The Animation Options Blog

Animation Options has you covered from stem to stern at SIGGRAPH 2009 in Yokohama, with courses ranging from story development to production efficiencies…

Making its Japanese premiere is “What’s Your Story?”, a condensed version of the popular three-day story development course, Wednesday, December 16th from 9:00am-12:45pm:

What’s your story? Can you explain it in a sentence? If the central idea of your film is not clear to you, how can it be to your audience? Does your story pass the “who cares” test? And do you know that story is NOT king, but character IS?

This course examines the nuts and bolts of feature film storytelling in a straightforward, accessible manner for everyone seeking to improve the resonance of their movies on the international animation market. The way to the audience’s wallet is through the heart. Is your story stuck in the head?

The course explores story loglines, genres, hooks, and twists with an eye towards a compelling stage for an appealing hero. The story-outline section addresses the foundation of a strong and flexible story “spine” and then assembles the full skeleton. In the story-boarding section, the course reviews the process for laying out an entire feature film from beginning to end by applying tried-and-true structural beats. The course concludes with an interactive audience brainstorming session and a pitch of the resulting story by presenter Kevin Geiger.

Returning to SIGGRAPH Asia by special request is “Keeping Your Money On The Screen & Off The Floor”, Saturday, December 19th from 2:15pm-6:00pm:

The global animation industry is as competitive as ever, with merciless markets, unforgiving audiences and miniscule profit margins. Yet independent and major productions alike seem content to burn through money (and people) as though they have resources to spare. Amazingly, this waste is not only pervasive, it is accepted. Not only is this irresponsible, it is unsustainable. It is also easily addressed through clear-minded assessment and informed action.

This course squarely addresses common production motivations and pitfalls. It examines the human factors and organizational considerations that are the foundation of all production (dys)function. It proceeds to cover workflow considerations and strategies, the establishment (and erosion) of balance, common heuristic assumptions and errors, and the importance of clarity and adaptation within the studio environment. A series of “Golden Rules” for production segues into the characteristics of a balanced pipeline and an overview of a flexible and robust nonlinear production pipeline. Finally, asset management is reviewed with an eye towards organization, flexibility, and transparency.

The presentation concludes with a micro/macro view on the production paradigm and synergistic orchestration of these parts into a practical yet transcendent whole.

See you in Japan!

Animation Options President & CEO Kevin Geiger will conduct “dual core” presentations at SIGGRAPH 2009 in Yokohama, ranging from story development to production efficiencies.

Making its Japanese premiere is “What’s Your Story?”, a condensed version of the popular three-day story development course, Wednesday, December 16th from 8:30am-12:15pm:

What’s your story? Can you explain it in a sentence? If the central idea of your film is not clear to you, how can it be to your audience? Does your story pass the “who cares” test? And do you know that story is NOT king, but character IS?

This course examines the nuts and bolts of feature film storytelling in a straightforward, accessible manner for everyone seeking to improve the resonance of their movies on the international animation market. The way to the audience’s wallet is through the heart. Is your story stuck in the head?

The course explores story loglines, genres, hooks, and twists with an eye towards a compelling stage for an appealing hero. The story-outline section addresses the foundation of a strong and flexible story “spine” and then assembles the full skeleton. In the story-boarding section, the course reviews the process for laying out an entire feature film from beginning to end by applying tried-and-true structural beats. The course concludes with an interactive audience brainstorming session and a pitch of the resulting story by presenter Kevin Geiger.

Returning to SIGGRAPH Asia by special request is “Keeping Your Money On The Screen & Off The Floor”, Saturday, December 19th from 1:45pm-5:30pm:

The global animation industry is as competitive as ever, with merciless markets, unforgiving audiences and miniscule profit margins. Yet independent and major productions alike seem content to burn through money (and people) as though they have resources to spare. Amazingly, this waste is not only pervasive, it is accepted. Not only is this irresponsible, it is unsustainable. It is also easily addressed through clear-minded assessment and informed action.

This course squarely addresses common production motivations and pitfalls. It examines the human factors and organizational considerations that are the foundation of all production (dys)function. It proceeds to cover workflow considerations and strategies, the establishment (and erosion) of balance, common heuristic assumptions and errors, and the importance of clarity and adaptation within the studio environment. A series of “Golden Rules” for production segues into the characteristics of a balanced pipeline and an overview of a flexible and robust nonlinear production pipeline. Finally, asset management is reviewed with an eye towards organization, flexibility, and transparency.

