When you make a movie, how even discreet lights (lights and colour) influence your viewer is a good thing to keep in mind. Since you can change a whole scene just by using filters, and changing the colours. I'll now show my point by using the same picture with different "colours".

Now, this first room is one of my first ever 3D projects, but it works for this visual explanation.
Firs I'll cool it down by adding blue to it.

And that is just a little bit bluer, but looks like a colder environment.
So if you feel something is wrong, the colour might be the thing. also light.

Is a good way to show what time of day it is.
In our film we let the first scenes be darker than average, and then brighten up, and in the end get darker again. We wanted to get a feeling of time passing, so he would be going around there all day. In retrospect, we could have faded from normal, to orange/red to blue.
If you are using Adobe Premiere, you can find these settings under The effects tab in the bottom left corner, and then in the colour correction menu.
You can make these changes in 3D max as well, but as you might change your mind, its safer to do this when you are editing.
Now, there is another way to use it, it's obvious, but you might not always remember it right away. You could use colour correction for correction. If you have done something wrong, or forgotten to reset a setting, or in our case, we overdid it, and changed our mind. Our first scene was to dark, and we used a mix of light and contrast to get the the setting we was aiming for. Now, This "trick that actually isn't a trick at all" might save you some precious time that you can spend yelling at whoever made the mistake in the first hand, if you mad the mistake yourself, you may fix it before anyone notices, so you won't have to get an ear full.

This was the last night, I hope. We have delivered our project files, I have delivered my Assesment, and my drawings, and I now have this post, and a post where I'll talk about colour vs setting. Something you should think about when you edit your film... actually, you should think about it before, but anyway. This has been a long night, I didn't spend the full night at the school, I wished that I could, but because of poor planing, and lack of sympathy to the person/s who had done seemingly nothing the hole day, while I had worked over Frank's shoulder, solving problems he had and similar, and after I had made sure that everything was under control, I left around 9 pm. I had to make some drawings, and write on my journal posts, I had written some of them the days before, but I still had to make the last few. When I was done, I called Frank to see if things still where under control, and they where, so I left for school an hour later, and was back in the classroom around 8, and was working again in minutes. Some of the members had gotten a bit cranky from the lack of sleep, and even though I also had worked all night myself, I guess since they didn't see it, it didn't happen. So I was the rested one that had to tag in and pull the group over the finish line. I didn't see the point in making a fuss, but I guess that I could have become mad if someone was pushing or complaining. (I still have only slept 4 hours over the last 48 hours, having a late night to being awaken by Frank on Monday morning, (I was at school before 11:00) and working the hole night. Now I'm trying to stay awake and get these things done, while I'm in the zone.
Anyway, the film was finished, and I'm not happy with the result, some of the scenes that was never made/rendered, I don't know, I thought it was under control, and without a notice, they was removed because of lacking files...
Things like the crying woman... It was an important piece of the film, but we delivered the best we could do from what we had.

Now, One last post, and I can sleep. (if it weren't for the part where they are drilling in our basement... to... loud... sounds...)

I was a bit bored when I wrote this, as more of a joke at start, but in the end I decided to post it. This isn't how we did it, but in retrospect I would have liked to have followed this list.

Preparations for a project like this/things to think about before you are ready to start/Checklist
You are going to start your project soon, and there is a couple of things you should take your time and think over before you start.

