initial forest file, because there are two shots in which we see the full forest.
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Because over 1300 assets were referenced into the full forest, Maya failed to load shaders when there were individual shaders on each asset. To fix this problem, I applied lambert1 (the Maya default shader) on all the assets in the environment library, which is used by the set populator tool, and wrote a simple script to apply one set of shader on the same object in the set files. To simplify the shading system in Katana, we also used UDIM on all environment assets.
Set Populator made by Mason Smigel
Forest before and after population
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Example of a shot before and after population
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The set file of this shot before and after population
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Production Spreadsheets
In the Bearly production, we had an environment Google sheet and a look dev Google sheet. They were mainly used by the leads to check status of shots and assets.
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The env file include a sheet recording the assignment and status of each asset (trees, grass, rocks, etc.), and one that records the status of shot-based sets.
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In the look dev file, I mainly used the lighting and render sheets. Because we use alembic files to send the animation from Maya to Katana for lighting, I would export alembics frequently and update the dates on the lighting spreadsheet when I did so. When we were close to the end of production, to make sure all alembics were up-to-date, I assigned an animator to take the resposiblity and update all shots so that I could focus on the output.
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Our production was tranferred to a remote system because of COVID-19, but Katana was not on the SCAD render farm, so we had to remotely control school computers to batch render the film from Katana and Nuke. Only a few artists received the remote control access, so the render team was naturally formed with these artists, whatever their original roles were. We used the render sheet to track the status of each shot. We were short on time for rendering at the end of production, so I monitored the renders and I would notify the artists about "your render will be done in 8 minutes so can you render this next?"
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