SANM-560: Week 7 in Full, Week 8 Begins!

Written by Shane Reuter - 10/29/2025

Week 7:

The crunch was felt through most people it seemed in week 7, but I didn't see the need for stress. We were very close to the final product and achieved something far better than any of us had expected in the end, that's for sure! Another 'One Billion'o'Clock' session was planned for the Wednesday of Week 7 though funnily enough was quickly abandoned and never mentioned again once everyone decided on their own with no planning to show up tp Monty on the Tuesday and do it all. It felt as though everyone was doing a 'No, I am Sparta' reference as they kept announcing they too were arriving at Monty.

My role was fairly minimal here, as expected, since I didn't have much to photograph beside Class 14, so I mainly focused on fixing the escalator model to better match the environment and the desires of Professor Diana and the vfx team. Though I did remodel the door, once it was imported into Unreal all the textures were completely messed up and we didn't feel like retexturing it was worth diverting attention and manpower away from unfinished hero-assets like the walls. I spent a decent portion of the week proceeding week 7 figuring out how to extract the right LOD models from Unreal, and it turns out the default export settings for FBX aren't just set to 2013 for some reason, they're also default set to just not really export correctly... you have to manually go in and change pretty much every setting no matter which year FBX you choose just to get it to export right. Super easy fix, super unnecessary though.

Shoot Day 1:

I had an absolute blast. I loved working on the set previously as an actor both in the 170 production and on Monday of this very same week for Connor's SCADPro, but there's something so nice about being the designated watcher. While yes, I chimed in and did plenty of roles on set with the Brain Bar and Live Action teams like I had hoped, my main job was of course to photograph the entire day and ensure we had proof of the work we did and WHO in fact did work on this momentous project. There were so many moments where the blue lighting both from the stage LED's and the white light clashing against the orange lights on set to create such vibrant and beautiful pictures, as well as the fog machine giving amazing depth and flavor to each photo as they naturally became a bit repetitive as the day went on. I even enjoyed some of the blurry pictures due to the low light adjustment, on Rada's actress it gave such a perfect ghostly effect and sometimes on the lead's pictures it gave a weary effect.

Week 8:

I expected to be a lot more tired than I was on Monday, which is great. I had taken a quarter off freshman year due to a really severe illness and hadn't done such long hours in a row since then and been as fine as I was the 4 days I was on stage all day and that was a really refreshing realization I likely wouldn't have had this soon had it not been for this class and while that's a completely unrelated thing to this project, it was a very weight-lifting moment to have after completing the shoot, or it could've just been the overbearing 'what if it goes wrong or isn't good' weight being lifted too... who's to say for sure? Just like the previous days, my main job was to photograph the set, and while I didn't feel like I was doing it as much, I apparently shot the same amount as Friday's shoot.

 I think the reason I felt I did a lot less is because I was a lot more focused on learning how the Brain Bar side works for certain, which was an unfortunate decision to do this day and not Friday as Eve was no longer there but why reflect on minute poor choices, and actually doing other jobs. I chimed in a lot more with the decisions and sharing the knowledge I have and things I notice with the team. I had a genuinely fantastic time and cannot wait to do it all again for my senior thesis, if not sooner, hopefully with as many people from this class as possible!

In the most recent class I was assigned the job of working on the edit more than just the compositing which is nice, I have a fairly large background in editing so I hope I can clean up any slight errors we may have just to give it a more clean and polished look though I trust Joao will have it all pretty solid before I do that. I feel the credits may become an issue, not to put it in the air, but it feels as though there's inconsistencies. Everybody wants it to be correct due to some confusion about roles apparently, but at the same time I was told I'd be receiving zero writing credit even though I had written an entire draft. I'm not knowledgeable on what credits are supposed to put so maybe I'm incorrect, but I assumed everyone was being credited on the things they contributed to. It's not a big issue, more just my only current confusion. I am very excited to jump back into compositing work, I have not done a green screen shot and rotoscoping in far too long!