Hello everyone,

As we wrap up, we thought we would share some of the lessons we learned.

• Dedication: Our team was incredibly dedicated to the project. Animation is difficult and inevitably there will be crunch time. What got us through was the fact that everyone is incredibly passionate about making this project the best it could be. If any of us are on a challenging project in the future, figuring out what about the project we find engaging will be the key to finishing with as much momentum as when you start.

• 360 degree animation follows different rules: This seems obvious, but it is true. The frame ratio for a 360 image is 2:1, yet depending on whether you’re in a headset or watching on a screen, the ratio is 16:9 or a circle that maybe shows 1/6 of the full frame. We learned a little too late that this style of framing should be considered when creating 360 film, but we were able to apply it when thinking about which glitches to fix and which to leave (because our composition lead the viewer away from the visual error).

• Cultural Respect: If anyone is going to tell a story about a culture that is not their own, it is imperative that they be open to outside input. At every phase of development we made sure to run our designs by cultural consultants and our dancers. When we looked for dancers for the motion capture studio, we asked for specialized dancers in our various dances, rather than pulling a single dancer to learn all three.

• Recruiting and Timing Dancers: Working with all of these outside experts was incredible, but we wish we could have had a little more time with them before needing to finalize. If we had started motion capture sooner, we could have responded to issues with re-recording, rather than stitching together two clips that didn’t necessarily work well. In addition, we felt that we were not delivering as effectively as we could have been on our story, and an additional motion capture pass on certain sections would have done wonders for our exposition.

• Never under-value pre-production: The amount of work we put into creating animatics and prototypes, and the research we put into effective emotional expression paid off in spades. Yes, we wish we had more time to re-record dancers, but since we put 6 weeks into strategy, the number of problems we encountered in the second half of the semester were far fewer than they could have been.

• Structuring Pipeline Efforts (especially in Rendering): We altered how we handled the communication of work across the pipeline throughout the development process. At first, we used Scrum, then Kanban once our work became linear in its development direction. In addition, one thing we started implementing as soon as we realized it was an option was treating our entire office like a render farm for Nuke and Premiere. As we were getting frames from the farm, we would have to wait an additional 12 hours for those frames to render together in Premiere. However, if we divided up the frames into 1500-frame chunks, and then processed them through Nuke and rendered them as 6 high quality AVI, the cumulative delivery date of the final film went from 3 days to one.

Thanks for following us on this epic journey, and keep an eye out for Melody of Life of the festival circuit!