KEEPING EFFECTIVE THROUGH WORK BREAKDOWN Back to tutorial index Let me teach you something that sounds strange; I will show you how to skip to the end of an production without actually finishing it. This is a way of working that I have picked up from classical animation, where you finish only what is needed to communicate your work. It's nothing groundbreaking, I think most people work like this, but if this is new to you then please try it out. There's no reason why it shouldn't work for you. It can really help you improve your workflow, maybe even get you home earlier. Breaking it down! As I said, this is something that has been picked from classical (drawn) animation. Animation back at the start of the last century was a lot of work, it still is of course, but redoing a scene when animating by hand must have been a torturing thing to do. Imagine an animator working for weeks on one scene, and then cleaning up the drawings for one more week. The day the director finally gets to see it he goes: 'Naaah. Didn't like that too much. This isn't good. Here's what you should do...'. And then the animator goes back to his desk to start all over again. It's not good for the deadline, it's not good for the budgets, and it's not at all good for the artists. So they came up with a more clever way of doing it. They did it in passes, breaking it down. Instead of animating an entire scene, they found important poses through the scene, and drew those first. These were the key drawings - the most important drawings needed to tell the story in that scene. Then they timed out these drawings and filmed them. One drawing might last for half a second, before the new drawing came and was on the screen for maybe two seconds, and so on. Then they would show this to the director and get his opinions. Now he could comment on the scene and make changes, before any of the major work was being done. And that's the most clever part: you had the absolute minimum that's needed in order to communicate, and you could get approval before digging into the time-consuming stuff. Above you can see a sequence of animation drawings from the Disney classic 'Peter Pan'. They are from the book 'The Illusion of Life', also known as the bible of classical animation. If I'm not mistaken, the drawings were done by Frank Thomas, one the best animation draftsmen there ever was. The top row of three drawings are his key frames, and below you can the finished animated sequence. Look how he picked his key frames; the first frame of the sequence where the captain is ready to attach his hook, then the most extreme frame just before he is about to move his hook to his hand, and finally when the hook is connected to the hand. That's the brilliant way of working they figured out in the early 1920s, let's see how this applies to our fancy modern 3D computer animation stuff! Breaking down computer animation It is of course very easy to transfer this method to 3D animation, and I think this is how almost everyone does 3D animation today. You start out by blocking in your key positions using stepped interpolation, then you get this approved by the director or client. After the blocking is okayed, you convert the stepped keyframes into smooth keyframes, and start animating the large body motions. You get that approved, before finally doing the little details that complete your animated scene. Below is an example from the Twin Association films done at Toxic that show the animation at the blocking stage looks like compared to the final animation: Breaking down everything else Now you might say: "I am not an animator, why should I care?". Well, you should care! The best part of breaking your work down, is that you can do this at every level of the production. Think about the principle behind it, which is breaking stuff down to the minimum needed to communicate. Let me show you some examples on how this can be applied to different levels of a 3D production. This way of doing it can also be used when editing 3D animation. When I did the Europride film, I first made really rough versions of all the shots I thought would look good in the film. Since I did them really simple, I was able to do all the shots in a days time. We then used these simplified shots when editing, making sure the film had a smooth edit before I went on with the animation and rendering. Below you can see a grid overview of the different animatic shots I did for the Europride film. There are 33 different shots here, and the total length of all these shots are five minutes and forty seconds. Compared to the one minute long final film, there's plenty of footage to play around with in editing. Also, compare the look of these animatic shots to the look of the final rendered images. So these have been moving examples, something that is very well suited for breaking down. Lighting is also something that should come in much earlier in a production. Usually it is left until the end, but think about how many things that are dependent on lighting. Some details could dissapear in the dark, so why model them? Facial expressions depend on how they are lit, so how are you going to animate them when you have no lighting set up? Take a look at this project Toxic did for Hydro, where they wanted a print ad done in 3D. Since this was a high resolution print ad, something that can take a lot of time, we really had to make sure we didn't model or texture anything unnecessary in order to keep the budget low. So before modeling started, I roughed out the 3D layout on the left, complete with lighting, so that we could see where we needed to put the most work. Thanks to the layout, we could concentrate our details on the brighter parts of the image. I even painted the background in 2D, and since it's dark and out of focus you will be hard pressed to see the difference between 2D or 3D. Best of all, the client could look at the lighted layout, and OK the lighting much earlier in the process, saving us a huge amount of work in case they didn't like the lighting after the modeling had been done. Finally, here is one more example related to modeling. This is a shot from a series of christmas bumpers Toxic did for norwegian television network TV2. Here you see another benefit of blocking in your scene, this time without lighting. From the layout on the left, we knew exactly what we had to model for the final scene. For example, there is no need to model the back side of the gingerbread house, since you won't be seeing it. We knew we only had to model that specific part of the background window, because that was all the camera was going to see. And we moved parts of the foreground around after doing the layout and blocked animation. Parts of the foreground was covering up our main character, and it would have been a shame to spend half a day modeling and texturing them, and then discovering they had to be moved. As you can see, blocking layout and lighting will save you lots of time. And I am pretty sure you can think of creative ways of blocking in other aspects of your work. From rough blocking to final render To reach the final product, you go through everything in passes. First doing a rough pass, with just the basics. This is our blocking, as demonstrated. Then you go back and rework everything to a slightly more detailed level. After that, another pass, with even more details. I always do overnight renders, so that I can review my work and also do rough compositing work on my 3D renders. You continue refining and refining like that until you and your client are happy - and the deadline appears. You can even stop the project at any time you want - because you will always have something that looks complete. That's a great benefit of working on everything progressively. Working like this, you will find a way of moving through a production that will give the client something to review at a much earlier time. And that's very important if you don't want to redo any of your work. The important word here is communication. You should have something to communicate with the client early on, because then you will get your work approved earlier as well. I finish off with something that is very important! Make sure you get contractually binding approvals from the client after every step, having a contract that specifies extra time and budget made available if the client wants to go back and change something that has been approved earlier. If you don't do that, you're literally putting your way of working back to the 1920s again. 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