Looking for multiple animators to animate 25> minute increments

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Hi! My name is Sophia and I am a 14-year-old filmmaker. I have posted about this same project before, but my approach has changed and for anyone who hasn’t seen my posts/story before, let me introduce myself…

When I was 12, I started writing a script for an animated horror/thriller movie with a friend. The film is based on the characters from Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw, Child’s Play and Annabelle (note - character names, appearances and any very noticeable similarities were changed). A couple of months after starting the script, my co-director and I found a Blender animator who was willing to work for free (which was and has been a Godsend) via a Discord animation server. From January 2022 up until about February/March, he sent some screenshots of models and things he has created (for the film, not in general). More recently, he sent over two character animations, which were only about five seconds long. In late September/early October, the entire cast (including myself as I voice one of the leading roles) recorded all of their lines and sent the recordings over to me. I spent my days and nights learning a new editing software (DaVinci Resolve), putting the recordings together, cut by cut and line by line. After a few days of working on each “section”, and after finishing each one, I would send it over to the animator. He had every single recording and word from me by the middle to end of October. He told me he was working on finishing up animations, models, etc. and that he would begin to sync the VO recordings with the movie itself. He said that in October. Since then I have seen almost zero animation and I have not seen a SINGLE clip/scene/part WITH voiceover thus far. He has been M.I.A. on this project since March (have not heard from him, he has not sent any animation or model updates, etc.)

So at the end of the day, I am looking for help. I am not sure what to do and as I even told our old animator, I cannot lose this project. It is my first one and I am so very proud of it and excited for it to finally be done.

The total movie script is 167 pages long. Our old animator estimated it would be about a standard two-hour-long movie. Would anyone be willing to try to help out with something like this? Also, please note two things: Firstly, I am working on ALL models (characters, buildings, environments, etc.) myself, so you would have those to use already. Two, as this is a standard two-hour length film, I have split it up into 7 sections. 7 separate people (or multiple people on each, doesn’t matter to me) would be working on each increment (which are all 25 minutes or less).

Thank you!

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Hello !
That’s a great idea but also it’s a lot of work.

Indeed, in general 1 page of a script roughly equals 1 minute of animation/film. Given that it’s written in standard script format : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenplay#Format_and_style

I worked mostly on animated series, and the daily animation ratio an animator can produce ranges from 4s a day to 15s, at 4s of animation per day they can produce quite a polished work , 15s is like really difficult and either the quality will be bad or it asks for very good animator that will work a lot. Probably blockbuster animation ratio like pixar / sony is much lower.

Using 15s of animation a day, to produce 25mn for 1 person, it would ask for 100 days of work, which is likely to be done over the weekends , holidays on top of probably other stuff to do.
Given that there are 4 weeks in a mouth, if an animator spend all their Sundays working on the project, they’ll manage to finish the movie after 25 mouths = 2 years.

The first thing you need to do is to prepare some layout, that is a simplified version of the movie where each shot is a .blend file ready to be animated. You have then correct camera framing, correct action timing, all the characters, props a shot require and a very simplified animation.
These needs to be edited so you are sure that each shots put next to each other is working and you have a good continuity from one shot to the other.

Here you have an opportunity to make the movie shorter and prepare animation work , so animator won’t have anything more to do than animate ( which is how it works in general) .
If you manage to make the movie 80mn long ,animating the movie is still a huge tasks but you already managed to cut the production time in half.

What is generally best to do is to work first on 10mn , make a short movie by producing only one sequence of the whole movie. That’s what they did in blender foundation short films Cosmos Landromat, Agent 327.
From there you can use that finished work to find more people to work with and advertise about the movie. This will also inform you about what time is needed to produce the remaining 70mn, what you can improve, and also get constructive feedback before jumping for real !

Another solution might be to find a very simple narrative style that allows to work the movie by yourself.
This movie is done by one person only over multiple years, hence the very simple style but it works : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guqRCaZCl_Y

Sorry to come and be quite down to earth, but this might also explain why your previous animator disappear by not feeling up to the task !

Good luck and I’d be happy to watch that movie someday !

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In case the link isn’t available in your country here is the same trailer from another source :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oYCF-tqvxU

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@Sophia_B Very good suggestion by @sozap . It is better to start from storyboarding, then making a previz. Then you get an idea of how many sequences and scenes needs to be done. And you will also have shots to give to animators. I am not an animator, but i can do props, environment modeling and texturing if needed. Send me reference images and i will try to model them. I can also help with geometry nodes in blender if needed.

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