This week most of the team members attended the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Colin and Ricardo stayed on the ETC and they worked on the animatic, sound and lip sync.
A new version of the animatic was released this week, the changes involved in this version are mainly focused on getting better camera angles that help telling a better story. With this new version of the animatic, a soundtrack reference was made with pieces of real soundtracks from movies in order to send it to the composer and help him create his own original soundtrack. This new version also helped us finish the shot by shot list that is a guide for all the things that need to be done within the next few weeks in order to complete this project.
A first pass of the lip sync animation was done with the Annosoft tool. This will serve as a basis for the animators to sync the character movements with the dialog.
Nick Ducassi, a CMU alumni, visited our project room. He is writing an article about the relationship between the ETC and Give Kids The World for the CMU Alumni magazine. We had the opportunity to show him the process of 3D animation and the current status of the project, and then we did a tour around the ETC to show some of the other current projects.
The team will continue working with the animation. The “key pose” layer for the entire animation must be completed next week. To save some time creating models, we will be asking other ETC students interested in donating 3D assets to fill the cabin scene.