Animation : Dear Filmmakers: Animation is hard! by David Andrade

Hi everyone :) David from Theory Animation here. If you don't know, I produce a webseries called Ray & Clovis. We just released our next short (link below!) In the tradition of these posts though, I'd like to offer some insights: Animation is super hard. It's a time consuming process that often ends it lots of false starts. Even when your script is 'done' you still have the logistical problem of creating the assets, assigning shots, and managing the production. Now, I don't want to get too spammy, we've built some tools to help you (feel free to PM me and I'll tell you more:) ) Rendering is also a giant nightmare. Which brings me to this post. The short below is just about 90 seconds long. It was heavily optimized and customized to look the way it does, but it took a week of effort just tweaking settings. We tried different approaches to speed up the render, cut down on noise, and keep the look. When we got it all said and done, the short took 5 days to render on 5x32-core Intel machines (Linux, because it has low-overhead.) Now that seems absurd - and it is. If you want that nice Pixary look it takes a lot of technical effort to polish it. Once rendering is done you have to dive into post too. Trying color combinations, pushing and pulling colors (I hope you rendered EXRs!) to get the right feel. For fun: all files combined total about 12 GB. I imagine if we did full 4k frames we would easily hit 100 GB. Anyways I'm not trying to dissuade anyone to animating. Just saying that it's definitely an uphill climb and you should be prepared for such a journey! I'll gladly answer any questions any of you have too :) Email may work best as sometimes my inbox gets flooded: david@theoryanimation.com All the best. :dA: The short! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maA2Yd3FOYQ