All images from Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Reprinted with permission.

Be sure to check out Parts 1-6 of Production Planning to learn about basics such as the production pipeline, budget analysis and production deadlines.

Scheduling Your Production
Now that you’ve determined the size of your intended team and made any necessary adjustments to the complexity of your cinematic vision to ensure that your production cycle will fit within the limits of your available timeframe and finances, it’s time to organize the steps along your pathway toward film completion by creating a schedule for each of the three phases of your project cycle — pre-production, shot production and post-production.

There are many ways to schedule a short animated film production, depending on the complexity of your film, the steps included in your overall digital pipeline, the size of your team and your available hours and assets. Before you begin, you need to answer a couple of important questions about your overall production plan.

• Will you be working alone or with teammates?

• Where will music fit into your pipeline?

If you work alone, your schedule will be rather linear. Although you might bounce back and forth between different tasks, you will basically be doing one thing at a time. If you work with a team, obviously you can accomplish certain tasks simultaneously.

If music will dictate the action of your story beats, you will need to schedule creation and recording time into your pre-production phase. If music will be used as a final enhancement to your storyline, then it can be composed or acquired much later and then scaled, offset or edited to fit with your visuals.

Pre-Production Scheduling
Start by making a list of all assets that will be required for shot production. These include:

• Vocal and/or music tracks

• A 2D animatic

• A 3D animatic

• Character models

• Texture maps

• Character setups

• Background models and props

• Background paintings or photos

You should have determined the quantity, complexity and build times of these elements when you created your time estimate. Here in the scheduling stage, you simply need to organize a sequential plan for creating each of these assets. The order you choose for the creation of these elements is not particularly important as long as you get them all ready for shot production at an appropriate level of completion.

[Figure 22] Create daily or weekly columns depending on the expected length of each task.

Lone Filmmaker Pre-Production Scheduling
If you are working alone, then obviously you will be creating all of these assets yourself. This might not necessarily be the most efficient way to accomplish such a task, but it will indeed make for the simplest schedule.

Start by building a task table, where each column represents either a day or a week depending on how long you expect the creation of each asset to take. If most of your assets will take at least a week to build, then use one column per week, titling these columns with the start date of each workweek. If you expect to work much faster, then break up each week’s column into sub-columns representing the number of days in a typical workweek (see Figure 22).

Then simply fill in the necessary time blocks for each task you will accomplish. Figure 23 might represent a typical pre-production schedule for a lone CG artist creating assets for a film with two characters and a bit of dialogue.