1. You should have a story ready for people to get involved in. people you work with have to be interested in making the same type of movie as you. But, as you can't be sure that you'll get any interest in your story, you shouldn't put heart and soul into it yet. the other members should have a saying in the film, You also need to figure out what kind of movie you want to make, you are alowed to change your mind, but in case you get no response to your film, you have to apply for another group.
2. You should find group members you trust, and belive that you can do good work with. At least 75% of your group should be people like that. In a 4 man group you can have 1 person that is choosen to fix a hole in your collected skills, but this isn't the most important right now. Someone can always read up on this, unless it's really esential. (like how to make a box in 3D max)
3. You are now ready to start your planing, there are a couple of things you need to think of.
  a) What style would best tell your story? (How will textures, models, and light be important? are some more important than others?)
  b) Do you have the skills/people to pull this off? if not, check 2.
  c) How long will your story be? (you don't have to know that it will be 3678 frames long, but knowing that you aim for 3 minutes, (give or take) helps in further planing, and it sounds like you are in control of things when people ask about your projekt.
  d) Will your story be to long/short? can you add something if it is to short, and if it is to long, what can you take out and not loose the story. you don't have to remove anything yet, but it's good to wait with scenes that might have to be removed later on.
  e) Now you need to go into detail, knowing what has to be done to make eache individual scene. (like Modeling, SFX, light, textures, animation) and what need to be done outside the diffirent scenes, (Like storyboard, Editing, toturials)
  f) setting up a plan where all the details of the work is puzzeled together between the groupmembers, in your timelimit. Remember that something will probably not go as planed. And Instead of giveing more time on each task, make sure to have more time on the last assignments, so you won't have something to cut from... but even so, I would suggest to keep a week to edit, not because you need a week to edit, but in case something is wrong, you still have time to hotfix it.
4. You are now ready to start working on your film. good luck.

Now I'll write about how being a disguised gamedesign student, has influenced my work.
Some of the important ways it has influenced me in a bad way, is that my motivation for a film project hasn't been the best, I have worked on a game project, and I felt at home, and it didn't feel like work at all. Now I'm working with film, and this feel more like work to me. Of course there are things that are close to what a game designer meet in his work, like Modeling, animation, and texturing, but I do lack some skills when it come to special effects, editing, rendering settings and such. I haven't needed them in a while, and don't remember much of it. Even 3D max seemed a bit distant, as my use in it last year was a bit limited, and old trix was forgotten.
But I signed me up on animation work on this project, and felt that I managed all right.
Before the groups was assigned, and the project had even started, I did play around with an idea of making a film, fully in "Unreal Editor 3" (a game editor), but I scrapped it as I got another Idea for a story and got some positive response to this story. (my other idea was to make a prequal to the map/mod we made as a project in gamedesign, but that would be to much work, and hard to make into a interesting story, with good pace and under 2 minutes... I'm sure I could write the outline for a mini series based on it)

Well, I can only mention 3D Max 2009 right now.
3D Max 2009 is another 3D studio max modeling program that is in many way just the same as what I have always seen.
Considering that 3D studio Max 08 (I think) was the first one I checked out. That dosen't mean to much, but one thing that I noted was that this version had some bugs. Freezing problems and such.
You are always prepeared for it (at least we say so) but sometimes you are caught by surprise and you have to do some work again. Why did we choose to use this paticular brand you ask? we had desided to use V-ray, and couldn't find a version compatible with 3D Max 2010. But we managed to get trough it, and we even figured out how to convert most of a 3Dmax 2010 file to a 3Dmax 2009 file... Ok, I have written 3D max enough times now.

3. party programs/services:
We used a some of theese, at least I did.
Wave: a comunication servise from google.
Dropbox: a private file share program.
Skydrive: a web based file sharing through Hotmail.

Wave: this one was practical and helpfull, It's designed as a remade E-mailing system, instead of mails being sent between mashines, you have a server everyone can check out. So if someone want to change something in the mail, everyone get to see it instead of that person having to send the mail back to everyone. (you can see how things look before the changes)
But, We used this for planing and story, with the story, I wrote the hole story into one of the "Waves" and gave the other members acces to it. they in turn added small text boxes next to the part they had a suggestion to, and we once in a while went trough it and debated/voted on changes, so the story was originaly mine, but was handed out and molded by the hole group through it.
In the planing I used this as a way for people to find work, and let people know what they where doing. But since no one checked this thing, it ended with me having to hand out work and making sure that no one assignment was double booked. This was a great way to form an idea and collect thoughts, And I would like to use it again in the future.

