When it comes to creating low-budgeted work like Lucy, The Daughter of the Devil, Fluid Animation finds that overall style can transcend technical compromises. All Lucy images © & ™ 2006 Cartoon Network & Adult Swim.

When it comes to animation for television, splurging is not one of the categories in the budget, either above the line or below it. Unlike feature animation, where major studios spend money hand over fist trying to outdo one another, television budgets are much more modest. Even more modest still are the lower-budget CG productions that are well below a million dollars, hovering around a half-million and even lower. Normally, visual effects and CG present many challenges, but CG on a budget is far more challenging.

To discover just what some of these challenges are and how they have been overcome, I surveyed a couple of companies that have worked on low-budget productions.

Fluid’s Seth Piezas, formerly of Pixar, learned that with low budgets, you have to learn to pick your battles well.

“The ever-present challenge for any CG production is adhering to schedule,” states Erik Shepherd, computer graphics supervisor for Fluid Animation and their production of Lucy: Daughter of the Devil for Adult Swim. “This is especially true for low-budget CG, where the slightest failure in a pipeline can have major budgetary ramifications. Another issue that arises is the efficient division of labor. What helps our studio is our artists are skilled in more than one facet of production.”

Seth Piezas, director of Fluid Animation and a former designer at Pixar, agrees. “Creating Lucy makes you rethink many of your assumptions, especially coming from the Pixar world of large-scale production. While it is highly effective -- mandatory in many ways -- to have highly specialized individuals when producing complex long-format content, it is impossible to carry the associated overhead costs when the budgets are highly aggressive.

“Also, it takes a whole lot of time properly targeting the crew’s energy. Crews are artists. And artists always want to put 200 percent into almost every facet of their work -- perfecting everything. That’s wonderful. That’s why we do this. But with low budgets, you have to learn to pick your battles well. It becomes a Zen art for everyone to learn how to spend their time.”

To overcome these challenges, Shepherd concurs with Piezas that picking your battles is very important in low-budget CG. “You can't have everything. The trick is getting as much value out of your efforts as possible. Ideally, we don’t want to spend time on things viewers won’t see. Any corners we do cut will hopefully be overshadowed by the overall style of the show.”

Fluid keeps costs down by using techniques and internal technology that reduce the overhead expense of rendering.

“Style saves your tush more times than you’d imagine,” adds Piezas. “On Lucy, we have a brilliant art director, Albert Truong. Between Albert, Erik, and Loren [Bouchard, the director], they found a style both in art direction and animation that looks great, but has a small production footprint. It’s the hybrid car of animation production.”