Weekly Evaluative Log

I know this probably doesn't bode well for the coming project, however, this weekly log is coming several days late. The start of a project is always the hardest part for me personally, however despite this I am on schedule so far — I have completed all of my pre-production, as the production schedule intended, and have (most importantly) figured out the aesthetic and layout for my Google Site. Having a good layout and colour scheme is one of the most important parts of a project, silly as it might sound, as it helps me keep all my thoughts organised and neat. I have also begun on my Subnautica research. I'm quite glad I started that early, since I assumed I would be copy-pasting a lot of it over from my video essay Site, however I'm having to reword a lot of it to make it relevant to worldbuilding.

I have already run into problems this week — I have adjusted my production schedule slightly (although I will try not to do this past this point) to amend issues regarding continuity and flow so that I am doing all the work in the best order possible. For example, I decided to switch around my production so that my worldbuilding and plot/characters sections would be done first so that I can build on this for the other categories. After analysing and reflection on my work so far, and looking a bit closer at my production schedule, I'm sceptical about how much I'll be able to include the cosmic horror in my final results, as the two clashing genres will pose a challenge. As a result of this, I would like to try extra hard not to abandon that side of my project, and to keep it in mind going forward.

My plan for the following week is to stick to my production schedule — I will finish my Subnautica research today, and then spend the rest of the week on Cameron's Avatar.

Yet again, this log is coming slightly late, however I have just finished up my work for the week, and I'm feeling superb about my progress. This week I finished off my Subnautica research and fully completely my research on Cameron's Avatar. I also had the great idea to, at the end of each of my worldbuilding subpages, a small section where I experiment with doing my own concept art, as if I were doing it for the actual piece of media. This is a great idea I think, as it will bag me some extra marks for the 2.2 assessment criteria.

I have accomplished everything I need to for my production schedule, am completely on track, with little to no change to my schedule so far. I was really worried I would not be able to write as much about Avatar as I did about Subnautica, as I am more personally interested in Subnautica. However, I actually managed to hit almost the exact same word count for my secondary research sections.

My plan for the coming week is to completely finish my worldbuilding in media sections, including Avatar the Last Airbender, and Tolkien's Middle Earth. After reviewing all the work I have done for the other two worldbuilding sections, and re-analysing the assessment criteria, I now plan to do around half the amount of secondary research for both of these medias. They are not quite as relevant for my final product, and I don't want to be spending unnecessary time on the same few criteria — this means it should hopefully only take four days maximum.

This log is coming to you, for the first time ever, actually on time! This week, I have achieved everything I set out to do, at a slightly hurried pace. My Tuesday was taken out by an unforeseen distraction, and so I got little to no work done on my Last Airbender research page then. I did a lot more work Wednesday, however I only managed to complete around half of the Last Airbender research due to the heat in the college classrooms being unbearable — plus my morning routine that day being interrupted which threw me off, and made me feel ill and tired. Because of this, I made the executive decision to stay home both Thursday and Friday, and begin my Easter holiday a bit early, so I can really focus and get my work done. I spent today and yesterday working hard from my home PC, and I managed to completely finish my Last Airbender subpage yesterday, and almost finish my Tolkien subpage, bar about two paragraphs, today. I decided I would really cut down on the amount of research I did about Middle Earth, as I felt like I was repeating myself a lot and going over the same or similar themes. After all, I wouldn't want the rest of my research to suffer for the sake of more of the same.

I don't plan on doing a log entry over the two-week holiday, however as you can see by my production schedule I have a lot planned. Outside the six days I am out working in Durham, I will be finishing all the rest of my research, so that once the new term begins I can really hit the ground running with my production. I'm feeling fantastic about this, not just because the bulk of my research is now done, but also because the rest of my research proves to be a lot easier hopefully, and more varied. I'm looking forward to a break, and my next weekly log will be on the Monday after the holiday, and will detail all the work I got done over the two weeks.

