The Animation Options Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

This weekend was a theatrical triple-header for me. Like everyone else, I had Batman on the brain (or more specifically, a Joker jones), but I didn’t feel standing in a long line. So I waited until Sunday evening to see “The Dark Knight”… and ended up standing in a long line. One that circled the block around the Mann Westwood Village theater. When you’re on your way to a $155m+ weekend, even the “light” screenings are madhouses.

So, that left Friday and Saturday for “Space Chimps” and “Mamma Mia!” (don’t ask). I’ll be completely honest - nothing compelled me to see “Space Chimps” other than a professional duty to view every animated film that is released. So, I did my duty. In “Space Chimps”, the characters are sucked into a black hole, and this experience was certainly shared by those of us in the audience. Whereas “The Dark Knight’s” 2 1/2 hours seemed to fly by, “Space Chimp’s” 80 minutes just draaaaagged on the way to $7 million. (In fact, I almost titled this blog entry “Chimp Change”, but I didn’t want to be mean.)

Now, the poor opening isn’t exactly my point. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about a weak animated film (especially one featuring Patrick Warburton as yet another big ape). However, this advice to indie animation companies by “Space Chimps” producer John Williams in the June/July issue of Animation Magazine stuck in my head: “Hold on to your hats! You’re in for a wild ride that may not have a clearly defined or ideal decision-making process. And, keep your head down and do the best work you can - and hope that someone who controls the decision process is listening!” TRANSLATION: “Hello, I’m your pilot. I have no idea where I’m going or how to get there, and I’m not really big on asking for directions or listening to advice. So hold on, because it’s gonna be a wild ride!”

Now, when you’re pulling down “Shrek The Third” numbers, I suppose this sort of cavalier sloppiness can be “understandably” excused. After all, massive revenues mask a multitude of sins (even though one has to wonder in retrospect how much profits were compromised in the process). But, with all due respect to Mr. Williams and the fine folks at Vanguard, when you’re dealing with low budgets, low margins and low returns you’d BETTER have a clearly defined and ideal decision-making process. And if you control that decision-making process you’d BETTER be listening - unless burning cash is your idea of doing business.

Of course, this winking “you-know-how-production-is” attitude is pervasive in Hollywood. I’ve blogged and lectured on it many times. But WHY it’s so pervasive in an industry that values money above all else, I’ll never understand. Mr. Williams, if I told you that you could reap a cost benefit of up to 20% on your films simply by establishing (and adhering to) a clearly defined decision-making process, would I have your ear? Or would I have to “hope that you are listening”? That this attitude even exists is illogical, but that it is presented as “advice” is frankly irresponsible. And the kicker is that it’s easy to correct with a little foresight, planning and discipline - to the direct benefit of your production and your pocketbook.

Then again, this IS the entertainment industry. Perhaps the idea of improving quality and saving money with a little diligence is just too… boring.

Enjoy the “wild ride”!

On my recent flight to Beijing, I had the chance to catch up on some reading, and took in an article on a major visual effects blockbuster. Most of the article contained the usual: “we had to extend our ______ system beyond anything we had done before”, or “we didn’t think we could do it but somehow we pulled it off”. Nothing particularly remarkable, until the following passage from the VFX Supervisor caught my eye:

My first instinct was to go with a CG environment for this sequence because I thought that would give us more flexibility. But (the Director) wanted to shoot a miniature in the natural surroundings of real (landscape) and sky – and it was a great idea. We got all of that terrific setting for free by shooting the miniature there. Of course, in post, we had to change the skies to make them look consistent, because we were shooting on different days and the skies changed. We also added more (landscape).

Well, at least the miniature was still usable… right? Not according to this CG Supervisor:

Initially, the idea was that we would take the shots from the miniature as they were and populate them with (creatures and characters). But quickly we realized that the 2D roto that would have been necessary to place people behind all of these (structures) would have been astronomical. So we decided to redo a lot of it in CG.

So much for the “great idea”.

• Lesson #1: Your first instincts in your field of specialty are usually correct.
• Lesson #2: Your subjective self-preservation instincts vis-à-vis the hand that feeds you will almost always trump your objective professional instincts regarding the good of the production.

This sort of waste is so common in the film industry, that it is accepted with a winking, “you-know-how-production-is” coda. But it is quite frankly ridiculous - especially given the precedents that are seemingly ignored time and time again. For example, the replacement of inadequate or inconsistent practical elements with digital assets is by now a time-worn cliché – yet it still persists at the expense of much time and money. While clearly everything cannot be anticipated in advance, the forehead slaps come when you hear of experienced artists and technicians whose qualified instincts are overruled for the sake of a “comfort zone” that results in the crew chasing their tails and the studio burning cash.

The bottom line: hire the most talented minds you can, and then trust their judgment. You may be pleasantly surprised to find your film a little better and your wallet a little fatter.