summary and Plan

During the holiday, I did a lot of summarizing.

My biggest point now is that I need to work on the detailed designs for every shot, especially the modeling details.

Right now, as a animatic, I think it doesn’t have main issues overall. However, there is one part I’m concerned about—the transformation of the goldfish at the end. I want to keep the version where it grows legs but still retains its fish looklike, and remove the idea of making it look more human-like.

I’ve reflected on this and realized that I had way too many ideas. This helped me come up with lots of concepts last semester, but it also made me feel confused. sometimes I didn’t even know how to proceed with my project because I didn’t know where to start.

So, now I finally decided to stop coming up with new ideas...

First, I cut out a lot of the original concepts. For example, the idea of trying to explain the goldfish’s journey of self-discovery. it’s not the focus anymore. No matter what the audience notices, I want the theme to center around "keygen," meaning software cracking. I think this will make the story clearer. The audience will start understanding my short film from this "software cracking" idea.

So，The title of the film will be changed to “G-Keygen”

As for the designs, I’ve also removed some unnecessary equipment designs and kept the ones that have room for further development.

Next, I organized my shots. My progress plan is based on these shots. Since I have a lot of mixed-media elements, I feel that some parts turned out too flat. Now I plan to bring those flat designs into the modeling process. I’ve documented every object and animation that needs to appear in each shot and worked on the details for each one.

For example, in one shot, I don’t want to have horizontal movements here. So I learned a method and did it, replacing last semester’s background with a sense of depth instead.

Finally, the schedule. I haven’t put it into a form yet.

I’ll try to keep all my pre-production work within 10 weeks. The 11th week will be a buffer, and the 12th and 13th weeks will be for compositing and post-production.

For the 1，2 weeks, I’ll focus on completing my modeling work—sculpting models, texturing, and creating textures using nodes.
Weeks 3, 4, and 5 will be for adjusting the content of each shot. There are 25 shots in total, but many of them are long shots that I’ve split into multiple ones because of the montage.
The 6th week will be an adjustment week.
In weeks 7, 8, and 9, I’ll start working on lighting and rendering the layers for compositing, while still being able to adjust the shots.
The 10th week will be for further adjustments. If I can’t finish everything, I’ll continue during the 11th week. If I finish early, I’ll move on to post-production.

Post-production will be in weeks 12 and 13, including music, title fonts, and end credits.

For my thesis essay, I’ll update my progress daily instead of having a fixed plan.