Vanilla Bakery
A small idea that I started a few months ago, with great help from family and friends, we start to sell Oat cookies in my hometown from our home kitchen. Now that I am working in the VFX industry, I got motivated to make a full 3D commercial.
Planning
As I have no formal education in films, I partner up with a friend of mine who is interested in making this a reality. We setup a 5 months long plan covering Storyboarding, Blocking, Modeling, Rigging, Texturing, Animation, Lightning, Compositing, and Post / Audio.
Storyboarding
Initially I planned 2 weeks for this stage. Currently, in week 4 and I am barley 60% done. I always thought this would be in easy task. “How hard this could be?”
Well, very hard, I didn’t expect the amount of details that need to be considered such as the movement of animated objects, camera angle, and how complex the shot would be. I was lucky to find a comprehensive webpage of learning material thanks to u/dandylion_banana on reddit: http://www.floobynooby.com/comp1.html
The plan is to get this stage done this week and would update this post with my final work.
06/08/2023
Update (13/08/2023)
Finally, I was able to set and finish the first storyboard. I draw what I assume is 13 shot for the commercial. I passed the work to MJ, a friend who decide to explore this project with me and will be passing the work to other friends to gather feedbacks. My next step, while confirming the final storyboard, is to learn more about the blocking stage as I don’t have an overall view what are the expectation.
Lessons Learned
Sharing progress is the most important lesson I learned as it help create further motivation to finish any creative work.
Second, it seems like it would have been better to draw a simple draft without thinking as a first pass, instead of thinking about the details of each shot. I should have taking a notebook to a coffee shop and spend a few minutes as soon as I started this process.
Finally, the importance of the storyboard increases with the amount of people involved. The clarity and the details are essential so each person knows exactly what they have to do which will help to reduce conflict and speed up the work.
Next?
Layout / blocking is my next step. The plan is to complete it in two weeks, but have to take a week off so I am looking to complete the work by September 3th, 2023! will update here with any progress.