Dropbox: this lets you have a folder on your computers that will try to synchronise itself with the other once, if a change is made in one of them, the same change will be made on the other computers, meaning, if you add a file, it will be copied to the other folders, if you delete somthing, it wil be deleted from all the computers.
You set up networks through a web page, where you can give access to other partisipents. They will only get access to the folder you choose, so you can share diffirent folders with diffirent people.
I use this program personally as well, since I can transport files between school and home without any sweat, or memorysticks. There is a drawback with the size, as you can only have about 1.5 gig in your folders all together, you can pay to get more, or you can Refer someone to get more space. https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTEzMDAzMjg5

Skydrive: This one was not maintained, it seemed usefull, as you put things on the web, to be downloaded at a later point. There where some problems with size, and the fact that you manually had to upload and download things was just to much work. It is practical in a pinch, but I would recoment other solutions instead. like dropbox or a memorystick. On the pluss side, a lot of people are useing hotmail from their youth, so it's accesable.

This week some of us went trough files, setting up cameras and animations, planing the renders, I was on standby to fix or change animation that they didn't like, There was some I had to redo, and only one of my files, It feels good to see that your work is acceptable... in a kind of mean way... lets not talk more of it, but It was all right work, the base work was already done for me by the other, I just had to do some minor tweaks to improve realism, and flow. (usually)
When the scenes where finnished and cameras where set, and textures where ready, the files started rendering.

End of week 17:
This was suppose to be the last week. but the renderings are still working, so we negotiated for a extension by one week.

End of week 18:
We finaly got things ready for Editing. Even if we lost 4 days because of som lack of comunication, we think that we will be able to make the new deadline.

Finaly the animation is started for real. We where hoping to finnish our animation in one week to make up for so much lost time. And we started of strong, making most of the scenes in one week, but. We did suspect that this would be insuffisient, and some needed more work, and we were right. We ended up taking another week as texturing work got started, I'm happy we took our time with this, as the result was much better.

The last missing models are made, and some test animation is made by more people than me. I hear some of the problems I was already aware about, and I did tell people, but I guess I talk to fast, to much, or just plaing unclear. because they did remind me of the problems I had just told them about. Anyway, the most important part is that I knew how to fix or work around the potential problems.

(Week 8 and 9 was time of)

This week was a lot of complaining, It started with the sudden realisaion that we didn't have a Rig for our character, so It was desided that Bjørn would try to make a hasten working Rig. and this was what I started animating and testing this weekend. I did spend some couple of hours with it, so I could come with some feedback and things that would be nice if they were tweaked.
It wasn't a bad week, I was worried, but it did speed up things later on to know how to tackle diffirent potential problems, spending some time trying to break it, so you know how to fix it later on.
I also got started on one of the scenes, that was possible to work on. but ended up scraping this work later on. (This is out of chronology, but still, this was week 13) I had done the best I could with the current rig, that didn't require days of tweaking. But when we rigged a Biped character, it gave me some new options, and I spent 5 minutes looking at what we had, and thinking of the posibilities of the Biped, and asked for one hour to remake it like it was in the script. It turned out all right. I made it, and the group liked it.

(week 3 was time of)

Ok... We had a week of and started our monday by going through is someone had any briliant ideas. I don't remember if we did, But no matter, we were almost ready to start our moddeling works.
I had to write up the Plan, giving out assignments, and try to se who did what. This task was a bit of a puzzle for me, as one of our group members was from Iceland, and he would have to know what was being done, and what he could do, same as we needed to know what he did.
In the end, Wave seemed to be the solution, since everyone could update the list of assignments, I wanted people to look through the list and choose something, and write it down. This would have worked better if people used it. But no matter, over this and the next couple of week our moddels got done. On the down side, all my works got scrapped when we changed our story a bit... It's all right, it happens, but having no models in the film... oh well, I did a more sentral role in the animation.

End of week 5:
Now, we were suppose to start animating this week, but as some hadn't finnished their work yet, we spent another couple of week modeling.
Something I hated with this was that they modeled, I couldn't take over their scenes, and I was going there with a promise of some animation work soon, I did some planing work, tried to get hold of our Icelandic friend, that had dissapeared on us now, and did some small moddeling work. I did manage to fill my time, but the problem was that we didn't have everything ready for animation.