Updated Gantt Chart
Our budget during this phase was still tight and it unfortunately slowed down production, so the Coloring phase has only just begun as of 11/1. Because of this, I had to adjust our other estimated dates to compensate for that change. The trailer will be mostly finished by the Capstone’s due date 12/4, but there will be some scenes that have only been inked. The Coloring phase will continue until it is completed, which will be estimated to be around 12/11 or so. Based on the feedback I received from phase 2, I adjusted our Gantt chart to be color coded to show the correlation between certain tasks:
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Cleanup, inking, and coloring are all directly related. Coloring cannot be started until we have most of the inking finalized, in case there are errors that need to be corrected before continuing to the next stage. The inking has taken longer than we would have liked because we were short on funds and did not want to have artists working when we could not pay them fairly.
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The capstone poster will be created by the producer (Sam) and does not require waiting for any other assets to begin working on. The rough drafts will be shared with the director (Jax) for feedback and critique.
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The documents will be worked on by both Jax and Sam, but they will be started after most of the coloring has begun. The status of the document completion doesn’t directly affect anything else in this chart.
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The compositing and final edits will be started at the same time because they will directly influence one another. These two tasks can only be started once the trailer is close to being finished. However, these tasks cannot be completed until the trailer has been completed.
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The last 21 days are reserved for project completion; this will give us some room to go back and make any last minute corrections to the documents or finish other tasks outside of the animation itself. At the moment, we will be using this time slot to push back our current estimated dates to ensure they match up with the progress we currently have.
How Budgeting Affected Progress
Our budget continued to be tight since our last project phase so we were only able to just start the coloring at the start of November instead of at the start of October. As a result, we are about a month behind our planned schedule and we only have one month to finish as much of the coloring as possible. We will be changing the trailer to have some scenes fully colored while the others are left as inked line-art. While this is not what we had originally planned for, this will be a learning experience for us and we will be able to make notes of what didn’t go according to our plan. We will be making notes of what we would do differently if we had the chance to do another project similar to this. The changes we make will better prepare us for making independent films in the future, because we will have experience with limited funding and meeting specific deadlines.
Since the last phase, I have been going back through our receipt spreadsheets to delete incorrect labels and data entries, add a key for the abbreviations used in the receipts spreadsheets, and double check that the numbers are adding up correctly. Even though we were low on funds, we focused on what else we could work on to make sure we were still progressing as much as we could under these circumstances. After receiving feedback from alpha phase, I cleaned up the documents I have created and presented the information in a better way that was easier to understand at a glance. The second image posted below is an in depth breakdown of the artists columns from the first image's spreadsheet.
Dates and Milestones
Scene 4, shot 2: Color Test
Oct. 10, 2020
Scene 5, shot 4: Color Test
Oct. 12, 2020
Scene 5, shot 4: Inking Complete
Oct. 17, 2020
Scene 2, shot 10: Inking Complete
Oct. 25, 2020
Scene 4, shot 5: Inking Complete
Nov. 3, 2020