# Week 12 — Tuesday, November 10 ### Project 3 Thumbnails due · Concept critique · Scope lock --- ## Focus Lock the concept and lock the scope. Four weeks of production remain, and one of them is finals week. --- ## Due today — before 9:00 AM **Project 3 — Thumbnails (10 points)** 1. **Gap statement** — what your portfolio is missing, or the posting requirement you are targeting, quoted 2. Project statement — two or three sentences 3. Why this fills the gap — one paragraph 4. **15–20 thumbnails or explorations** 5. Reference board, cited 6. Chosen direction, with rationale for choosing it over the alternatives 7. Technical plan — pipeline, software, engine, delivery format, constraints 8. **Capture plan** — the breakdown material you will produce alongside the piece 9. Production schedule through Week 16 **Weekly progress report.** --- ## Bring to class - All explorations, printed or displayed together where they can be seen side by side - The reference board - The gap statement - Your portfolio, open --- ## In class **Gap argument critique.** Does the piece actually close the gap you named? This gets tested directly, and the answer is sometimes no. **Exploration critique.** We look at all 15–20 together. Range matters here — twenty variations on one idea is not exploration. If everything on the page is a minor variant, we generate more before choosing. **Direction selection.** Which one, and why. Often the strongest option is not the one the student came in favoring. **Scope lock.** The most important conversation of the day. What is in, what is out, what gets simplified. Everything difficult that is not the thing you want to be hired for gets cut or simplified now. **Capture plan review.** Breakdown material is planned into production, not bolted on at the end. **Supervised production.** --- ## Before next week 1. **Begin production immediately.** Blocking, greybox, or first-pass build due next Tuesday. 2. **Attack the hardest technical element first.** Same principle as Week 2, and it matters more here because there is less runway. 3. **Start capturing breakdown material now**, per your capture plan. --- ## Note — scope, one more time You have four working weeks. Thanksgiving takes a chunk out of one of them, and Week 16 is a presentation, not a production week. Realistically you have Weeks 13, 14, and 15. Three weeks. Plan for three weeks. The single best predictor of a strong Project 3 is a scope that looked slightly too small in Week 12. Every semester, the pieces that land are the ones where the student cut something today and spent the recovered time finishing what was left.