The presentation concludes with a micro/macro view on the production paradigm and synergistic orchestration of these parts into a practical yet transcendent whole.

See you in Japan!

Animation Options LLC devises 2D & 3D production plans tailored to your specific artistic goals, format, schedule and budget. Contact us for further information on how you can increase quality and profit margins.

If you have certain ways of approaching things, you tend to view the problem at hand as being related to your tried-and-true solution. Here is a great example of how we can get stuck in our preconceptions. Can you tell what the relationship is between the numbers above?

You might look at these numbers for a very long time before you arrive at the answer (or at least, this answer): they are in alphabetical order. While people usually attempt to divine some mathematical relationship between the numbers, once you make a lateral move to another logic system, the “non-intuitive” suddenly becomes obvious.

This brings us to the subject of heuristics. Heuristics are simple rules for making decisions and solving problems – “shortcuts in thinking”, essentially. Heuristics are generally good: we utilize them, and they have their place. They can be inherent or learned, and they work well under most circumstances. But they can unfortunately result in systemic cognitive biases (which is a fancy way of saying “preconceptions”).

Some common heuristic errors…

• The anchoring error: drawing premature conclusions based on the first piece of information, and holding to those even when contradicted by subsequent findings
• The availability error: mistakenly applying mental models and conclusions from apparently similar previous situations, based upon findings in the new situation
• The attribution error: using the information to make gross generalizations confirming what you already “know”

I often see these in action with my consulting clients. Some will say, “We know what our problem is. It’s this,” and they’ll haul out data to back up their conclusions (which they may seem to be more interested in validating than challenging). While this might be comforting on some level, it is ultimately a disservice to the goals that they are trying to achieve.

So, it’s really important to be clear-minded on the following: what you want, where you are, the resources you need, and the need to adapt… to keep changing, moving and growing.

Questions about rendering are common to producers of CG content that is leveraged across multiple output media such as television, film and DVD. Let us assume for the sake of discussion that we are creating a hypothetical “backdoor pilot” of 75 minutes in length that may be released theatrically on film, broadcast on TV and ultimately end up on DVD. Let us also assume that we have settled upon an acceptable render time of 1 hour per frame, and have furthermore decided to work at a “film” frame rate of 24 frames per second.

FRAME RATE

Working at 24 fps is recommended for a number of reasons. In the first place, most animators are comfortable with it as a metric within which to work and to time movement (walk cycles, etc…). Working at 24 fps also tends to result in snappier animation than working at 30 fps (especially when “twos” are employed). While one might choose to animate at 30 fps (29.97 fps) for projects that are solely intended for video broadcast, 24 fps is generally preferred - even for projects with divergent final destinations. This is the case even when taking into account “3:2 pulldown”: the process of converting 24 fps material to 29.97 fps. While telecine conversion (which incorporates 3:2 pulldown) has been common to our industry for decades, it can result in troublesome visual artifacts – especially where lateral motion is concerned. And while there are ways to address these artifacts, that time and money is better spent elsewhere.

Simply put, the rule of thumb is: cater to your primary output medium, and adjust for the rest. For theatrical release, 24 fps is of course entirely compatible with the native frame rate of film, and also of digital projectors. Similarly for DVD, the MPEG-2 standard encodes source material at 24 frames per second. A flag is inserted within the MPEG-2 data stream that instructs conventional DVD players to perform a 3:2 pulldown in real-time (with the potential for artifacts). However, increasingly popular “progressive scan” DVD players react to this flag in a different way: creating high-quality, progressive video in real-time, with no degradation. These advantages should also translate to television as the Congressional mandate for 100% nationwide DTV broadcast takes effect on February 17, 2009.

FRAME RENDERING

There are two basic approaches to frame rendering: a global approach in which everything in the scene is rendered all at once, and a composite approach in which the scene is rendered in layers. Each approach has its pros & cons. The global approach treats the rendered scene like a live-action shoot in which everything is filmed at once, for better or worse. (Pixar has been one of the last notable adherents to this approach, but even they have turned to layered renders in recent films.) On the plus side, the global approach simplifies render organization and facilitates high-end, physically based global illumination. On the minus side, loading an entire scene into memory at once can result in a prohibitive footprint for complex environments. In addition, changes to any small part of a scene require that the entire environment be re-rendered. (In fact, the folks in Emeryville faced such prohibitively long renders on “Cars” that they ironically chose to address minor issues with digital “paint fixes” - just as one would on a live-action plate.)

