Halloween Hubris

During late 2021, I was recruited as co-producer alongside Josh Percy to help with production on Halloween Hubris. The production had suffered from unforeseen circumstances around the project prior to our involvement. The work shared between Josh, Laura and myself, we managed to return to a successful time frame for post-production.

Production Responsibilities

My role included several major responsibilities including:

  • Organising team meeting and scheduling.
  • Managing and maintaining the project directory.
  • Giving the director additional support during challenging periods.
  • Reporting progress and representing the team at stakeholder meetings and discussions.
  • Recruiting students to help assist with production.

Tracking & Scheduling

A critical aspect of my roll was the the maintenance of documentation to keep the team on task and informed about their roles and responsibilities.

 

My role was further challenged due to the issue of the unsatisfactory documentation reports provided by the former producer. So I had the additional role of restoring old reports, and communicating with team members to establish timeline corrections.

Additional Responsibilities

My role also extended out to other parts of production, to help fill gaps in roles lacking in the project this includes:


Producer's Statement

Our objective on this project has been to support the creative ideas and talents of young filmmakers and to help them overcome the challenges and risks that come with filmmaking.

 

Not all projects are given a fair opportunity to succeed, and Halloween Hubris was one of them. A last-minute pitch approval forced the entire project in a challenging position. With limited with time and available crew members, by the time Josh and I were asked to work on the project, we were uncertain if production could be achieved. Unfazed, we worked tirelessly with the director, combing over the entire production pipeline, and refocused our efforts to the critical elements of the project. In a matter of four weeks, we managed not only restore production to the schedule at certain points we we’re well ahead with production.

 

I cannot take much credit for the successes we had. Laura constantly was a part of everyone’s work whenever she could, like a director should. She constantly provided modellers with hand drawn references to props, that were visually striking and fleshed out, in a timeframe I still cannot comprehend. Patrick dominated our environments, matching Laura’s style and enhancing it further, his dedication and craftsmanship allowed us to truly capture the Halloween setting. Ali was a phenomenal help, his talent and speed in animation was the one of the decisive factors that truly put us ahead of schedule at times.

 

 

Overall, the I don’t just see the film as a delightful experience of a nuisance of a child get his rightful comeuppance. But as an experience of a handful of artists facing an incredible challenge and going the extra mile, surpassing all expectations, and sharing an experience we will look fondly on.


Project Challenges

When joining the project, I identified several key concerns in regards to production that ran the risk of resulting in the final project being unsatisfactory or incomplete. My key areas of concerns and resolution revolve around the lack of documentation, pipeline scheduling with asset development, and lack of communication with the director.

 

The first issue needing addressing was documentation, when joining the project while there was enough to provide a general idea where the project was at, it was out of date and missing a ton of critical information. To resolve this issue I reformatted documentation with guidance of the director and establish a confirmed status of individual assets, their required components (modelling, rigging, texturing, and animation), and assess what state they were in (completed, work-in-progress, not started and either unassigned or assigned). This allowed the producers and director to make a clear assessment of the current condition of the project and make a forecast on the completion of the project. Reviewing this information I assessed if we we're able to complete the environment and the main character was completed before the beginning of week 5, we could begin animation on a majority of shots and be expected to be completed by the due date. This lead into our next issue with the pipeline.

 

The pipeline scheduling with asset development currently lacked overlapping of projects. Our biggest issue was texturing. To achieve the week 5 due date established, we assigned animators to help complete low-risk assets in order to fill up the environment with a larger amount of props and items in a shorter timeframe and to keep animators occupied until they were ready. Texturing and UV unwrapping was going to be a massive strain to complete with the large open environments and I concluded that it would be generally unfeasible to get a majority of the assets done in a suitable timeframe. With discussions with the director, we took advantage of the fact that the entire film was intended to be shot in greyscale. Rather than rely on UV unwrapping and texturing we would instead assign a series of grey materials of varying shades to fill the environment, and only rely on texturing on character models and critical props such as the candy. Now that we had a plan in place we needed to resolve our remaining issue, communication.

 

Laura, our director, while brilliant had struggles with communicating with our ragtag group of artists. Her biggest issue was being confrontational and proactive on the project, she lacked the personality and presence when it came to face-to-face meeting or audio conversations. To overcome this I acted as her voice, so to speak. I communicated with Laura to establish reasonable times for her and myself, communicate with the team and schedule them in, and I basically operated as the showrunner during meetings. I intentionally pushed any artistic questions or concerns back to Laura, though I did give my technical opinion on matters and gave feedback when I felt it was beneficial. Whenever there was a pressing matter such as due dates for items, status reports, and renegotiations I took charge of the situation, due to my intimate knowledge of the project schedule and timeline I could quickly assess task delay feasibility and impact on the project as a whole. In the end I think I've managed to have some success with Laura, I believe she's come out of the experience more confident with herself when communicating as a director and was more frequent with her feedback with team members.

 

In the end we were able to overcome these challenges and many more in order to complete the project. We were able to successfully submit a short film that was regarded by our supervisors as surprisingly impressive. At our project check-ins, our team consistently reported in as ahead of schedule expectations and it enabled us to add additional adjustments and tweaks over the remaining weeks to further refine the project. Though this refinement stage was kept quite minimal, as we allowed a majority of our team members to assist other student projects which were struggling and needed additional support.