I got laid off two months ago from Smite 2 and got the grand Idea of making a realistic VFX reel to show the recruiters that I can do both stylized and realistic VFX. I was planning to spend two weeks on it and start sending my CVs everywhere.
Three weeks later, I had to start sending CVs and ended up spending 2 weeks mostly applying to places both in Techart and VFX. And not being able to put in as much work as I wanted into the new reel.
I wanted to have a full battle between the drone and the turret, post-process overlays and generally was aiming for a 50-second video. Looking back after spending two months on it, I was only able to get ~20 sec of actual reel in an “ok” state.
What went wrong?
I spent too much time setting the environment, coding the blueprints, and animating the sequencer events. I didn’t set up source control for this project because I thought it was going to be fast and easy… and it did break at one point forcing me to redo the whole chaos explosion in the beginning.
What is the lesson? What is the takeaway?
- Overscoping is
and 50 sec is a lot of time work time for a video. - Working on the blueprints and environment was majorly a waste of time as they did not help at showing off my VFX and not even the Techart skills for the most part, yet took most of the work time on the video, same for the sequence animations etc.
- Even if it’s a small project source control is important. I’ll probably still not set it up for a single effect showcase but…
- If I ever plan on making anything as long again, I will split the sequence into takes instead of rolling the whole video into one sequence. Working on a long one-shoot sequence creates a lot of domino effects that make one small change require a lot of other changes, and with smaller takes each can be isolated to prevent these issues.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vbBnRx
