More about the project
Two-Month production schedule
One month of production time wasn't enough time with the previous collab. Two months proved to be a good time frame. It was urgent enough to keep the pace moving while not generating too much pressure.
2 months will likely be the standard going forward but may change depending on the scope of future collabs.
All Skill Levels Welcome
Perpetuation what we learned from Collab.02, we aim to structure a project for all skill levels to participate. We're happy to report that the credits feature low and high level contributors! Frankly, it's amazing to see those lines blur when everyone works together and helps each other.
Without a doubt one of our favorite aspects of the Collab format.
Expanding Skills
Several key new skills were executed by contributors during this project: Design, Rigging, Animation, Lighting, and VFX.
DESIGN: Apart from the robot, we had no artwork or explicit reference to source from. Supervisors had to collect various unrelated artwork and photography, develop a cohesive design bible, and effectively disseminate to contributors. A first in collab history and a big step forward for future projects.
RIGGING: Robotic equipment had to be design, modeled and rigged from scratch. Rigging is always a technical challenge, not for the faint of heart. Yet the machinery department banded together and pulled it off beautifully.
ANIMATION: Robotic equipment also had to be animated constructing the robot. While robotic movement is inherently linear and stiff, making animation simpler in some ways, the animation on this project serves as a significant development in our pipeline.
LIGHTING: Kent takes lighting pretty seriously and admits that he has trouble trusting someone else with it. However, hangar supervisor Omar Domenech played a huge role in the lighting of this project. Yet another important step toward a self-sufficient pipeline!
VFX: This is the first collab to tackle realistic visual effects like sparks and smoke simulation. That's another major skillset added to our utility belt.
(mostly) Maintaining DIY-friendly pipeline tools
The biggest pain-point from Collab.01-02 was asynchronous communication. We utilized community forum threads which were not designed for this task; not even a little bit.
This time we utilized a paid general project management platform called Basecamp. We use it for company project management as well. While it's not specifically designed for animation production, it worked incomparably better for task organization, scheduling, and async communication.
We still want to be as DIY-friendly as possible and are looking into FOSS alternatives. We continued using Google Docs and Google Drive for this project.
