Reader's Questions: How Much Time Do You Spend on Each of the Workflow Steps

Another reader question on workflow: How much time do you spend on each of the workflow steps?

When it comes to AnimationMentor.com, there is a guideline to live by – the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. Animation Mentor students are definitely a hard working crew, and this is because animation is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it well. Finding the timing of your workflow is just like the rest of it, you have to see what works for you. Your first instinct may be to rush the planning and go right to animating, but you will soon discover that this is not the most ideal way to work, since you will most likely spend more time fixing things in the end. Finding the right amount of planning, roughing in, getting feedback, blocking, getting feedback, refining and polishing is something that takes time. For beginners, it also takes trial and error, since you can’t be told what the best workflow for you is.. you have to build it yourself!

But to answer your question more directly, you can expect to spend at least twenty hours a week on your AM assignments. But you probably should plan on it taking longer, upwards of forty hours a week, so you aren’t surprised when it turns out to be that sort of time commitment. Animating is time consuming, and until you have really hammered out your workflow, you should expect it to take a while. Rock star animators can move more quickly, but that is because they have spent their time “in the trenches,” taking their knocks, and learning from experience.

And you know what they say… “experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” So don’t expect it to be easy, or else you may be let down.

Good luck!

Animation Mentor Staff

By: Unknown On 09.23

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How Much Average Time Does It Take to Create a Shot?

That's a difficult one to answer. Each studio has its own set of deadlines and expectations, which will also vary wildly by medium (games vs. television shows vs. advertising vs. films, etc). Generally, as you move into larger studios, the deadlines tend to become more realistic (read: a little more spaced out). The larger studios can charge clients more money, which the clients are willing to pay because they know the trade-off is a higher standard of quality. The studio knows that more quality will need more time, so deadlines become a little less intense once you get to a top-tier animation studio, generally speaking.

However, even the larger studios are increasing their productivity all the time (via new technologies, faster machines, better artists, etc), and the "average time to do a shot" is getting less all the time, it seems.

Of course, the biggest X factor in all of this has to do with the content of the shot. I've done a shot in a couple hours (of a hand, in the movie A.I.) but I also got bogged down for about 6 weeks on a shot in Hulk. On Transformers, we had a really streamlined situation with a really fast feedback loop, a lot of amazing animation tools at our disposal, and terrific animation rigs, all of which helped us get our animation time down dramatically. One shot I did of Bonecrusher on the highway only took a few days, while another took closer to 4 weeks - so, yet again, it all depends on the number of characters and what they are doing in the shot. It's always going to take longer to animate a giant robot tackling another robot in slow motion than it will to animate one robot skating down a highway. (There's an example I never would have thought that I'd have at my disposal! ha ha ha)


Shawn :)

By: Unknown On 08.00

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