Project Plan

Big step last week: Spent a while inside Microsoft Project and came up with a bona fide project plan.
 
I'll say right off the bat: I am no project manager, and while I've been working for a while on improving my time management and estimation skills, I still have a slight bent towards the "hopeful" over the "realistic." However, I feel that I am committed enough to give this project the time it's going to need.
 
My assumptions:

I can allocate 50 hours per week for the rest of the Summer, until classes start up again in September. Considering my lack of freelance work at the moment, I think this is pretty doable.
 
I can allocate 28 hours per week during the Fall. This one is tougher -- I've got a full course load this fall, and two of those classes will be fairly demanding of my time. So I think I need to reconcile myself to the fact that I may not be able to give the other two classes as much time as I normally would. This is going to be difficult, and I'm going to have to watch myself. But thesis has to take priority over everything else. And hey -- Federico already wrecked my shot at a 4.0, so I think I can finally let the grade thing go now. :)
 
Also means no freelancing during the year, which is going to hit hard -- but it's an investment in the career that I want to have when I'm done. 
 
In addition, though I'm taking one class this summer, I'm going to use the final project to work out as much of the technical issues as I can. I've ended up picking a story w/a fair amount of dynamics in it -- specifically, a lot of flying paper -- and I don't want to spend all my time troubleshooting collisions. My focus is character animation, so I need to spend my time on that. Which brings me to my last (for now) assumption:
 
900 hours will be enough for me to achieve a high level of animation. Ideally, I'd like to give myself twice as much time to animate, but stupidly, I've once again complicated things by choosing an elaborate story. Right now, it times out to ~3 minutes, but I think it's really shorter -- I'll know more when I finish storyboarding this weekend.
 
From what I've heard, Blue Sky's animators used to do about 4 seconds of animation per week; now their production schedule is upped to 9 seconds.  That's about 5.5 hours per second. Sounds luxurious, but I think when you're shooting for really high quality, with all the secondary and other stuff in place, it can take that long. And if my story times out to 2.5 minutes, then I have about as much time as they do.
 
One advantage I have -- much simpler characters. And executive control over cutting the story.