I am a final year animation student, and a short while ago, I was involved in the production of a few [very] short animated movies for a competition at my class. It was the hardest, messiest, fastest I have ever worked. Of a total 54 shots, I animated 35, in under a week, with a 72 hour work binge during the weekend during which I slept a total of 3 hours. I was asked [by a few friends and a couple of subreddits] to do a write up of the experience, so here we are! Before I start, I wanna drop in this time map to help you keep track of the production -



THE COMPETITION

The competition was called ‘The 100 hours challenge’. The basic idea was that each centre of the institute would take on a few movies [25 seconds long each] and have 100 hours to produce those movies. A total of 80 such movies entered production on 12 noon, 19th March, 2015. Some 550 students were working across all the centres. From here on out, I’ll describe the production experience of some 20 students at my centre, working on the 4 movies that we’ve taken on. Why 4? Because 4 movies totaled 100 seconds, so we wanted to produce 100 seconds in 100 hours.



We had pretty much no creative freedom in terms of being able to handle any pre-production during the competition. We received a script, animatic, model sheets for characters, prop sheets for bg, and concept art for scene layout. We had to pick up the production pipeline from there on out, onwards all the way to post-production.





THE IDEAL PRODUCTION CYCLE

Ideally, this is how a production pipeline is supposed to work -



[Pre production]

Story pitch -> Refinement -> Script

Concept art -> Character, bg, prop design -> Model sheets

Scripts + Model sheets -> Storyboards -> Animatic

[Production]

Model sheets -> Models for characters, bg and props

Models -> texturing/shading -> Rigging

Rigged models -> Scene setup -> Layout

Layout + animatic + script -> Animation

Animation -> Scene cleanup -> Lighting -> Rendering

[Post production]

Raw renders -> Composting -> Final renders

Raw renders + sound layout -> Raw edit line up

Final renders + final sound -> Final edit -> Movie

Movie -> ??? -> Profit

At least, that’s how the ideal production pipeline is supposed to work. Ours was anything but ideal. There were quite a few fuck ups. Before I get to them, I wanna layout what my role in the production was, because my role defines the lens through which I see the production experience, and understanding that point of view is important before delving into details of the things that happened.





MY ROLE

I was the lead animator on the production, meaning my task was to head the animation team, supervise and assign shots, as well as do the important ones myself. Moreover, it was my task to co-ordinate with the layout artists on both ends of the animation production - first, when the scene first comes to the animators, at which point I made sure the set layout and camera matched the animatic and the rigs were functioning properly; and later, when the scene goes onto the cleanup artists, where my job was to take care of any issues that might arise with intersections of objects, ground placement/planting of feet and tires, etc.

So, that’s what my role in the production was. Now, onto some of the many issues we faced.





FUCK UPs & MESSES

The first issue we faced was scaling issues in layout, on movie 4. What happened was that the layout artists on that movie [who doubled as the modelers for it] were really new students, and didn’t have all the relevant knowledge to make sure no issues arose. So what happened was that when they started to layout the scenes, all the models were of different scales. A truck would be as big as a 4 storey building and so on. So, what they did was they rescaled them to ‘look right’. EXCEPT, it wasn’t right, since the scale still didn’t match across shots even if it did within them. So what?



Well, two things. First, this meant that when the animators did the character layout of the scenes, the characters all had to be rescaled differently in each shot. Some character rigs were not done well enough to properly scale - some bones or some controllers didn’t scale along with the rest as they should. That’s what happens when a team is working on such a short timeline. So, for those scenes, the shots had to be resent to the layout artists to scale all the bgs and props, and then finally we could animate. Woops, there goes a few hours of precious production time.



Secondly, the shots that didn’t get rescaled twice ended up animated and sent to lighting with the scaling still wrong as before. And now, when the lighting artists tried to match lights, the shadows and light intensities didn’t work properly because the values had to be changed to reflect the new scaling. Woops. Those shots had to be sent back to layout, given a checkup pass through animators, and then finally they could be lit. And a few more hours of precious production time were lost. That’s why we had to drop two of the movies [points d and e in that image up there].



During all this, I was also working on animating the major shots, as well as getting some of the simplest shot out of the way, leaving just the moderate shots for the other animators. Cue sleepless nights and hunger and tiredness and frustration and all that. Oh well, we got the the deadline on 4 pm on Monday, and managed to get two of the 4 movies done. We submitted them, and we thought we’d finally be able to go home and rest and relax.



But nope.





SOME DEAD THINGS SHOULD REMAIN THAT WAY

The head office called and demanded that we finish the other two movies. We explained that the models and rigging and so on had lots of issues we simply didn’t have the time to fix, but they didn’t care. By now, some of the animators had also left the production, because the competition was over and they couldn’t be arsed to put up with the head office’s shenanigans. So now, we had to finish the two movies which had died - for good reason - early in the production, and we didn’t even have the full production team to get the work done.



As a result, the work on those two movies is some of the worst I [and all of us, in fact] have done. Those two movies had died because they had lots of technical issues which we didn’t have time to solve before the deadline ended. Now that the deadline was over, it was a soul crushing case of the being asked, every single day, that we “get the work done by the end of today”. The only option we had was to work with the same buggy props and models and rigs that were left from when the movies died. Hence the final result of those movies being quite bad.

So, after so much effort and pain and frustration, all four movies got done, having taken twice as much time as they should have. It took quite an emotional toll on us, the whole experience. First the frustration from having our precious time be eaten up by the fuck ups that happened. Then, the pain from seeing the movies that we liked, and wanted to do, die. The short lived relief from having done at least two movies got buried quickly by the shock and horror at being forced to do the other two. And then, every day after that, it was just extremely stressful to keep pushing the submission date back, and working despite knowing that because of the technical issues, we wouldn’t be able to do anywhere near our best work.





AFTERMATH & REFLECTIONS

Overall, the experience was something I did feel to be personally transformative. I learned so much, due to collaborating across the teams. I picked up on rigging, modelling tricks, lighting info. I gained so much confidence due to being able to work this fast, and work under so much pressure. I learned shortcuts and better workflows in my animation to economise the time taken by each shot. I learned how to manage a team, how to delegate, supervise, assist, problem solve. I learned how to handle emotional whiplashes, how to provide support to others who are dealing with the same. I learned how to have fun even when there is so much work and stress. How to enjoy the little things when the going gets tough, and find positivity among all the negatives. When the production finally wrapped up on Thursday, I felt like I was a significantly different person than I was a week ago when the competition began.



A few days later, we received news that of the original 80 movies taken by all the centres, a total of 76 were submitted. Of those 76, one of the movies we did won second place! Much rejoicement was had, and it did put a nice cherry on top the bittersweet cake that was this production.



Later, I talked to many of the other artists, and they had similar thoughts on how the experience affected them, how it changed them as people. The production was like going through a crucible for me, and it was tough and there were times I wanted to cry and give up, and was frustrated, crestfallen, overworked, tired, sleepy. It wasn’t easy, but I am glad to have gone through this crucible, because I do feel that I have emerged the stronger for it.





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Ps. I’ve had a few people ask me if there is anywhere they can see these movies. Unfortunately, no. The institute partnered with a third party which supplied the pre-production to the teams. As it wasn’t a project we did internally, we don’t own the intellectual rights to the movies, hence we can’t show them. Sorry about that.