The power of spreadsheets

Pale Black is not a major production by any means, but it's a pretty daunting undertaking for one person. That is why it is important for me to document and track the progress of everything in this project.

I don't use any fancy tracking applications that shows me flowcharts, progress bars and completion percentage, nor do I need them. I do want a lightweight, simple and easy to use solution. In fact, as it turns out, I only needed spreadsheets. I also needed portability, since I'm not always in front of my workstation and I didn't want to carry a laptop or thumbdrive with me all the time. That is why Cloud applications, specifically Google Docs, is a godsend to people like me. I can update my documents anywhere and anytime as long as I have an Internet connection. Currently, I keep all my documents pertaining to Pale Black, including scripts and treatments, with Google Docs.

But enough of that. You can see below a screen shot of my 3D assets list:

It is as simple as it gets. The name of the asset, the type of the asset, reference concept art, status of the 3D model (whether it is modeled, textured, rigged etc.) and the level-of-detail (LOD) of the 3D model. Everything is updated manually which is not that much work since there aren't that many assets.

A shotlist is created for each episode, and as you might've guess from the name, it lists the shots that needs to be done to be assembled into a coherent episode.

Excuse the mosaic, possible spoilers!

Again, it is extremely simply. The information included are the shot number, description of the shot, audio (sound effects, music and dialogue), remarks (usually highlighting unique techniques for the particular shot) and the current status of the shot. The shotlist allows me to estimate the number of shots for each episode and track the status of each shot as well as what I have to look out for when I revisit any particular shot.

Strangely, these two documents not only helps me keep track of the production, they also have weird way of motivating me. The feeling of checking off tasks in these spreadsheet are very gratifying to say the least, and gives me, however minute, a sense of achievement every time I mark something as "Done".

I would like to add that Google Docs is by no means a replacement for MS Office or even OpenOffice (Which I use for my other works) when it comes to functionality, but if you are only in the market for a free, simple and portable alternative, it proves to be an immensely useful tool. That, and it saves the document that your are working on into the cloud every few seconds, saving you the heartache of lost work because of a computer crash....that has gotta worth something!