Patrick W. Crawford, Blender NYC Meetup Group writes:
After months of quarantine, a few members of the Blender NYC meetup group decided to challenge themselves to a weekend animation sprint. Having never worked together on a collaborative project, it was a unique experience to try and combine skills and work virtually.
Collectively, we were pretty surprised about what we accomplished! Some of the key success definitely came from an early on guiding principle: “Think Small”. Instead of biting off more than we could chew, we opted for something short and reasonable to see what we could do while still having the closure of a completed project.
In the end, ~95% of this animation was created within the 48 hours - including ideation, concept, modeling + rigging, animation, and sound design rendered exports. We ended up doing a small amount of polishing within the week after (tweaking particle settings, redoing road skid marks, and making those lil’ turtle legs wiggle some more) but otherwise, everything was done during the original time period itself. The only borrowed asset was the turtle’s yellow smear frame effect, from the Blender Foundation.
What went well:
- Having a point person act as director to decide things, and another point person act as a technical director to resolve technical problems (like syncing assets or linking things)
- Using library linking to separate tasks, and using the concept of “master files” (which get linked elsewhere) and “working files”, and communicate when “promoting to master”.
- Setting up *ahead of time* a way to share and sync files automatically (we almost used a GitLab repo, but opted to just use Drive FS for automated syncing between all our machines).
- Screen Sharing while working - was very valuable to see the way people work and tackle problems.
What could have gone better:
- Multiple story revisions mid weekend; e.g. swapping the order of the car vs tortoise, and what hits what or what occurs at the end; but, the end result was definitely better after evolving the idea as we got feedback/reviewed latest renders, rather than sticking blindly to the original animatic!
- Preplanning the story more. Could have spent’ more time storyboarding, would have been harder at the end
- A lot of the work towards the end was all in one scene file, so only one person at a time could bring everything together (but even so, one person could still make asset updates as saw issues in this combined scene file). In the future: use library linking for animation actions too to really minimize how much work is done in the central “scene render” file.
Super pumped about the experience, we are looking forward to doing more of these challenges in the future - possibly even “dueling” other city meetup groups at some point!
B3D NYC team: Justin Antero, Patrick W. Crawford, William Young, Mike Guiliano (Mikey Ace), Michael Montez (plus concept artwork by Celina Bertoncini early on).
