October Snapshot #1

Greetings everyone!

Its time once again to examine a few of the dailies and overviews of what's been happening these past few weeks.

So as you know I've been reformulating a few strategies on how I can develop more concrete 'soft deadlines' for projects. The easiest metric would be by how many seconds I accomplish each week. I've looked at a few methods and tried an experiment in the past week or so with massively increase my workload to see what kind of affect that would have. 

Normally with two ongoing projects I tend to finish about 2.5-3 seconds a week with each one, I like to take my time and 6 seconds is normally more than what most animators do at professional studios so I moderated that action for the better part of this year. Among the few things I wanted to try out was consolidating my projects into one active production at a time, but before I considered that I also wanted to run a stress test to see how much I could put out if I burned the midnight oil. 'Crunch' is what most professionals would call it, but stretched out over the duration of 1.5-2 weeks. 

With results coming in I've managed to accomplish as much as 20 seconds each week in total (10 seconds for each project) of blocked in key frames, extreme cels and passing position cels, leaving only the inbetween cels (essentially the filler material for smooth flowing action) to be done for them. All this considered, its needless to say I am a bit tired from the experiment and will be re-configuring after this week. But it has taught me a few important lessons in this experiment.

For one, the metric of seconds per week can be a misnomer, as the difficulty of setting up the shots with keyframes (the most important poses at certain points in the timeline) have to be set up properly, they need to be correct, otherwise the whole animation based on it will feel off be it timing, shape, flow, etc. Sometimes complex shots really require the better part of a week to complete since they can make the difference between an okay animation and a great animation. I also have to consider how I've been working before, usually its a layering process, I start with the storyboards building my keys based on those, then add in the extremes (contact positions for various actions) and then finally adding in the passing positions before smoothing out and polishing the animation with inbetweens. This can take a few weeks/months at a time to process. So going by seconds per week has to be considered in a different way than what it is at face value. 

Since I face the challenge of trying to work out a process of the timeline we can examine one model I'm considering: 20 seconds per month per project. Each week I will be expecting to animate 5 seconds of footage on average for a project, what I can process here is determine how condensed and heavy the workload is based on each week. I could try exploring the use of keys and extremes for week one, extremes and passing positions in week two, passing positions and inbetweens for week three and inbetweens with any cleanup in week four. Something like this allows enough flexibility for me to correct any errors or take my time with very difficult shots to ensure quality is maintained while also dedicating half the time for inbetweens (as they are usually 50% of all the footage anyways) and a broadly structured plan to ensure I can accomplish 20 seconds in give or take a months time. This plan doesn't consider the factor of color, which usually takes just as much time to complete for each scene as animating the scenes themselves, though the process is more straightforward so not as much planning is necessary when going about that.

Plans like this will be important moving forward since scaling projects this way will help ensure those I'm working with have an idea on what to expect and when to expect them by roughly. It also keeps me moving through each project while also avoiding any burnouts or exhaustion (something that is easy to slide into if I don't keep to a strict 6-8 hour schedule per day.

Free time is substantially important for someone in my position to ensure I can have a creative drive to punch out each scene with efficiency so care has been taken in considering all these factors as well.

Moving forward I'll be attempting to accomplish roughly 10 seconds a week with 5 seconds of footage covering each projects progression. It perhaps feels slow in the grand scheme of things but as one person animating this, it can be a sizable work effort. As mentioned before challenges like this is why I'll be exploring the potential of working with other animators in the future, more manpower means more footage which means more content to see in a timely manner without sacrificing personal time or risking exhaustion.

So that was my experiment this past week, there's not much to share beyond the large amount of footage I had rendered most of which will be worked on and viewed only after the day of release. I have left a little glimpse into one scene involving two consenting adults that utilizes a blocked out scene using rough sketches to illustrate how I can play around with the timing and energy of the characters. It also means I don't have any side projects to share until later, but all in all I would say this has been a rather successful run.

I'll be back in two weeks with some deeper insights on the projects I've been working on as well as, perhaps, a new weekend marathon project that I will have probably cooked up by then.

As always thanks for reading up on this post and if you have questions or curiosities feel free to post them here or contact me directly. Until next time~!