Aviva Gomberg: the FINAL PPJ

WOW final PPJ! This is so exciting who even knows what to say! I am in high spirits today because the end is near.

This week I just finished everything I needed to do I guess. Renders, comps, background plates, what have you. I feel pretty confident in the work I did, and am more relaxed today than I would’ve expected for the day before the project is due. Lots of crazy late nights, weird, reversed sleep schedules and high stress this past week but I feel fairly optimistic. I kept doing this thing were I would get home at 6 am from the labs and then play the Sims even though I desperately need the sleep. It’s been a weird last week.

THE GOOD: Really the only news you need to hear. I went to the senior sendoff today with a bunch of other digms and i won a TV in the raffle!! Very exciting.

THE BAD: I did waste a lot of time so the work I did I probably could’ve done more productively. But whatever.

 

 

Party on.

 

Aviva’s Post-Mordem PPJ

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

These past couple weeks I’ve reflected on our senior project a lot, a great deal of “where did we go wrong”‘s and “what could we have done differently/better?” and “what change could I have affected that I didn’t?”

Disclaimer: I feel like this can’t be entirely honest since we 1. Have not yet finished senior project and can therefore not be completely objective/ we don’t even know the full extent of our work yet and 2. I have not yet been given a grade my you (Rob/Abishek) or our adviser so I’m not going to be as honest as I could be.

3 THINGS THAT WERE DONE RIGHT

1. Boy howdy did we do a project, did we make and produce a thing. That alone is an accomplishment, right? We worked, a lot. Lots of hours and effort and tears went into this project. Regardless of the end result (which is still unclear beacause haven’t yet finished) we put a lot into it.
2. Soft Pastels and sweet plants. These were big deals to me so I’m happy we ended up with the aesthetic we did. It was soft and gentle and ethereal and it makes me happy to look at and that is important.
3. Fall term. Fall term was super solid for us. We were flowing with creative ideas and momentum. We did good work and constantly. We were on point. While we weren’t able to maintain that momentum throughout the year, I am proud of the work we did in the beginning.

3 THINGS THAT WERE DONE BADLY

1. Pretty poor communication. Our team struggled a lot with poor communication that i think got in the way of our own productivity and well-being. Things weren’t always clear, and I know I often felt out of the loop, not sure what was going on when, which hindered my ability to have input on things. That was frustrating. Things got done without everyone knowing about it which made things very tense at times. Messages weren’t always relayed or recieved and it caused a lot of tension which affected the overall feeling surrounding our project. And when you feel crappy going into a project, and you lose any  semblance of passion for a project, it affects the quality & quantity of work put in. We also didn’t know how to talk to each other always. We got in fights and shut each other out, it wasn’t always clear how to approach each other when feelings were hurt. I know I struggled with this a lot. I might be oversensitive to things but I often felt like people were pitted against each other, and felt like my feelings were getting hurt a lot.
2. We were led astray early and often. This problem was the biggest thing I reflect back on in terms of “where did we go wrong? What could’ve been done better?” Like I said earlier, we had a very solid start in fall term. We came into the year with a fully realized story. It was concise, wimple, and short. And most importantly, completely finished and storyboarded and turned into an animatic by our very first faculty presentation. And then, came the feedback. Endless critiques that more often than not were not constructive but only served to challenge our story simply to challenge it. We tore our story apart countless times. We were changing it into winter term. It hindered a lot of production because so much depended on our story. And the thing is, I don’t think our story now is any better than our very first original story. We convoluted our own idea and I really only think this hindered us. We spent way too much time hung up on story that we feel behind, and spent the rest our project rushing and catching up.
   1. This is a topic that really gets me mad. The animation program here has no formal story telling  class, no focus on it in our major at all. They tore us apart time and time again taking away our focus from the actual production of our class. If this program cares so much about story, then make a class. Teach us.
   2. I think besides story this happened a lot inside our team as well. We had no organized sense of pipeline and lacked a central leadership guiding us in the right direction. But again, there is a lot I will not talk about while this project and class is still ongoing.
3. We were working against our natural strengths/weaknesses. We are a small team and it is hard to get so much done with so few people. But for all of winter and spring term I don’t think we did it correctly. This ties into the other two topics but I think we went about the project all wrong. I voiced this a lot throughout the process but I felt pretty alone in my point of view. We basically split up all the work evenly instead of dissecting who is good (and bad) at what and planning accordingly. I think it lead to inconsistencies in our project and majorly hindered our productivity. A lot of times, it didn’t feel like a team project, rather, 5 consecutive projects stacked next to each other. We split the story up into fives parts and everyone was completely responsible for their chunk. I think in general our pipeline was nonexistent and we lacked the organization to reach our full potential . I think we also had really different standards and priorities which again, could have been a good thing for us — all of us focusing on different aspects and areas of the project and bringing it all together — but we lacked the organization and communication skills to make this work for us.

3 THINGS I DID DONE LEARNED

1. How to be more adaptable. I have bad work ethic and am too emotionally invested in things. My productivity is directly related to my passion and emotions. While this can be a good thing, (When I am passionate about something I can create hella good stuff) more often than not, it wasn’t. I have been working on being more adaptable. When things do not go my way, how to find my niche. When things change suddenly and drastically how to mentally adjust without stress crying a bunch first. Just trying to be a better team player.
2. Learning new software — Marvelous deisgner & mental ray! Just kidding, it was Renderman. Just kidding, it was Maya hardware 2.0
3. How to detach myself from my earthly vessel
   1. Sometimes you just gotta let go, you know?

