Here is a blog by Nick Dorra including awesome tips on producing animation. The newest post is about budgeting and why animation costs more than live-action.
Archive for the ‘c) Schedulling and budgeting’ Category
A Blog worth subscribing to!
Posted in §. Producer´s Tools, c) Schedulling and budgeting, WWW on December 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Understanding the workflow
Posted in a) Animation, a) Editing, §. Producer´s Tools, b) Lights and special effects, b) Sound editing, c) Compositing, c) Schedulling and budgeting, d) Rendering, e) Sound, tagged animating, deadline, diagram, dropbox, file, folders, plan, VUE, workflow on May 11, 2010| 2 Comments »
Our lighting lead/director of photography planned this diagram first on a chalkboard and then with VUE. There are two main points why diagrams like this are important:
1) Making the folder structure clear to everybody. The first row in the diagram explains the names of the folders and who’s job it is to transfer files in and out of there. As we’ve told, we are using Dropbox and it gets easily messed up if there is no plans how to name the files and folders.
2) Making the workflow clear to everybody. Even the crewmembers with “minor” roles need to know what’s about to happen. Also different deadlines are easy to set when you can visualize the path of he project.
This kind of diagram SHOULD have been done from the beginning of the project, but better now than never. It would be wise to print the whole diagram on a huge piece of paper and hang it somewhere so that everybody could see it every day. (You could even have little name-tags that would indicate the person working on a certain stage.)
The day after this was done, we found out that the composing can be done with blender. So we deleted the “After Effects”-stage, because it’s better/faster to do the job with the same programm. The point here is: make your diagrams easy to correct, because there will be corrections!
Producer´s schedule
Posted in §. Producer´s Tools, c) Schedulling and budgeting, tagged animation producer, excel, producer, schedule on January 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »
The schedule is made with excel, so that it can be updated easily. This is our schedule today, but tomorrow it might be different.
Budget
Posted in §. Producer´s Tools, c) Schedulling and budgeting, tagged animation, animation producer, budget, producer, project on November 21, 2009| 1 Comment »
Because this is a school project, we can’t really “count the budget”. This is because the crew can’t do the job 8 hours per day, five days per week. But we were curious to know how much money would a project like this cost.
We estimated the hours that would be needet to complete every stage of the project and we noticed that one person would be able to do 40 hours of work in a month (after and during school).
All in all the whole animation will take 929 hours for the whole crew. That alone would cost 29074,36 € with the normal Finnish salary payment custom. Adding the equipment, computers and facilities would add about 8600 €.
This means that in real life doing a 2 minute animation with 12 people woul cost 37574,36 €. But, we are doing it for free because its a school project.
Early schedule
Posted in c) Schedulling and budgeting, tagged animation, animator, Art Director, blueprint, character, composing, modeller, modelling, rendering, rigger, rigging, schedule, sketch, texturing, work-flow on September 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »
The main animator made a sketch of the animations work-flow. This was just to make the whole process a little easier to understand, because some members of the crew were doing this the first time.
translation:
1. Developing the characters and the surroundings
– director, art director, scriptwriter
– target: blueprints, different moods of the characters, pics of the surrounding farm
2. Modelling, texturing, rigging (3-8 weeks)
– modeller, rigger, art director
– target: characters that are ready for animation (contron tool etc.), 3d farm ready to work with
3. Animating (2-4 weeks)
– animator, director, cinematographer
– target: scenes animated and spotlighted
4. Rending and composing (1-3 weeks)
– target: the scenes rendered and exported for the editor (AVI/MOV)
This plan changed a bit afterwards. For example the texturing is done at the same time with the animating. But this is just to show the rough basic idea of the “to-do” -list! It was important to have something on paper to start with!
3D Animation Project 