NEW YEARS'S RENOVATIONS · 1 JANUARY 2011
Another year has come and gone. Seems like I was just writing about it being 2010 already and now we are at 2011. The last three months of last year were not very productive for various reasons, as well as several during the summer. I accomplished a few things I wanted to, but kind of hit a wall when I moved on to modeling the hallway set. Hopefully this year will see some visual results which might give me inspiration to move a little faster.

One thing I did spend some time on during the last few weeks of December was the way I handle my shot pages. I actually (finally) published my main site and had to learn a little php coding in order to use a few variables for choosing video formats. This got me to thinking that I could create my shot pages in a more dynamic (and easier) way.

The shot page was the first thing I designed for this production site in photoshop. I knew that it was more or less a template that 50+ shots multiplied by 4 to 5 different stages would share. However, I really did not want to get much into the coding aspect of web pages and decided to create them by brute force. In other words, each shot for each stage and even each version got its own unique page. Not a very efficient way to work, but it did work. Not without problems though. Mainly, every time I increased an animation version and published it to the site, I had to deal with creating new pages for the previous version and manually linking all the versions together, copying notes, etc. Plus if I wanted to do the "large" format video page, I needed to add one for that. While it worked, it created a lot of headache. Not to mention all of the layout pages did not have "large" versions.

I decided that with my new found php coding skills, novice as they are, I could create animation shot pages which would dynamically link to the correct version. I created a bunch of extra variables for what I thought might be useful such as the shot number, stage, and even the directory path. It wasn't too tricky to get the page to dynamically link to the correct version which let me make the video link dynamic as well. Thanks to naming conventions I've learned to use over the years at places like Sony Imageworks, it was very easy to consistently pass variables to links and get the correct files or information loaded. I even made it so the "play large" button is just linking to a single page.

While this is something that no one would ever notice by just looking at the site, I was quite estatic with the optimization. The first round of coding eliminated around 28 redundant pages where the only difference was the version of the shot and video. However, this got me to thinking, why not make the entire animation section dynamic? Which lead to, why not make the entire page and menu system dynamic?

After a little more coding research, I was able to make every aspect of the page dynamic. In essence, I have one shot page and one large video shot page. I do have an info page for each shot and stage, but it is so much easier to maintain and update. It was quite a bit of work to convert the entire system, but in the long run, much cleaner and easier to work with. I went from over 230 pages that needed to be mainted with regards to links and versions to just 2. Even though I have to maintain a few data base type pages, it is so much easier adding new shots and versions. Now I just need to start "making" the shots.