"CHERRY" CHENWEI ZHOU
Production Management Portfolio
Blooming
Roles: Producer, Director
SCAD, Jan 2020 - Nov 2020
​
Film Details
Team size: 30 SCAD students and alumni
Film length: 2-min 3D animated film
Production time: 11 months
​
My Management Work
Click Images to Expand
Blooming is my MFA thesis film. All artists worked on it offered volunteer help on top of their school work or day time jobs, and the COVID-19 pandamic started soon after the production did, so the communication was almost all online and in an one-on-one style. I used Slack, FaceBook Messenger and WeChat to communicate with different artist, and SyncSketch for animation reviews.
​
Some artists could only work on a few tasks and then they had to quit for their other projects, so I had to find new artists, change work assignment and revise the production schedule for a few times.
​
Production Drive
Because a large portion of the artists have graduated from SCAD, I decided to use Google Drive for the production instead of the SCAD collaborative drive. On Google, I kept my tradition and organized the folders clearly so any one using the drive can find files without confusion. I am used to name my Maya animation projects with a suffix "_proj", so it's called "blooming_proj" here.
​
Production Spreadsheet
As usual, I made a Google Sheet to record the condition of each shot. I used conditional formatting in the sheet. When an artist's name is typed or chosen from the drop-down menu, which I created with data validation, the cell will change into the artist's assigned color. In the "Animation", "Cloth Sim", and "Lighting" columns, I used numbers from 0 to 100 to show the progress percentage. Once the number is put in, the cell will automatically turn red if it's 0, yellow if it's 50, and green if it's 100. Therefore, when the artists checked the sheet, they would notice if anything is behind for the color being different.
​
Production Pipeline
In the "Frame Count" column in the spreadsheet above, you can see that most shots started from frame 100. This is because I did cloth simulation for the characters. In order to increase the correctness and stability of the simulation, in the animation I set up a run up of the characters at T pose for 30 frames, slowly moving into the first pose in 30 frames, and staying in the pose for another 40 frames. Therefore, the actual animation starts at frame 100 for all character animation in this film.
​
Once the animation of a shot is ready for cloth simulation, I would collect the updated version of the Maya file, export alembic caches for each character and prop, and send them to the cloth effects team. The cloth effects will run the simulation and do tech fixese with the anim cache, and send back alembic caches of simulation to me. Then, I would create a brand new Maya file with the set and T-pose models, blend shape the anim and sim caches on to models, and send this version to the lighters. This way, all departments work on their own files and wouldn't step on each other's feet.
Render with cloth simulation.
Example of the set up of a lighting file. The hidden (gray) objects are the alembic caches, which were blendshaped onto the models.
Process Book
As a requirement of the SCAD Animation MFA program, I wrote a process book in which I included my research and production documentations. Because I understand that page layout and design would change if my text changes, I decided to finish writing all the contents in a word documents first and then do all the layout together. In the word file, I color coded the texts so it's easier for my thesis professors and my tutor from the Writer's Studio to review. I used InDesign to do the layout, which references images instead of importing, so I collected and organized all the images in the drafting stage and it sped up my layout process by a lot.
​
Some pages from my process book.
​
Production Episode
To better animate actions with the flow of Chinese Classical Dance, I asked a friend Stina Wen who learned the dance to act out many scenes in the film. It was when the most serious period of the COVID-19 pandemic, so we decided to record all the reference videos with face masks on.
​