This particular exercise is meant to be the initial part of the planning of a production schedule.
It’s intended to be a useful and practical activity. It can be in the form of:
- A daily planner, like a desk diary or a notebook with dates
- A document grid or table, either on paper or with a program like Word, Excel, or a Google document or spreadsheet
- An online calendar such as a Google or iCal calendar
The undertaking is the first step at figuring out a production schedule. To begin, you will need to know how much time per week you can reasonably dedicate toward your project and/or practices, when you take all of your commitments and responsibilities into account.
And, let’s remember, as an Animation student, you will already need to set significant time aside, be focused, and work hard for the coming months.
To begin assessing your daily and weekly obligations, you should:
- Go through the outline and syllabus for this and your other courses. Make a list of assignments, papers, exams and the like, how much time and effort they will take, and when projects are due.
- Include the time it takes to commute from home to school and back.
- If you have a job, include your employment commitments.
- Allocate the time it takes to prepare and eat meals, do chores like grocery shopping, laundry, and cleaning. You have to live.
- Factor in other important events, such as out-of-town trips, family commitments, birthday celebrations, doctor and dentist appointments, and so on.
- Also account for sleep and personal time. It’s okay to take the occasional evening off, to have meaningful relationships with friends and/or a partner.
- It is important to get regular, daily exercise, especially to alleviate stress and anxiety. Exercise is also known to be a good way to brainstorm, to creatively solve problems, and come up with new ideas. It’s a result of increased blood flow, intake of oxygen, and brain chemistry that kicks in. To save time, you might want to combine required activities such as walk, cycle, or run to school, even part of the way (the campus has private shower facilities and lockers on the 1st floor). Instead of eating your lunch at your desk during the noon break, you and a group of friends could go together for a vigorous walk, like around the running track at China Creek Park, at Great Northern Way & Glen Street — just minutes from the campus.
By doing this calendar exercise, you will have a good sense of what you can reasonably commit to a given course and its projects.
As a reminder, for every 3- or 6-credit course, you are expected to dedicate time to assigned tasks, at least 2 hours per credit hour. That is, 6 hours outside of class for a 3-credit course, and 12 hours for 6-credits. We already know that animation requires much more than that. With upper-level 3rd and 4th year courses, projects are long-term and in-depth, so they tend to need more attention than those in 2nd year. Projects like the Junior and Senior Films require a commitment of.a full semester and then a whole academic year.
It would be a good idea to set a specific days and times to work on Junior Film activities related to the course.