Recap Week 06

We finished up the sprint from week 05 on Monday, and were assigned new ones on Tuesday. Mine was to complete a new animation test of 150 frames on the theme 'Sadness'.

Ideally, one sprint should be divided into several shorter tasks (preferably so short that you can finish them within a work day). This is also to give a sense of progression and have an overview of how much is left on one sprint.

I divided my sprint into the basic stages of animation - Layout, blocking, splining and polishing (I'll go through those in the next recap). I tried to estimate how many hours each stage would take, and made those into the shorter tasks. I also added a bit of work by making my animation 200 frames instead of 150.

Besides animating I also got to do a couple of unexpected tasks. The team had been working on an application for Annecy, and we sat down for a few hours to do some collective proof-reading of the document.

It was a very good document to write in general, I think it gave us all a clearer idea of what we are doing. Plus that there is a huge sense of success in having such a nice-looking document as this!
We also decided on a working title for the project: "Driftwoods".


The writing team sat down to discuss the universe and the characters. I've chosen to not involve myself too much with the writing itself, but I'm still happy to give opinions in the meetings. :)

When Friday and the deadline for this week's Sprint came around I wasn't finished with my Sprint. This was mostly due to the fact that I had planned to spent all of my working hours on animating. But in the end I spent around 6 hours on proof-reading and various meetings, and since I didn't leave any time for unexpected meetings I got short on hours for my animation.

Our conclusion during the evaluation was to leave at least 45 minutes every day for those unexpected meetings and tasks. We also decided within the animation team to plan 30 minutes everyday for feedback sessions. My personal lesson from this week and Sprint was that I got to experience the limit of my abilities, and I know better what I have time to do and not.

Next week is gonna be spent on finishing my animation for last week's Sprint!