I surprisingly managed to achieve the vast majority of the things I set out to do over my two-week break. Due to complications with work, I ended up actually being away from Tuesday the 2nd till Monday the 8th, which means that I lost a day or two. This threw my production schedule out of whack, and I was forced to mostly improvise with timing — I have completed all of my cosmic horror research (with slightly less work than I initially intended), and pasted over a load of work from my Subnautica video essay project about Cory Strader for my concept art subpage. While I have created and sent off two surveys to my peers, I have not yet analysed and discussed the results. After reviewing all I've done and reflecting on my motivation and progress, I have decided that since I am meant to be starting on my production now, I will go ahead and start despite these unfinished areas. 

For the following week, I will be starting on the plot and characters section of production; I mostly just want to outline the character you will play as in the video game, as well as what they're doing in this world, and what their goal is. I may or may not mash the worldbuilding in with this, as I would like to outline the different places/people they interact with over the course of the game. It won't take too long, hopefully, and then soonish I will be able to move onto the bulk of the concept art — environments and creatures. 

Yet again, this log is coming late! This week, I have managed to completely finish concepting and designing the main character of this game, Maur. I experienced extreme burnout over the weekend, and so did not manage to do any of the unfinished research pages I was supposed to do — I need to really get on the ball with that, however I have been extremely stressed and busy for external reasons at the moment, and so my energy levels over my weekends are taking a hit. On my morning train journey today, however, I managed to write immense amounts about the character's lore and backstory, and I'm hoping I can use those times to get some writing in.

I made the decision this week to combine the characters, plot, and worldbuilding into one page, since they all kind of go hand in hand. I will be referring continuously to my worldbuilding research, and even if it doesn't look like I'm directly taking inspiration from these, I will definitely be doing it subconsciously. This research might not factor directly into my production, however I will try my best to bring light to any inspirations I take from the media I have studied when I am discussing it in my production. 

I am hoping that this week I can continue along my production schedule and start doing some environment designs. Of course, the plot and worldbuilding parts of the game will mostly be explained in the designated subpage, however I will be developing the world continuously throughout the research — the environments are vital to the world, so I will continue to expand and develop as I begin concepting them.

This week was quite dramatic as it regards to changes in my project. I have started on the background/environment design this week, and so far designed two (the purple mushroom forest, and the caves). After just two days of this, I ran into one glaring issue, and one massive oversight; I do not enjoy, nor am I particularly good at, background design and the concept art style. This caused me to have a minor crisis, and I feel that my work is suffering because of this. Neither of the backgrounds I have designed, nor the design for the player-character, meet my standards for what I would consider to be acceptably good work — I also feel my skills will not be improved by continuing this repetitive pipeline fifty more times. By Wednesday, this had become glaringly obvious to me, and was something I felt I couldn't overlook going forward.

On Thursday we had a work-from-home day, and since by drawing tablet is at college semi-permanently at the moment I was forced to do some written work and think on my options. During this time, I completed my market research, and made the decision that it was best for my workflow to get rid of the “concept art techniques” section altogether, and keep it as just concept artist research. Then, on Friday, I decided to jump around a little and try to design one of the game's creatures — after doing some initial concepts, I randomly got the itch to turn it into a 3D character in Blender. I'm not one to turn down inspiration, so I gave it a go — and I was shocked by how amazing it turned out. While I'm not normally one for Blender, I really loved how the “fox bat” turned out (the name is a work in progress).

I am yet to fully realise where this project is going, however my tutor and I had a one-to-one discussion about it Friday morning. He recommended that I utilise these concept designs to create a trailer, and branch out from the one topic I decided on in the beginning. This way, my research is not all for nothing, and I will also work on the presentation/synthesis aspects of the mark scheme that I otherwise would have had to shoehorn in.

As for next week, it's difficult to say where I will be going with this project. I will have to problem-solve depending on what decisions I make going forward, however I plan to mostly follow where my inspiration takes me. Of course all I have left to do is production, and that doesn't really need to be done in any particular order — after this reflection, however, I've decided that ideally I would like to give myself at least a week and a half for editing and composition. This means I should finish creating backgrounds and assets by next Friday, the 2nd of May.

This weekly log is (again) extremely late, so I have decided to combine weeks 8 and 9 — this means I have a lot to cover. My plan of redirecting my production is so far going successfully, however I still have a lot of ground to cover. Since last week, I have spent countless hours texturing, weight painting, and animating not only the Foxbat but also another creature named the Deershroom. I have decided that for my final product I would like to create a simple teaser trailer (I may do some relevant research for this, or I may not, it depends on how much time I have by the end of the project) and so rigging these models will be essential for my final product. I have mostly disregarded the written portion of my production for now, in favour of getting as much practical work done as possible.

