Nov 4th meeting with Mr. Rawson

A look at timeline (reverse chronogical):

• Feb 1st = Final Draft due
• Jan 1st = MUST start writing at latest!! 
• Dec 31st = product must be done
• Today we have 2 months left 

How can we cut down on production time?

• no voice actors, 1st person reflection voiceover
• less characters 
• more audio, less visual 
• what are the only movements that I need?
• what can I reuse / duplicate / loop?  
• can I cut some flashbacks? and make it simply a voice comment?

The harsh truth is that we WANT to make a great machinima, and we want to finish the story, but if timeline runs out, we will have less time to write our report, which CANNOT come second.   The report must take priority.  SO, we've got to be very careful as to how much time we devote to the product.

Better to have a shortened product and a better report

1. what about a trailer?

human ingenuity

WOW map viewer isn't working ... hmmmmm grrrrrr .  OK another software issue ... how many software issues have we had by this point?   5 -- ish?  Probably?  How long has the software set back my productivity?  1 month / 2 months?  This is an element for reflection .... ahhhh yes. 

Without map viewer, we can do the animations of teh charactres, but it won't have any background.   Can we create the whole character animations bit, and INSERT backgrounds later?  YES.  OK good, so what we're going to do is focus on the character animation and deal with the backgrounds later.    SO -- conclusion, we are doing animations and NOT backgrounds.  done.

Sounds - another program?  Getting the sounds will hopefully take 1 hour.  After 1 hour I should be able to play/insert any sound I want.  I'll blog about this once it's done.

Steps/Goals.  Today is Nov 4th :    Hope to have ______ done by ______:

1.  Animations,  Mon, Nov 14th
2. Put together in Vegas  :  before I leave for England 
3. Sounds:  Dec 5th
4. Voice over (not perfect)   Dec. 12th
5. Titles, final edits (possibly subtitles): By START of christmas break.

All of this is A LOT to do before Christmas break.   But if all of this isn't done by Christmas break, chances are that we're just going to fall too far behind. 

Christmas break is the production HARD deadline.  Product is second to the report.