Delivering on a tight timeline
Timelines are something I'm always very conscious of on projects. As a person who doesn't have a solid grip on the passage of time, particularly when it comes to big-picture things, I keep quite rigid day-by-day project schedules. They provide an assurance that as long as I'm hitting certain milestones at set times, the project on the whole will get done on time and I'll be able to give accurate ETAs because my plan dictates them. I can feel pretty rudderless and unproductive when I don't have some sort of schedule.
As such, the idea of taking on a project with a lot of elements that require skills development with a pretty tight deadline in tandem with another project that has a not-so-tight, but super hard deadline is pretty nightmare-inducing for me.
Skills Development
OniGroup is a company who work with Google - in particular their location services - to develop platforms which aid the logistics sector. We work with fairly regularly and have created animated videos for a few of their needs. As such, and as we were subject to a tight deadline, I was really pleased to receive the After Effects files for the previous videos from one of my colleagues at Posh Gecko. However, I was slightly daunted when I spotted some techniques that I've never used before like 3D layers, camera movements and some expressions that I hadn't seen before had been used in quite integral ways.
After creating a storyboard using a few scenes that already existed, but had to be reworked along with other brand new scenes which used some preexisting background graphics, I got to work right away, picking apart the scenes and graphics I'd be using in terms of this new functionality and investigating ways of reworking all of these elements to suit my needs. Along with this I had to consider my new scenes and how I might animate them in a way that seemed in-keeping with the reworked scenes. I got on ok with that, although I still plan to investigate those new techniques once I get some downtime, and once the storyboard was approved, I was able to head straight into the animation phase which went really smoothly.
Check out the full video below, or take a look at some of my animation work from a year ago to see how I've been progressing.
I'm part of the Posh Gecko team, ownership of this project belongs to Posh Gecko and/or the respective client and has been posted with the relevant permissions.