Question: How fast do professional animators animate?

[ed209]

Realy it depends on what area of the industry you're in. For television expect to be able to key 20 - 30 sec a week or you won't go too far. Even if your keying really quality stuff. If your only doing 5 seconds of your weekly quota of 25, most companies can't afford to keep you around for too long.

Feature film is allot less but and they expect allot higher quality work because of this. Don't really know to much about the gameing industry.

[chepe297]

Thanks for the reply ed209. :scream:

[adavies]

I work in games and a lot of stuff we do is either cycles (walks/runs etc) or action stuff (falling over, fighting, jumping) with a bit of acting thrown in for the 'story' bits. I can normally get a walk done in about a day, or about 2 or 3 good quality attacks/falling over type anims. if it's acting type stuff it can work out at about 300 frames a day (12 secs), other days it can be a couple of seconds if I'm working on action thingies.

[MosaFacku]

i'm right there with chepe, i work with games and sometimes, they need stuff fast, like in a couple hours or as little as 1 hr, other times, depending on the type of character, i can usually get a good walk out in a couple of hrs, fighting (combo) moves take a majority of the day to animate, tweak, animate, tweak. the acting stuff usually takes me longer to animate.

another place where i did freelance work for a tv commercial, they gave me about 10 days to do roughly 4 seconds of animation. it was only 4 seconds, but it was very action packed and had multiple characters.....it was my first job out of school though, so i'm a lot faster now...

[chepe297]

adavies - Thanks for the information adavies.

MosaFacku - Thank-you for the response MosaFacku.

Thanks-you for your replies. :beer:

[jeremybirn]

"another place where i did freelance work for a tv commercial, they gave me about 10 days to do roughly 4 seconds of animation. it was only 4 seconds, but it was very action packed and had multiple characters.....it was my first job out of school though, so i'm a lot faster now..."

On TV commercials, it's not unusual to have animators working for several months on a 15-sec spot.

TV shows are the opposite of commercials, you sometimes have quotas of 25-30 secs per week of multi-character animation.

Of course, "seconds per week" quotas are a terrible system, because some shots are very easy (let's say, a camera move pulling back from an unconscious character), other shots much harder. Rating the "difficulty" of shots that are assigned (by effects, # of characters, type of animation, etc.), and budgeting more time for some shots than others, is a smarter approach than just counting seconds.

-jeremy

[MosaFacku]

exactly :)

[chepe297]

jeremybirn - Thanks for the information Jeremy. :scream:

[Killerbee2]

currently i'm doing a 1 minute corporate presentation (rather heavy on animation and motion graphics) total time spent will be 6 days. For the most of the commercials I made, I've spent around 3-4 days.

I think it's a plus if you work fast and keep it up with the desired quality (or better) the client wants.

[chepe297]

Killerbee2 - Wow... you are really fast. I soon wish I can achieve at the rate of that level. :beer:

currently i'm doing a 1 minute corporate presentation (rather heavy on animation and motion graphics) total time spent will be 6 days. For the most of the commercials I made, I've spent around 3-4 days.

[Mangaka604]

I agree with Jeremy on how the "seconds per week" quota sucks. Action shots are generally very quick (3seconds is long already) and yet sometimes these are quite difficult shots especially if they incorporate trick camera moves along with it.

The difficulty rating is a much better system.

For most generic shots, I can do 30 seconds, with lip-sync, animation, lit and rendered. But if it's a good bit of acting involved, then I'll spend more time on it. Dunno, I find action shots easier to do.

[Emergence]

I would honestly have no idea how many "second's per week" i produce.

I guess working on my own I have been able to produce about 30 seconds of basic animation in a week on average, but when you have to please supervisors and directors, the time you take depends on them as much as you.

-Richard

[chepe297]

Mangaka604 - Thanks for the input Mangaka604.

Emergence - Thanks for your information Richard. I see you work in Weta Digital as an animator. It's good to get advices from people from the same country. Thanks again.

Thanks all! :scream:

[lricho]

i just got 1.30 min of animation done in 2.5 days last week. I almost killed myself in the process though.:surprised :)
Admittedly, the character rig was fairly simple, but there were 7 of the characters to animate. I didnt get much of a chance to do any refining, but overall i was fairly happy with it.
Oh, the 2.5 days wasnt my idea. I got handed the job last week, with a deadline of today. We got there, just :scream:

[chepe297]

90 seconds in 2.5 day!!!! That must be a record! well... from my point of view. I bet you must had quite a lot of caffeine! :scream:

[lricho]

yeah, a fair amount. My mind was a bit numb at the end. I was lucky though, cos about 25 seconds from the second sequence was reused from the first one. (that means that the whole lot is about 2 min long. I still animated 90 sec myself.)
Remember though, that i couldnt really tweak the animation much, cos of the time constraints. And the rig was fairly simple - only 7 controls per character.
Hopefully, i will post a link to the two sequences later this week, after they have actually shown at the conference we were doing it for this week. I still have to do some foley work for the second sequence on tuesday evening. :bounce: Foley work is fun :scream:

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.