Week 10 Meetings

Hello everybody,

It's that time again. Here's the really important info that everyone needs to know: Cleaned up storyboards are due this coming Friday. The combined total must be the entire film, and each group member must submit a minimum of 9 panels. *OUR PERSONAL GROUP DEADLINE FOR THE BOARDS IS THIS WEDNESDAY.* I want to make sure we get everything done well before we need it so we can look over and tweak things as needed without waiting til the last minute.

We have broken down the boards into new workloads to be finished for Wednesday. Here is the current list of assignments:

Ban – walking thru jungle up til stairs, inside/outside of stairs shot.
Anita – cleaning up and refining her original sequence.
Kal – going to cleanup his sequence and add the counter.
Vince - cleaning up and refining his original sequence.
Martin – ted meets the monster thru finding the camera.
Daph – ted finding camera thru ted taking final shot against monster
Adric – death of monster thru explosion of orb. (maybe wave of souls and soul into Judith)

THIS IS IMPORTANT: If your name is missing, then you weren't at the meeting to choose your sequence assignment. Contact me to work out what you should be doing. If your original sequence does not overlap any of the already assigned work, then you'll most likely be finishing up what you've done so far. If your work does overlap, then we will need to contact whoever your work will be overlapping with to work out what parts of that sequence you will be doing.

With that out of the way, here's what happened this week:
In our meeting with Mark, we went over the boards and his suggestions on how to improve what we were doing.
In our meeting with Tony, we discussed narrowing down character designs and running them by DQ. We also did a group evaluation on how we're doing on a number of criteria. We scored well on trust, but we can make improvements as far as clarity of goals, listening, feedback, and decision making go. For clarity of goals we talked about the ideas of providing official group agreement on goals, getting opinions from each group member, and delegating decision making power to competent sub-groups. We discussed how listening is a matter of respect, and that not listening is both disrespectful and calls into question the validity of having group meetings. We agreed that we all need to work on giving feedback. We need to be able to take criticism professionally, but we should also seek it out instead of waiting for it to be delivered. Finally, we talked about the need for enthusiasm for the project. Instead of waiting for other people to get excited about what we're doing, we need to get into the project and do work to inspire our teammates.

In our group meeting on Thursday we went over each of the character's identities, some ideas for how the fight and credits would progress, and the need for working out more focused designs for the characters, environment, and new props.
In our group meeting on Friday we pitched our boards to Natalie, who gave us some good feedback on where we need to go. She was wondering if the beginning felt a bit too light-hearted, and that we should probably play up Ted and Judith's relationship in the opening. She also said we should introduce the basic concept of the temple as a prison for the monster very early on, probably as dialog from Ted showing off to Judith. She presented the idea that the two characters are both photographers, which would play along better with the idea that Ted doesn't really have any idea what he's doing. After Natalie left, we divided the boards up among those who had shown up for the meeting.

We've got a lot of good work going for us, and the boards are shaping up well. We've got a lot of big deadlines coming up back to back, and I think that if we keep up this level of work, we'll be fine.