This is mine and mine alone. It’s a gray and windy day… ominous, foreboding. I am worried that perhaps I’ve taken acted hastily in hiring contractors before I knew exactly what my objectives were. How much of this could I do myself, what are the key elements *I* need to finish. Why do I have to keep firing incompetent contractors? How can I attract true talent?
I shouldn’t psyche myself out. It’s a project, I’m about to have $4000 to play with, to drive the project home or nearly so. Home eh? How much money will we really need to finish? Ben contributed mightily, but I haven’t yet assessed what’s really needed to wrap this.
Let’s look at Trace’s numbers. They charged between $1-$2/frame. I need to review the complexity of the shots so I can be a little more clear about what I was paying for.
Ok, a reference for bids would be helpful. That means plugging in the numbers we’ve been getting for bids and descriptions of the jobs, to see how complexity effects bids.
Convert our times for shots into frames so we can compare apples to apples. Costs for finished tasks could also be entered for a running total for the job so far, with projected cost next to it.
Converting times now.
I’ve got durations in both timecode and frames. Even figured a little more functionality with spreadsheets and clarified my understanding about what I was trying to do with the time estimation formula. What then is my ultimate goal?
I’d like to be able to plug in bids and see if they are different than what the artist has been bidding.
More importantly, I’d like to be able to predict how much time and how much money it’s going to take to be done. Knowing a task’s duration and complexity is helpful, but then it really comes down to tracking what I’ve done so far and how much of that is left. I want to finish an act, but I don’t think I should be working on one act while the contractors are working on another. I should be plugging in their results immediately and using them. So if I put M to work on ACT 2, that’s where I’ve got to be also. So either I take him back to Act 1 or move myself to 2.
So concentrating on getting the prediction down, I should decide what a finished shot looks like (getting better at specifying but still slip into artisan mode), break it down into it’s constituent tasks (need more detail), concentrate on one task at a time as much as possible, log my time or the cost of contractors, and somehow input this into the grand prediction spreadsheet. Once I’ve climbed the learning curve on a specific sort of task, it shouldn’t be too tough to apply knowledge to accelerate my progress on similar tasks.
Imagining how to deploy all this on a spreadsheet feels complicated, especially when my spreadsheet chops are rather lackluster.
Theoretically, I could adjust the complexity value so that the price per frame came closer to what Trace was offering for the shots they did. Then I could evaluate the the rest of the complexity based on what I could expect from contractors.
If I could indicate what tasks were done or which were roto shots, then I could add up all the frames (adjusting for complexity) and multiply the sum by the price per frame and viola, a finishing cost for the roto based on contractor work.
Next morning…
This is scary. What if I don’t get done? What else have I taken on. For the spring, fine. But really nothing else should be taken on. UNTIL. DOG. IS. DONE. imagine when we are finished, (FINISHED!) the projects we can take on, the new frontiers we can explore, based on what we learn here, closure. What we need to do is carefully document the process so we can look things up. Go back over older posts and add more reference words.
We get this done, and we can learn all manner of new techniques. Keying and roto are important, keying!
I shouldn’t even been thinking of myself as a VFX supervisor. Hell, I’m pretty much lost. There are two conflicting drives – to learn more about the art and to get this project done. To be learning WHILE we are trying to finish, that’s part of the reason we have been stuck. Do what we know, practice what is known. I am an extreme creator, daring to the point of recklessness. I’ve taken on making a movie AND teaching myself after effects, mocha, general vfx theory and on and on. It’s way over the top, too much and now I’ve got to extricate. That means finishing one thing at a time. Did M quote for 49? Let’s give him that and see how he does.
(October 13, 2012 – At this point, I think I am realizing that there is a problem with results from M for shots of Gerry’s hair. $700 wasted and he was the most promising of the bunch who applied, I’ve already had to wash out a several others.)
Just added $2000 to my paypal account by donating through the trickster site with a credit card (by using ‘doorbell’ instead of ‘anything’ which is assigned to paypal, did I just burn doorbell?) – $90 charge from pp, 4.5% shit! Adding funds from a bank account is free, even if it does take a week. Putting a credit card ‘check’ into my bank account costs 3.0% which I can do today.
Holy tamales and/or boners, 4.5% is a huge processing fee. I better find a better way to do my merchanting, paypal sucks.
I can save 1.5% by going slow. Make a $2000 usb to ss deposit today, then start the slow transfer process. The $2000 in pp now will allow me to pay off artists until the current transfers complete, (total $2300). Chase with another $4000 into usb should complete soonish, transfer that and we’ll have $6300 in the VFX war chest.
I’ll have another $3000 at the end of this month, and then we are officially tapped as far as 0% APR goes. Can we stretch it?
What might help…
Images of finished or near finished shots. Actually, series of shots like red hallway printed out and what shots are needed to complete a series. In a spreadsheet, can we color code based on what series a shot belongs to?
well, I’m sure we can but preliminary recon inconclusive. Here’s some logic for just getting the numbers
If cell task_series_value = “red hallway” AND task_done = FALSE, then add task_frames to red_hallway_total_frames
(October 13, 2012 – keeping this post for reference, it’s not totally coherent but important to document the process of working through the issues.)