The quality of the work I have done is honestly astounding, especially given that Blender is not normally my forte. I have overcome problems, discovered shortcuts and ways to improve the quality of the product, and created some truly gorgeous creatures and animations, almost entirely on my own. I figured out IK constraints from a tutorial, learned toon shading and line art from one of my more 3D-adept peers, and have as of today written over a new production schedule for the last few weeks of the project. Furthermore, I have now fully realised all the changes in my project, and I am also planning on taking a little more time to work from home; this will hopefully help with my intense burnout, and allow me to get more written work done.

By the end of next week, I will have hopefully finished all the aspects for the final character I will need for my trailer, Maur. 

I am well on track to sticking to my production schedule this week — I completely finished modelling, rigging, and doing the test animation for the Maur model. No particular issues, all documented. Well on track to sticking to my schedule. Next week is starting on the trailer.

 Again, I have stuck to my production schedule to a tee. I spend the beginning of Tuesday creating storyboards, which maybe took me an hour or two, and then spent the rest of the day drawing my backgrounds. I managed to draw all three backgrounds, each digitally painted with multiple layers, through the untapped art of “taking absolutely no breaks for 4–5 hours”; I have handily compressed those hours down into 2 minutes for you to view in my newly created trailer subpage.

 Then on Wednesday I spent some time compiling all the backgrounds into one blender scene; this week has honestly been full of troubleshooting and tweaking, but I did it, and it works, so I'm happy. Wednesday morning was full of adjusting images, lighting, and importing all the other rigs into Blender. Then I began animating Wednesday afternoon. If I can be honest, the animation part of this took way less time than I thought it would. Maybe it's because the trailer is so short, maybe there are other reasons. But either way, I managed to completely block out the animation for this trailer Wednesday evening.

 This turned out to be very lucky, since most of Thursday was spent troubleshooting and tweaking for the final render. The lights weren't working properly, the lineart took hours to finally get right, the transparency was all off, and most of Thursday and Friday was spent rendering and re-rendering until I finally got the trailer right. Friday afternoon was spent compiling all of these assets in Premiere Pro and using After Effects to create the introduction bits. All that's left for production next week is to finish creating the title sequence at the end of the trailer; then I will finish up the project by writing like a crazy person, filling in anything I've missed out, and finally writing my evaluation. This shouldn't take more than four days, and I'm actually hoping I can get it all done by Thursday, so I'm not rushing things Friday morning before I have to leave for work.

Well, this is it! Deadline day! This week has been nothing short of hectic, and while a lot of it went how I intended, there were of course some errors and issues I ran into and had to overcome. The first half of the week went smoothly enough; I ended up going in Tuesday and Wednesday and staying home Thursday and Friday, despite what I had written in my production schedule. I finished the title sequence in quick time, and spent a day writing everything I had to finish. Then, just when I thought I had everything neatly wrapped up with a bow and I could start writing my evaluation, my tutors told me that there was one or two assessment criteria I had missed out — mainly 3.2 and 7.1/7.2. I thought I had hit 3.2 in this very log, however it seems I had misinterpreted what the examiners meant by “theoretical” problems. I mostly had the 7s covered with my site presentation and finished trailer, but it turns out I just needed to iron out some kinks and make sure I had really hit the nail on the head for a distinction. This led me to write my further considerations subpage, and luckily due to my motivation from the looming deadline, I managed to knock it out in a day.

Then, yesterday, I managed to write all 2000+ words of my evaluation. To say I'm proud of myself is an understatement; if there are two things you take from these honest logs, it's that I hate weight painting, and I hate evaluations. Now, however, the project is finished. I have spent this morning pulling all of my stuff together, polishing off my evaluation, and getting some last minute feedback. This project has been os much fun, and despite my occasional crises and demotivation, I have overall really enjoyed working on it. I apologise if some of these later logs seem a little “unprofessional”, as I think the tone I take in my writing reflects my true feelings about my work. I hold myself to a very high standard, and I really hope that whoever marks this can see that no matter what I am proud of my work, and that's all that will ever matter.