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!

The SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 course notes from the popular presentation “CG Production Principles: Keeping Your Money On The Screen & Off The Floor” are now available on SlideShare.

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.

It was my pleasure to participate in the inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia conference here in Singapore. On Thursday, I delivered the best (and last) version of my popular presentation, “CG Production Principles and Practices: Keeping Your Money On The Screen And Off The Floor”. Having evangelized on this subject over the past year for international audiences ranging from boardrooms of executives to conference halls of animation artists, I feel that those who are open to the message have gotten it. This SIGGRAPH Asia attendee certains seems to:

Hi Kevin,
I am totally blown away by your awesome talk about CG production, the good and the bad. Frankly, I have been involved as supervisor on many animation projects, and I am facing those same problems that you have mentioned. This time, I got lots of inspiration and solutions from your awesome sharing. Too bad there were time constraints and you had to make it so fast. - LWL

Glad it spoke to you, LWL… and glad you were able to make it, because with SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 in the can, this presentation is officially “retired”! Stay tuned for the book.

In the meantime, you can check out my YouTube excerpts from the fmx edition of the presentation in Stuttgart this past May. Animation Xpress did a nice write-up on the Singapore version, so thanks to the folk in India for that!

On a separate note, thanks to Laura Dohrmann of NVIDIA for inviting me to participate in this afternoon’s “Emerging Markets” panel discussion, relaying my experiences in China. It was a lot of fun, and a great opportunity to meet new colleagues. It’s always refreshing when you meet like minds from clear across the world.

The Animation Options video channel is now available on YouTube, featuring excerpted presentations and interviews related to animation development, production and distribution:

http://www.youtube.com/animationoptions

Just returned from the fmx08 conference in Stuttgart, where my presentation “CG Production Principles & Practices: Keeping Your Money On the Screen And Off The Floor” was well-received. Afterwards, one producer in the audience was inspired to say: “This presentation should be required viewing for every industry executive, producer and supervisor.”

I could not agree more.

Full report coming soon to the AO press page, but for now I’m off to an onsite consultation in Jerusalem. - KG