How long does it generally take to make an animated tv special about the same length and quality of How the Grinch stole Christmas? I've been searching online and seem to get the idea it is around 9-10 months is that correct?
How long to make an animated tv special?
By LooneyAnimator | Friday, August 31, 2012 at 12:56pm
#1
How long to make an animated tv special?
Thank you. Would it take the same time if the animation wasn't outsourced overseas?
If you allocate 16 weeks ( 4 months)for animation, and you have a crew of 10-12 animators, and an equal number of assistants, then its very do-able.
A 22 minute show is 1980 feet of animation. As said before, a reasonable output quota is about 10-20 feet a week, and if you break down a 16 week schedule with that quota its 120-ish a week all told. That means 10-12 feet asked per week, per animator.
That workload is ideal because it allows for character animation to be done at a practical pace, and allows for concurrent effects animation to be done alongside the animation ( if you segregate a couple of animators to tackle JUST effects). It also allows for added complexity in some scenes: crowd scenes or the like. Most importantly, it also allows for line-test time ( shooting and reviewing) to quality check the animation, something that 99% percent of foreign studios just don't bother with.
My experience on productions has seen that you don't want to adjust these numbers too much, because reducing the amount of time to animate, or increasing the quota asked just increases the stress and DECREASES the output.
It ends up increasing the daily workload, meaning talent spend more time in-studio at the drawing board, which increases fatigue. People start to burn out about 2 months into a production, if the hours get too long. Mandating a "fixed" 8 hour day/5-day week gives talent a chance to rest and recharge--and it is a reasonable schedule to ask people to work.
"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)
Thanks, Ken. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me. It makes a lot of sense when you put it like that.
It depends on the number of people on the staff on a large project. Feature films take a minimum of four years but there are exceptions. If you are working alone, from what I have read on this forum, you can expect to produce an average six(6) minutes a week. You have to be working on the drawing full time so that means a twelve(12)+ hour day for a six or seven day work week.
Even after you finished all the drawings there is a lot of post production work.
I think you mean six seconds a week. Unless you are talking about motion graphics or something like family guy six minutes a week for one person is not possible for the quality of animation I am talking about.
My bad. Sorry.
Based on my experience, 9-10 months is about right.
"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)
The commentary from television series I am hearing has one or two years in development. There was a series that I am trying to remember the name of, their green light to televising was very short. Sponge Bob might had been the one, anyway the back story is that there was need the product for a time slot.
I read recently that the three seasons of Avatar The Last Airbender took six years to make. So I guess that's two years for a twenty something episode season. So if there were 22 episodes thats 33 days per episode. That doesn't sound right but I guess multiple episodes are at different stages at any given time in the production.
I think a person that an average six(6) minutes a week is normal .:D
Happy life can't apply colours to a drawing of the render farm ï¼
Uh.............you really don't know, do you?:rolleyes:
6 minutes of animation ( and let's assume its 2D-hand-drawn) is 8640 frames, or 540 feet (16 frames per foot).
The established average quota for animation possible in a 5-day week, by a single animator, working at a comfortable speed is about 10-20 feet per week.
That would work out to about 32 rough and clean drawings per day( at 20 feet per week), assuming they are providing keys and inbetweens, and timing on twos.
That is do-able in a typical 8 hour day and would still allow time for line-testing.
Your "normal 6 minutes" of animation would require 864 rough-to-clean drawings done per day, or about 108 drawings an hour( again, assuming an 8 hr day), or almost 2 completed drawings PER MINUTE.
For How the Grinch Stole Christmas type quality, that is simply not possible, and a single animator producing 6 minutes worth of footage a week at that level is definitely NOT normal.
"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)
You have to be joking.
I am an independent animator, so I know how much one person can produce in a given amount of time. The reason I post the question in the first place was because I haven't worked on a major television production and wanted to get some idea on how long a client should expect to have a piece done by.
Sometimes I wish people who didn't know would just not post but I guess thats the internet.
Thanks, Ken.
So for a piece like the grinch is 9-10 months a typical time for a small studio?
Well from script-to-post for a 22 minute episode of 2D animation is about 6-8 months, usually because getting model-pack designs worked up and such at the start takes a few extra weeks usually. Expanding that to an hour, 44 minutes isn't doing to take that much longer because actually animation is for a 22 minute show--outsourced to overseas) is usually done inside of a month and a bit.
The original How the Grinch Stole Christmas cartoon was only 26 minutes long (according to IMDB), so that added time could go towards polishing the animation and in-betweening itself to up the quality to a similar level.
The clincher is how many bodies the "small studio" has staffed for the work, if you have 10-12 animators and a similar number of assistant, then 3-4 months for animation is doable. If the artists are multi-faceted, and you get them inserted into the production-pipeline as you go; from designs, to storyboarding and then to layout--you can rotate talent off the earlier jobs to start animation. Then, as layout wraps up, the remainder can transition to animation so that all-hands are working on that. Its do-able, without being insane, which is important to stick to a certain quality look.
"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)