Question #8

8) What were some of our 'Pitfalls' Please explain.

-Christopher Janney (Scene Planner): Not enough sleep and not enough free time or energy to spend with our spouse/girlfriend/or S.O.

-Kellie-Bea Rainey (Producer): We had some crabbiness, but most of it was due to sleep deprivation. We had a few members of the team taken away due to deadline at their day jobs, and we gained others on the team when we needed them. One member even got married, went on her honeymoon and afterwards returned to the project. PHEW, talk about dedicated crew members. What else? Ah, I know. The schedule for the crew and for the production changed like running water. I couldn't count the schedule changes in one day there were so many. Besides the lack of sleep and schedule mayham, we a had a few team members playing the wrong positions on the court... only enough to learn what teamwork means and to get back into the real game. Overall we did a great job and learned how it's done and how it can be done for future projects.

-Doug Cooper (Technical Director): The NeTpower and DEC Alpha workstations were well up to the task, and performed flawlessly. We had a sharp network guy on hand to get all our computers talking to each other and collaborating, and the Windows NT environment proved to be stable and effecient for the production environment. So what went wrong? It's always the things you haven't done before, or don't think about. Like how do you back up 18 gigabytes of data every night on a shoestring budget? How do you output 6 minutes of animation designed for film to video tape? How do you get your colors to look right once they're *on* videotape? How do you get data from animators who are scattered all around town in order to render and composite? All in all, nothing was insurmountable, and we were able to solve, or work around all the problems that jumped in our way.