Colorization Software for West Wing Studios
C++, Qt, command pattern, Pixel manipulation, Proprietary File Formats
BACKGROUND
West Wing Studios is a colorization company that has done colorization work for television and cinema, from episodes of I Love Lucy to historical war footage. They use in house software to perform their work.
PROJECT SUCCESS
By communicating with company leadership, I modernized their software from prestandard C++ to standard C++17 and helped them extend their feature set while maintaining existing capabilities. I also independently organized development, scheduled time for quality assurance, and performed efficiently in a remote work environment.
PROCESS
Being the sole developer on this project with an older code base, I had to make sure that development was organized and planned efficiently and on-schedule.
Once I understood the client’s needs, I divided the project into chunks of features and worked on implementing a single element at a time, debugging after each implementation. This helped to keep the software from bloating too fast and becoming unwieldy (i.e. if I allowed bugs to remain while working on new functionality, the errors could compound and make future debugging more ambiguous). It also allowed me to create immediate, actionable goals that allowed a sustainable workflow.
I also researched older image file formats to keep the software’s features backwards compatible. Though this was challenging due to the lack of accessible information, I was able to succeed by cross referencing between the documentation that I was able to find and the existing code that relied on these file formats.
The restoration and coloring of a project about World War II received a lot of appreciation and was nominated for the BAFTA Awards.
TAKEAWAYS
After working on this large of a project for several years, I have improved my individual project management skills and my ability to work with a complex preexisting code base. I am confident I can be efficient, organized, and adaptive for any future projects.