Heya Pramod!
Thanks for the welcome!
Q: How do you manage time!! Btw your work , your film , the forums and blog and your social life, how do you squeeze in the extra hours for animation. I'm curious.Awesome question! it's all about making sure you know what's important, and giving that priority, while still giving yourself a little time for each additional thing. For me, normally I try and have family be the most important (even though it's easy to let that slide.. you gotta at least sit down for dinner with your partner) and remember that there is life outside of work. Work can sometimes take precidence.. but only when the other people in your life are okay with it. My wife is incredibly understanding, and knows that right now I've got a lot going on, so it's okay that I spend too many hours in front of the computer because the REASON I've got a lot going on is something we agreed on being important.
So in terms of time management, here's what I'm doing.. getting up early (6 or 7 am), working for an hour or two on my DVD/Masterclass/Website. Chat for a little bit with my wife, and then head off to work about 9 am. animate at PDI until about 7pm. My wife will then show up at work with the dogs & we'll have a little run with them on the field. Then, we'll go home and prepare dinner together (very important to have the together time!), watch the daily show, and then I'm back on the computer until about 1 or 2 am.
All of this is so that once the baby is here (woo!) I can focus more on family and less on the computer
But it's all about balance.. never give up your social and family life for more computer time.. always make them a priority, and then they'll help you when you need to make work a priority
temporarily.Also - I do like rigging but i find it extremely hard to transition from rigging to animation. I mean, if i've been rigging a character for 2 weeks (especially if its a challenging rigg) it takes me a while to get back to my animation zone!!
Hiow do you deal with this at work or on your film, are you constantly hopping around btw different aspects of the production?It's really tough, and I've found that the older I get the tougher it is! The thing that helps is actually taking a break between working on various things. Literally get up, move around, read a chapter of a book, watch tv for a half hour, go for a walk, go work out, do something NOT animation/rigging/computer related to let your mind reset itself. Then when you sit back down to do the other thing, let yourself get fully immersed in it. Don't be tempted to go back and work on the other thing.. just focus on the animation, or the rigging (depending no which direction you're switching). Sometimes I'll do little animation exercises with Plastic Animation Paper (
http://plasticanimationpaper.dk), just to get back in the habit of animating.
One good thing is that at work, I use a product called Emo which is PDI/Dreamwork's own internal animation package. It's quite different from Maya, so when I open EMO I KNOW I'm in animation mode, and not rigging mode. Heck, I wouldn't even know how to rig in EMO if you asked me to
When at home, I'm working in Maya.. so it's much easier to slip into rigging/workflow/pipeline mode.
Cheers!