The much more common layered approach distributes scenes to the renderer in layers defined by the artist and then assembled in a compositing package. While this approach requires careful organization, it also affords the ability to make targeted adjustments to specific elements without re-rendering the entire scene. Global illumination effects are either “faked” on the layers, or else are employed within specific layers (such as on Disney’s “Meet The Robinsons”, where global illumination was used in the background of certain scenes, with the characters composited atop). Either way, we should consider 1 hour of total render time per frame (on average) as a “reasonable” goal for an economical production – whether that hour is spent on one global render, or on a composite of layered renders.

RENDER FARMS

The fundamental components of a render farm are pretty simple: a collection of CPUs on a network for “cooking” the frames, a rendering application (such as RenderMan) to provide the “recipe”, a queue manager to distribute the scenes, and a network-accessible hard disk array for storing the data. As such, render farms can be created relatively cheaply from scratch, or purchased “pre-built” for a premium. But as with everything, the devil is in the details. Case in point: on “Cars”, Pixar saw their render times skyrocket to 10 hours per frame! And it turned out that the problem was not the CPUs themselves, but the NFS (“network file system”) server heads, which at only 1Gb of memory apiece were ill-equipped to handle the incredibly data-intensive scenes.

Moving to 32Gb server heads and replacing NFS with SAN (“storage area network”) - in which the devices appear to the operating system as locally attached - brought the “Cars” render times back down from 10 hours per frame to a much more reasonable 1 hour per frame. The moral of the story: not all render farms are created equal.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

So what does this mean to our hypothetical 75-minute backdoor pilot? At a frame rate of 24 fps, our 75-minute pilot amounts to a total of 108,000 frames. Assuming an average render time of 1 hour per frame, our project will take 108,000 hours to render: 4,500 CPU days, or a little more than 12 CPU years (the amount of time it would take one CPU to render the whole thing). At first glance, that may seem like a defeating number, but consider that 12 CPU years only takes four-and-a-half days to calculate on a 1000-CPU render farm, and a 3000-CPU render farm can render the entire project in only one-and-a-half days!

However, an animated film has never been made in which the entire project was forecast perfectly without preview and then sent off for a singular “first & final” render. Scenes are rendered and re-rendered many times in the troubleshooting of problems and in the pursuit of artistic quality. The more efficient this iteration is, the better. So truly, it is the WORKFLOW and not the hardware that makes or breaks a film.

And that is where production experience comes in.

There is an old Yiddish proverb that holds, “Borrowed brains have no value.” However, the American President Woodrow Wilson asserted, “I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.” When it comes to production, it’s my experience that you can’t go wrong following Wilson’s example.

Given the sheer quantity, magnitude and complexity of creative & technical issues that contemporary production crews are faced with - LEVERAGE is the order of the day. The most effective leader is not the individual who “knows everything” (or more likely, thinks they do), but the individual who serves as a hub around which collaborating talents revolve.

I recall a lunch conversation with a highly regarded producer who confided to me, “I didn’t graduate from Harvard or M.I.T., but I employ the people who did – and I value their contributions. I wouldn’t be where I am without them.”

As a leader, are you leveraging your brain upon the “borrowed brains” of your team?

What do you value more: the glory of being a “hero”, or the results of being a hub?

• What portion of your day is spent addressing the vision of your company? What portion is consumed with mundane business? What portion is spent “putting out fires”?
• Are your “brain surgeons digging trenches” (are your valuable artists wasting their time, your schedule and your money with low-level technical tasks)?
• Does your team approach their work like a film, or like a “science project”?
• Does your workflow “work” and “flow”?
• Is your pipeline robust, flexible, efficient and transparent?
• Do you regard pipeline problems as “normal” and/or “unavoidable”?
• Is your creative talent able to make informed decisions about work in rough form?
• How often are assets and shots sent back from one department to another for revision?
• How often do your artists find themselves on “treasure hunts” (searching for files, trying to determine the correct version)?
• How often are assets created without being deployed?
• Are there contingencies in place at every phase of your production pipeline?
• Does your pipeline efficiently accommodate “re-do” and “same-as” shots?
• Do you have a working strategy for asset re-use?
• What economies of scale are implemented in your pipeline?
• Does everyone in the production chain understand how the same decision can become more expensive at different stages of the process?
• Can your production pipeline economically accommodate last-minute story changes?
• Are you satisfied with your production environment in terms of relationships, communication, adaptation and high-quality delivery?