Week 1: The Black Dog Project

Trimester 5, 2018 begins. I had a good start this week; we hit the ground running but I'm feeling on top of everything.

For our third studio subject this year, my peers and I will be emulating a studio - 13 of us altogether, besides extra collaborators. We have been tasked with creating an animated documentary over the next thirteen weeks.

After pitching ideas, we brainstormed these two:

'Grandma's Kitchen'

- a historical look at life in southern China & exploring immigration

and

Black Dog

- an exploration of how depression affects people in their everyday lives

We used a program called Mural to create these mind maps, which could add to and update live. We are using Slack as our main communication tool, Trello as a visual project management tool and the G-Drive to compile/ back-up our work.

As a team we decided to pursue Black Dog; we split up the work, assigned producers, lead etc., and are currently in the process of researching and creating concepts.

I volunteered as lead of post-production. I looked a little bit more into what this phase in the pipeline will require and the list is extensive; colour grading, compositing, possibly matte painting 2D backgrounds, lighting, audio compositing, some FX, rendering, editing, titles and credits...

This will demand a lot of space in our pipeline and as a team we will need to budget our time for this in foresight. During (pre)production, we can begin testing different techniques/effects, to help things run smoothly when it is time for post.

In my own time, I began a course on Lynda.com:

Nuke Essential Training

with Steve Wright

I've found it to be a great introductory course into the basics/interface of Nuke and would recommend it to anyone who is new to this industry standard program.

I'm also currently involved in an urban planning project with Gerard Coutts & Associates & Maroondah council in creating a promotional video for some suburban sites they wish to develop. This week, we went on site and flew drones over the areas, with the proper checks & permissions. I will be running the drone footage through camera tracking tools more complex than what I've been using so far (After Effects), so I can composite architectural models & info graphics into the 3D space.

Fortunately, we will be covering some of these features in Nuke 10.5v5 over the course of the trimester. This job comes with it's own obstacles and I will need to remain switched on over the next few months in order to juggle everything and successfully deliver quality outcomes.

Good luck everyone!