Applied Animation: Progress Meeting 05/02

Earlier this week Katy and I scheduled a session to sit down and chat about how far we had got and what still had left to do in preparation for our pre-production crit on Monday. At the start of the week, I had encouraged Katy to look more at creating the environments for our animation, so I could move forward and begin to look at creating look tests, animation tests and so on. I had also asked her to create the final textures based on the ones we had chosen from our material testing, as I thought that it would be simple, as we had already created the textures so there was no need to experiment further. However, she had decided to begin work on a final storyboard instead and experiment more with textures on a larger scale. This has put us behind by a week and I was beginning to worry, as we still don't have any environments to work with or show. It is also making my part of the process quite difficult to complete, as I don't have all of the elements to work with. 

With this in mind, I asked Katy if she was struggling and offered my help, which she turned down with a promise to work a little faster and have things completed by mid next week. Whilst she was doing this I suggested that I could possibly start to move forward and create some phoneme sheets that would aid us when animating, of the shapes each characters mouth would make when talking. 

Although I feel Katy is falling behind a little, I also started to think that it may be due to me not communicating properly with her about where we should be at and what the plan is for the week. To try and solve this I made it clear that I wanted Katy to forget about the storyboard for now and have the environments and final textures done by the end of next week. I also asked if she understood what it is that she needed to do this week to make sure that I hadn't been confusing. She seemed clear on her tasks and I'm pleased that I had made things clearer for her.

Hopefully I have managed to encourage Katy to work a little quicker and not spend too much time on one task but rather keep the deadlines I set in mind and try her best to stick to them. As of now, I feel that it is safe to say I have adopted the role of producer and director and whilst I wanted us both to have a say in how things got done within this project, I feel that I have had to tell Katy which direction she needs to take next. I'd really like to encourage Katy to be more confident in her choices and I will do my best to do so throughout the remainder of the project.