I wanted to make a post to reflect on the production of Comfort Zone, and outline our process in putting it together, as well as some lessons learned.

We communicated primarily in our own Discord server, which proved successful in having specific channels for various parts of the project. It could get a little overwhelming at times, but we were specific enough that it felt clear where to find things, and it wasn’t a big problem retreiving something. Towards the end of the project, we created a #key-links channel, which included our working files on Dropbox, alongside latest edits of the film. This kept everything concise and structured, with clear naming conventions applied.

One thing we definitely learned whilst using Discord was the importance of in-person, professionally-toned meetings to check-in and make a plan. Around March, we began to do this more, and this kept us on track until deadline.

Throughout the project, we worked to various production schedules, such as the one below, setting our own internal deadlines.

Around about March, when I was a good bit into lighting setup, we decided to make a live schedule to keep us on track, with key categories such as shot number, description, duration and notes. It can be viewed here.

This production spreadsheet became essential for our render process, as we were able to update the status of certain shots, and also work on a priority list for what needed to be done. I used Excel mathematical features to work out shot lengths (in terms of frames), as some shots were on 1s, some on 2s and some on 3s.

I calculated the average render time per frame and multiplied that by the FPS to result in an estimated time for rendering that scene. This worked really well and gave us an idea of how much we had to do.

The naming conventions ultimately followed Caity and I’s production schedule/shot list that we created, attached here. We described project files as COMFORTZONE_SC00_SH00_FILEDESCRIPTOR-VERSIONNUMBER accordingly. This made everything clear and accessible.

Overall, the production was a success, and we finished the film with a few good days to spare, with a solid snag list for the weeks ahead (check out the next post for more on that!).