Cherry Zhou | Treasure

Treasure

Role: Producer, Animator

SCAD, Dec 2020 - Present

Film Details

Team size: 16 students

Film length: 3-min 3D&2D hybrid animated film

Production time: 12 months (ongoing) (I joined in the last 6 months）

My Management Work

Click Images to Expand

The Director Bai Huang plans to work on most of the 3D and 2D animation and texturing by herself, so my duties in Treasure include:

Setting up the production schedule for the last 6 months,
Cleaning up and organizing the environment model files, and preparing them for texturing,
Communication with modelers and riggers when changes are needed,
Check-ins with Bai on a daily basis and solving her problems on all aspects of the production,
Managing the film official website.

Production Spreadsheet

I made the shot list spreadsheet from modifying my spreadsheet for Blooming. Because the shot beats in Treasure might change, I decided to number the shots in 10s so it's easier to add new shots.

I used conditional format on the 3D and 2D animation status columns. We would put in numbers between 0 and 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. This way, we can visually tell the progress of each shot.

Based on the production schedule I designed for Bai (shown below), I put in the deadlines for each shot. On every Sunday night, I would color shots due the following week in yellow, and past due in red. The finalized shots are in green.

Production Schedule

I set up the schedule for every department for the last two quarters based on the team's professional ability and time availability. I set up detailed deadlines for every shot based on the shot priority and difficulty. If a shot has 2D elements, then the 3D animation would due earlier. Longer and harder shots are due later because they need more time being developed and revised. I made the schedule tighter than I anticipate the team to finish work, because from my production experiences I realized that most work will miss the preset due dates, but in tighter schedules artists would finish the work earlier than in loose ones, which eventually would meet the production deadline.

File Organization

The layout animation was done and modeling was wrapping up when I joined the production of Treasure. I noticed that all versions of the environment assets were in the same folder and not named properly, so I moved them into a "Modeling and Texturing" folder, and put a cleaned up version of each environment in the animation assets folder.

The assets/Env folder before organizing.

I also cleaned up the maya scenes by deleting floating faces, renaming and grouping objects, and creating, unwrapping, and laying out the UVs.

An example of outliner before and after cleaning up.

The "Modeling and Texturing" folder I made.

The assets/Env folder after organizing.