 

Anyways. Senior project was a thing. Now it’s almost over. Both excited to be done and terrified for the due date.

Thank you for reading.

Spring PPJ #8 – Aviva

It’s me! Aviva!

This  animation lock was simultaneously sooo stressful  and very cleansing to be done. Now on to the next stage — rendering and post! I’m very happy to have made it. This week just in the labs was many many very late nights and surviving on chipotle. Not sure what else to say, I just worked a lot. Two days before our animation lock I gave shots to Cali and Anna that was also both a relief and very stressful. Stressful because our adviser was requesting major animation changes (more than just refining) the day of the animation lock. In one case, a shot that was unchanged since our very first storyboard. That was frustrating and stressful. Anyways,

Aviva Week 7 PPJ

This week was just more iterations of animation, trying to get closer and closer to satisfied with my work. We are in the final stretch! I also made gifs for the senior showcase presentation and worked on some design stuff for the slides. I love downloading fonts! It’s one of my  favorite past times, let me know if you need some fonts.

 

Aviva Week 6 PPJ

Wow! Week six already! So crazy, am I right? Time sure flies when you have impending deadlines.

This week I worked on refining & polishing animation, as one does. I was not as productive this week as I have in the past but you know.

The Good: Worked on animation, refined animation, polished animation. Also made a chair.

The Bad: I would yet to consider any of my shots complete. I would consider all of them collectively getting closer and closer, but it would be nice to have some that I could be like “Yes, you are done. You are final. You are complete.” I could always be more productive. I am not a generally productive person and I’m nervous this makes me unemployable. What can you do, right??????????????????????????????????????????????

Aviva Gomberg Week 5 PPJ

Werkin hard on animated. Just animating away, refining and polishing. We have a time lock this week so i’ve been working mostly on timing, as opposed to detail animation. Also got renders of all my shots done. Worked a whole bunch

 

^^ Need to work out the grain on the ship light

Aviva Gomberg Week 4 PPJ

Oh boy where do I start! Mostly, I just worked on refining animation. Lots of refining. Tonight I made a rough of our showcase video. I have also been working on some drawings that I thought we could give out as little postcards at our senior showcase. I don’t know what else to say, I feel like I said it all.

The bad: I guess I could’ve worked more, I could always do with doing a little bit more.

The good: got a fair amount of refining done, though again, I still have a long way to go.

^^ Workin’ on a draw — was inspired by the comic Summerland by Paloma Dawkins — still have to color in and refine my lines

 

Aviva Week 3 PPJ

This week was very busy! I got a late start to working on senior project this week because I was home for Passover from Monday night to Wednesday night. It was very stressful to not be able to work those days and I had to fit a heavy week’s worth of work into just Thursday — Sunday. It’s been rough.

The good: I got a lot done for environment & lighting. I worked on the instances for the first scene & the ship environment, trying to make everything look well blended together & fit well with in the landscape. I worked on strategically placing plants places to mask the repetitiveness of the instances. For the ship scene I placed in Hoodoos & a background plane so that we have more layers & depth in our background, helping to make the hoodoos fit more naturally as well. I worked on lights for the search scenes, the first images below.

The bad: In the first image for the search scene I still have adjustments to make in the environment (specific to my shot) and in the second I have to fix the light linking issue we are having with our instances) . Overall, I feel good about the amount of work I have accomplished this week, though it wouldve been nice to be able to work more. Have been losing it slightly but at least I’m productive.

Overexposed plants

Aviva Week 2 PPJ

THE GOOD: This week was rough! I started out with a lot of momentum and motivation. I put a personal emphasis on organization, workflow and pipeline, because I think its really important for our team in order that we work efficiently. I think proper organization and communication is the key for getting our project done at this point. I put together two breakdowns — one of production responsibilities broken down as far as could, everything that needs to be done for environment, rendering, post, etc. The second one was a breakdown of what needs to be done for our animation. I know for me it’s very helpful to make a very specific list of everything that needs to be done, so instead of saying like “Cali, polish scene 4” we could say “Cali, fix the IK pop in scene 4, shot 6”. I did some experimentation for matte paintings, and I cleaned up textures and made some varieties of plants so that when we instance them they will look more diverse.

THE BAD: Things went south pretty quickly for this week. I got really frustrated because our adviser is being extremely strict with us sending him daily updates of all our progress, but during our meeting he revealed that he didn’t really look at any of the things I had sent him. This was upsetting. Speaking to other people in our group, it sounds like this current system is actually slowing down progress and I don’t know what we should do about that. I felt that while we were behind where we wanted to be, we were capable of handling things and getting everything under control and I have a lot of confidence in our team but now I feel like our team is under a bit of a choke hold where we’re not actually working in a pipeline that is best for our team, and were not working on the aspects of our project that need the most work.

Passover starts tonight and my sister and her family came in last week and it’s really really hard to prioritize senior project when I want to spend time with her and my nephews + niece because I am only able to see them at most, twice a year. I went home for Shabbat which I didn’t initially plan on but again, it’s really hard to know my entire family is getting together and being cute and not be a part of it. On top of being home for some of last week, I got really sick on Friday and have been consistently really sick since then. I’ve had a fever every night, my sinuses are busting out of my face, and every time I’ve done anything I feel like I’m about to faint. For me, this was extremely bad timing because I had these past couple of days I could work, and I am locked in to go home for the first couple days of Passover — tonight until Wednesday night. So, productivity wise, it’s terrible. Currently 4/5 of our team is sick. This is extremely bad for progress.