OUAN505 - Planning & Time Management, Schedule

From previous projects I have learnt the importance of trying to plan and manage time as effectively as possible. As ideas were thrown about early on in the project and we had established a method in which we were going to approach the making of the documentary. The opportunity arose to create a detailed schedule for the group in order to make sure we keep on top of the process, as well as remembering important dates and deadlines such as crits and presentations. I decided not to use a pre-existing timetable format and just create one that featured the things we needed, just making it so it was more personal to our group and was tailored to everything we needed from it. The four titles I had for my schedule included the date of the day that was at the start of the week, so essentially the date of the Monday. The next column consisted of any tasks that we had to do, so for example by the week that starts the 15/2 it was our goal to have the storyboard and animatic finished by then. The next column was reminders. The idea behind this was to include any important events such as presentations, crits or inductions for example. This came in useful straight away making us aware of the sound booth session we had booked as well as the imminent presentation where we will be demonstrating the early stages of our projects and explaining our initial ideas. Finally, a column for us to mark whether a certain task has been completed, which will be a simple way of documenting what we have done. There is also a notes section at the bottom of the schedule so we can make any small notes we want, such as the artists we are looking at. I'm happy with how we're doing up to this point, and having everything broken down visually has given me a clear aim for the project, and it is surprisingly motivational in a sense because of the goals that have been set at the beginning of each week.

This particular schedule was incredibly easy to make, and took a short time to create. I've found myself checking it on a bi-weekly basis to make sure we're on top of things and we are where we planned to be in certain stages of the process. Ultimately it acts as a guide for us to work by, and if for example anything needs to be rearranged or one week something doesn't get completed it's not too much of a problem. What I've learnt from the previous projects we've undertaken is that it's very rare for a project to go exactly as you predicted, it's just important to plan ahead. Looking at the timetable now, I don't think that the production process will necessarily last for five or six weeks, and I actually think the pre-production stage will be the longest because we have to design individual assets and have them laser cut. This is also the period where any frames of animation will need to be created and in terms of this project, the production process is simply putting everything together on a scene by scene basis.