Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!texsun!newstop!sun!imagen!atari!portal!portal!cup.portal.com!Classic_-_Concepts
From: Classic_-_Concepts@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Was Faith in Amiga, now where's the artists?
Message-ID: <27521@cup.portal.com>
Date: 4 Mar 90 01:10:47 GMT
References: <3255@dogie.macc.wisc.edu> <4223@qiclab.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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In article <3255@dogie.macc.wisc.edu> gilmore@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Neil Gilmore) writes:
|In article <27317@cup.portal.com|, Classic_-_Concepts@cup.portal.com writes...
||Animation is worse.  It takes me an average of a month to do a 10 or 15-minute
||animation.  Here we have not only the time it takes to do the graphics, but all
||the scripting, storyline, debugging, animating, etc.

> A month to do a 10 - 15 Minute animation?!?  I assume you mean seconds.  If
> not, my hat's off to you.  Our first film (QWERTY Dancing) took about
> 7 months for 2 minutes of animation.  Of course, that was a part time
> endevour, but still...  But, we did have several layers of animation going
> on at once, and it was single frame recorded at 15 fps.

Actually, I did mean minutes, not seconds.  But, I'm beginning to realize my
situation is not typical.  When I was doing CAD regularly, I finished an
average of 12 - 20 drawings a day; my 4 coworkers, doing almost the same
tasks, averaged 4 - 5.  When I said 'almost' the same tasks, I meant mine were
a little harder--they always passed the 3-d ones off to me, since I had
figured out the 3-d commands.  It's partly because I seem to draw fast, but
partly also because I automated tasks with LISP routines which I would write on
my lunch break (since I was 'just an artist', the company wouldn't spring the
funds to free up my time to do any programming, sigh.  And I was fool enough to
give them the LISP routines free, since I felt sorry for my coworkers).

> Lets face facts here, animation is HARD!  It takes a special breed of
> artist to make a complete animated piece that has a story, characters,
> a soundtrack, etc.  And, it often requires a team of artists, organized
> by a director (a job that's no sinch, I can tell you!).  It also takes
> people with the patience to see a project to the very end.  I think that
> there are probably many people out there who started films, but never

Yes, you are COMPLETELY right.  (When I said a month to do 10 - 15 minutes, I
was working on it almost full-time.  But here's the reason I accomplished it in
that amount of time--I did the music, storyline, scripting, graphics and
animation all myself.  I have done similar tasks on a number of LARGE projects
in committee.  The costs ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars.  And 10 -
15 minutes in those circumstances took closer to 4 months.  It's the
COMMUNICATION that eats up the hours, and also, people seem to work out the
ideas as they go, so there are always MASSIVE changes, and I'm more comfortable
working ideas to completion in my head before I even touch the computer, canvas
or piece of paper.)

That's not to say I don't appreciate group projects.  I have the greatest
respect for specialists in their respective fields.  It just saddens me when I
see quality diluted to satisfy the lowest common denominator, and all too often
that happens.

So, based on experience, for those who are interested in getting into the
field, it looks like a good rule of thumb for an average-complexity computer
animation in a group situation is to expect it to take about a month per 30
seconds of animation.  I'm gleaning this figure from educational videos,
interactive videodisc and commercial projects I've been personally involved
in.  That also assumes YOU ALREADY KNOW YOUR TOOLS, that is, you know the
software, the hardware and it's all reasonably reliable.  The learning curve
is steep.
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