If a person wanted to create a 30min short, how long would it take? Assuming all the characters and settings were already made beforehand and render time wasnt a factor? Something like… http://youtu.be/DVQDu_Zr5wY (if possible).
so basically, how long to animate and edit?
Pixar estimates 4 seconds of animation per person per week, so about 10 years. for one person. Though if you have all the tools (access to motion capture and skills to use it) I think the time could be reduced to a year or so.
That is if you do pixar level quality.
At the risk of offending all the Final Fantasy fans out there, that trailer is not Pixar quality animation. The models and textures are great, but the animation borrows more from Japanese anime techniques than from Pixar or Disney. I think even without mocap you could do a half hour of work similar to the sample video in a year or so.
Haha, if you have a lead character that is reflective and pensive for more than half the time perhaps you only have to animate 15 minutes!
You could always have him blink from time to time. Seriously, though: five seconds of motionless character in back seat of car, eight seconds of cars racing along freeway, six second camera pans still background… pretty simple to animate, with good models and textures looks great, add in a nice pounding soundtrack and no one will notice there’s no real animation.
How do they do lip sync in anime when a deadline looms? Cut to the sky or the character’s feet.
Most anime is not lip synced for English so I don’t think that it matters much. Otherwise they could be reading a newspaper or otherwise obscure their mouth 
Well, the reason I removed render time is because my school allows us to use their render farm so I dont suspect it’ll take long to render. But I would really like for a fight scene to be in the short, something akin to Lightning Returns.
@daren A year?! Even with MoCap? Oh God… >_<
Is there perhaps a way to do this faster? Say for instance doing it in a game engine, like Machinima? I recently came across this Machinima/Anime/Web Series thing… called RWBY. It was done in Poser but it made me wonder can a good short be done inside a game engine.
What in the world! And i thought that they use motion capture for the 3d characters.
Very true, but it is lip synced in Japanese, sort of. It’s amazing how much anime dialog takes place when you can’t see the character’s face.
Anyway, the point for AntiSocialPanda is to take a good hard look at what professional animators do to save time and meet deadlines while still producing a marketable product. Analyze scenes carefully: what is moving? just the camera? a simple object? Does the character sit still or stand still often, or just have one part (like her hair or the hem of her dress) moving over a rigid pose? Do walk cycles just show the character moving from the waist up, or just the feet? How much time do they spend panning the camera across non-animated sets, or sets that simply have blinking lights in windows or on crosswalk signs?
If ‘they’ is Pixar and the other major studios, your probably right, but even the best mocap requires a lot of cleanup and polishing. It’s not the magic animation bullet most people think it is.