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Lessons learned....

As I move forward with this new production I dare not repeat the mistakes of the past...here's some things I'm doing differently this time...

Breaking the film into more sequences... many more sequences but they have less shots are more manageable... WATS was made up of 11 sequences...some with hundreds of shots... the After Effects project files for each sequence for too big and took like 2 minutes to save.... HSM has 46 sequences... the biggest one has around 50 shots...

Using centralized storage for all source media... This time around I'm using a dedicated file/render server... on WATS I used drives on the render slaves...bad idea... If one crashed or restarted it would screw me up because I was accessing the media on my workstation... So I'm building a cheap file server that will run the c4d render server and house all the source media...

Bringing in the editor, sound designer and composer early on... I didn't bring them in until the edit was being done... Once the animatic is done at the end of this month the editor, sound designer and composer will all get a copy of the animatic so they can start work early....

More 3d.... as much as I love mixing 3d/stopmo/cutout and live action in the same shot it causes production to lag and limits my cinematography... so HSM is %80 3d......

Dialog... it wasn't a mistake in WATS just a different kind of film....but HSM contains about the same amount of dialog as a normal samurai film...

Constantly reevaluate/ reassess production schedules...WATS took a year longer than I initially planned because I really didn't do enough tests... With HSM I will TEST TEST TEST before production to make sure my time estimates are accurate so that I always am able to predict the required time...

Comments

  1. Thanks for these notes. I'm in the middle of figuring out the schedule/pipeline for a big machinima series and your comments are most helpful. If you get a chance, can you go into more detail about your new "centralized" media storage? Perhaps with some pix? Would help a lot. Thanks. Love your work.

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