Collaboration was at the center of this project. My initial aim from my pitch was always to collaborate with another person based on their ideas, to replicate working in a large studio environment. A shot animator from our class Mason presented his pitch, which showed that his interests lay in creating an animated short using Mixamo rigs and importing everything into Unreal Engine, and although he set out to do it himself, he stated that his weaknesses were camera and layout. His idea was a zombie short film, and towards the end of the pitch, I expressed interest in working with him, and then followed this up immediately afterward over Whatsapp:
Collaboration / Project Management
After our first meeting, we created a combined Padlet, which is a mood board creation site allowing us to throw our ideas in, to assist with brainstorming. The Padlet is intended to be a very rough and creative space. It worked effectively in pre-production stages to throw on tutorials and bits of research, to help establish the heavy technical aspects of the project.
Communication was key during our collaboration. Mason set up a Discord for us to communicate with, which is an app that allows multiple channels with different purposes, calls with recording and screen sharing abilities, small file sharing etc.
Examples of uses for the discord channel
For work, a shared Onedrive was set up, which had all of our project files. This meant not only could we work from any computer with one drive installed (great for personal use) but also that we could see each other’s work, and have one dedicated project folder per software which we could create our own files, and share certain aspects such as scenery or animations.
As I was doing Layout/ Worldbuilding, and Mason was leading Animation, I had to make sure our work could easily overlap, meaning there was less reliability on each other. After each stage of worldbuilding, I can select all the polygons, and export them as a separate file, which Mason references in his own project, to then do his own mocap/ animations. Here is an example of Mason working with an early development of my build.
For the Unreal project then, I’d still reference in my original world build, and then Mason would send over his animations in the shared project folder. He did his own organisation which meant I knew where everything was.
I would import these animations into Unreal, and then edit them in the sequence. (See Experimentation / R&D)
Sound & Music
Another big part of our collaboration was with the sound designers/music composers.
During a meeting with the entire sound class, I pitched the project using some visual elements of our project to their entire class, and as a group, they declared which sound designers and music people would be working with us.
We were set up with Dacre Ponsford, and Hammad Javid as our sound designers, as well as Will Shorten to be our music consultant. We had our first meeting with them on the 22nd of February, and they were very happy to crack on. They were also added to our discord to have consistent conversations with them.
A big part of the success of this collaboration was sending consistent exports for them to work with, which they would then add and replace to their projects so they could keep working. I would indicate an export being finished over our discord channel.
Dacre also sent this to indicate his sound design workflow:
This collaboration was mostly relying on the competency of Dacre, who attended every meeting. We had issues with Hammad, who kept claiming to be too busy. He also never sent any drafts over. Dacre took charge of this and addressed the situation on behalf of us. In the end it led to him carrying out most of the sound design work.
Will’s music discussion was excellent. As I said I’d assist with creating some music, he was brought on more as a consultant, and to start off the music production. After bouncing a few ideas he sent over a project with some really creepy music. After this, I declared I would carry on the composition elements myself and was very impressed with what he had done.
Overall project collaboration
As the project was so intense in collaboration, here’s a mindmup visually depicting the workflow. Each member is assigned their own colour, with light blue representing projects that are considered the collaborative elements.
A huge step in regards to project management, was everyone’s shared use of the Export folder.
In our post Easter holidays meeting in April, although me and Mason had effectively collaborated consistently throughout, with frequent meetings and meetups, we had no quite heard from the sound people.
What I declared at that point was that me and Mason collectively do our best to produce very regular exports showing our work, so that they always have the most up to date version, and therefore can produce more accurate sound design and or music production.
It was also used by the sound designers to send over their work. It was an excellent space for everyone to share their pieces, and although messy on the surface, was an extremeley well organised method of project management.
