Cherry Zhou | Fish Out of Water

Con Amore

Roles: Producer, Editor, Animator

SCAD, Jan - Mar 2019

Film Details

Con Amore is an official selection for the 21st Annual Real to Reel International Film Festival and RiverRun International Film Festival 2020.

Team size: 8 students in class and 7 artists out of class

Film length: 3-min 3D animated film

Production time: 10 weeks

My Management Work

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Con Amore was a film done in a SCAD Collaborative Project class designed for Animation graduate students. The whole class has to create a film in a 10-week quarter together. There were only 8 students in my class, which was the second-least number of people ever. To finish the film on time, I found some other SCAD students as well as artists outside of SCAD who were willing to help. The artists were located in Pennsylvania, Hong Kong, and Italy, and I was in charge of all the online communications with them individually.

Team Assignment

In the first class, I retrieved my classmates' contact information and their class schedule, so I could arrange future meetings and set up due dates. The contact information of other artists were added after they joined the team. I also casted everyone to different teams based on their interest and skill sets. Because this is a small team with limited time, everyone had to wear multiple hats.

Production Schedule

I reverse engineered from our deadline and created a production schedule using week as its unit for the second meeting. The whole team had a great shock because the strict timeline was an abstract idea for them until they saw how little time each task had. Just like in all productions, the schedule changed a lot since then, but it was a huge motivation for the team to work faster than usual.

Making Notes for Meetings

I made notes for all the meetings and sent them to the team via email. If we mentioned any reference images, I would also include them. I highlighted people's names and team names in the notes so they could easily find themselves. This way I could guarantee that every member knew what they need to do by the next meeting. It also gave us the chance to trace back to the decisions we made in previous meetings.

Shot List Spreadsheet

After the storyboard was finished, I created the shot list Google Sheet. In addition to the shot information, I put a column for animation notes in which I would write the notes from each meeting, and the animators would check the notes when they revise the shots. I would remove the implemented notes and keep the ones still not addressed. If the lighter found any problems such as floating objects and wrong layer names, it would be noted in the same column.

Half way through the production, we changed the shots drastically, so I made all deleted shots in gray and updated the story beat for shots changed.