Last communications blog post

This year I was the producer of the RIT Special Effects project, which has been wrapping up these past few weeks. There was a miscommunication between the programming and art teams. In the planning stages, the programming lead attended the art visualization meetings. At these meetings we decided we wanted the programming team to write us a plugin that would shatter our 3d models. 8 weeks later, the programmers produced a plugin that created a particle explosion effect, which lead to many complications to achieve our end result.

There where 3 communication issues that helped lead to this result, lack of Perception checking and paraphazing, overuse of jargon. The artists where all on the same page for the look of the effect, while the programmer had a different idea. If we had practiced some paraphrasing we could have gotten better perception checking. Also, the shatter term meant something very specific to the artists, while to the programmer, there was no difference to him between that and an explosion, so if less jargon was used, we could have communicated our concept better.