Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
sound; and fi nal editing. Think about the longest amount of time you've spent on a single project prior to this.
Three months? Six?
If you've never worked on a short animation project before, here's a suggested scope. It will give you a nice
fi nished product, and provide a little room for narrative structure, but minimize some of the more diffi cult
aspects of the process:
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One character
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One location
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No/minimal dialogue
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No/minimal effects
Because everyone works at different speeds and has different amounts of time available for work, it's not really
possible to know how long such a project would take you in absolute terms. It is possible, though, to make a
guess and to see how the inclusion of additional elements can affect the overall scope.
For example, let's say that a short animation that met the preceding specifi cations was going to take some-
thing like 300 hours of work to complete. That time would roughly break down as follows:
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Story/storyboarding: 20 hours
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Character creation, modeling: 20 hours
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Rigging, skinning, and animation testing: 20 hours
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Rough set creation: 10 hours
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Main animation: 100 hours
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Final sets and props: 40 hours
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Final surfacing and lighting: 40 hours
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Compositing/editing/sound effects: 50 hours
Those estimates don't include render time because we're just counting the time you actively have to spend in
front of the computer.
Now we're going to do some math. If you're coming at short animation production from the artistic side, you
may want to grab your uncle the accountant to help you.
Scope Example: Adding a Second Character
Adding a second character to the suggested scope causes the following change: Both character creation and rig-
ging/skinning/testing times will double. Time spent on fi nal surfacing will only go up a bit, say, by 10 hours,
because only a quarter of the original time was going to be spent on the single original character. However, the
main animation time will only go up based on the percentage of time that both characters appear in a shot at
the same time. If the running time remains the same, and the scenes constantly cut between separate shots of the
two characters, you will only be animating each character for half the time. On the other hand, if they spend
80% of the time in a shot together, you will be doing 80% more animation work. For this example, let's say that
through judicious storyboarding and editing, the additional character will only appear with the original during
30% of the running time. This means that the main animation phase goes from 100 hours to roughly 130 hours.
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