After completing a short film for LIAF and reading Levy’s book I decided to reach out to the LIAF team to see whether I could volunteer. I couldn’t find anything on their website or Social Media, so I emailed, not sure if they even remembered me from last year.
Turns out they did! Mandy quickly set up an online meeting so we could talk about expectations and perks, and general organisation. And… They were also looking for a Social Media Assistant! Reaching out definitely paid off and I’m super excited to work with the LIAF team!
I’ll definitely post an update in late November, once I’ve attended the Festival.
Victor, Marco, Neale, Rebecca and I entered a 24 Hours Animation Contest for Students. In short, we had 24 hours to create a short animation for the “imagining the future” theme. The theme was announced at midnight, and we had until the following midnight to come up with the idea, script, storyboard, animate, and composite a short 30-second film.
We followed the theme of radiation that killed animals on earth, leaving humans to exploit cockroaches for their milk.
I had a great time organising the team and taking care of the production, as well as clean-up and colouring, and designing the milk carton. As production is definitely an avenue I’m interested in pursuing, I was glad to have a chance to be responsible for keeping track of everything.
Before the contest started, I organise a whatsapp and a discord group, including a system to figure out who was happy doing what, as I wanted us to use our strengths and learn from each other.
I also organised folders in an Online Google Drive so that we could all share the files as needed, and it doubled up as a backup. Additionally, I created a simple spreadsheet to track the progress and divide the work when needed – due to the nature of the contest, I didn’t want to spend too much of my time on this.
Different production tasks. Click to see full image
This was the first time our school entered the contest in the 20 years it’s been run. And the results announcement happened a week later, on the 21st of October… And…
Drumroll, please… We came 8th!!! Honestly, we couldn’t believe we managed to place in the top 10! It was a little disappointing, as only the top 5 get prizes (so close-) but still! The experience was absolutely wonderful and, actually, not as stressful as I imagined it to be. We all worked together really well and trusted each other to do our job. Teamwork truly makes the dream work.
Today we had a meeting with Ko about Production and tools that will help us keep on track. We’ve learnt about Gantt charts and Route Sheets, both of which I found extremely helpful. And the more complicated the animation is, the more helpful they are. As well as this, these are extremely important if other people are going to work on the animation – especially to endure clear communication or when dividing the tasks.
I have put both the Gantt Chart and the Route Sheet into the same Excel document, so that I could keep them all together and not have a lot of the tabs open.
