I started with making a new level inside of UE getting a smaller ground plane to practice on! This is not going to be out final environment by a longshot! But it is a great start for reference building and for our team to work together on it visually. I learned last week how to sculpt the land inside of UE, and with that I am going to push myself to get it looking even better! As well to get scale of the land to people, and buildings to be more realistic.

The blocking stage is interesting as we have had a few interpretations of what the "map" should look like. With the main point being water going through the middle! In this I will be sculpting a river into the lands as well working to create a waterfall point for the our waterwheel. We are thinking of a river and coastal city, in that I will be adding ocean in after I get the land looking better. So that we can start planning around our shots with the water ways. I feel we should not spend a lot of time making a bigger city. As it is so much more work for so few shots! In that I will be pushing for a scaled down city, as well as working harder to make a great blocking stage for the team! 

This week the team started to rework the animatic, for better pacing, flow, continuity, and for what we want to cut out! Being the editor for the team I was part of that as I also know the story and it's pacing quite well. We were planning to do that on Tuesday, but with the onbuds meeting we had to push that to Thursday. Instead we were able to have a great meeting on Tuesday for just verbally talking about what we all through about the current story, and what and how we should change things. I think Tuesday was great because we were able to get to a group consensus about what should be changed and how we are going to do that. Making sure that we were constantly thinking about how to better the story and the experience of watching it. 

Thursday unfortunately we spent the entire class printing out our story board. In turn I felt like we waisted time trying to do it on paper over us just using the story boards that were created online and rearranging it online. Instead we spent the entire day trying to print the boards out, and then trying to get it roughly organized. I feel we could have done this in editing software, or even in pureref and gotten better results. We will continue to keep working on the animatic, pacing, etc. 

Where I will end on the team and the work I have been seeing. I am happy with the team I am on and I think just about everything I have seen them submit is either amazing work, or an amazing start! My issue is that a lot of our concept artists in my opinion are taking a lot of time of things they have been working on all semester. I will give the shop interior and shop props as my example. Where they have been in concepting for 4-6 weeks now. I personally feel a disconnect on that as I concepted and modeled two creatures in about two days. I love where the team concept art has been going, but I also am starting to wonder if we plan on wrapping it up!