I heard in an interview on Disney+ of one of their animators explaining how he had worked at Disney for 20 years yet only completed 45 minutes of animation in his entire career, and that on average, a Disney animator only comples 2 minutes animation - for an entire movie.
I don’t know whether I’ve missed some bits, or got it completely wrong - but it sounds almost unbelievably slow for professional animators.
Is this even true? For a full length movie of about 1½ hour, you need hundreds of animators, and each animator can’t have more than 1 character to animate then.
I find it difficult to believe, but can anyone verify whether that’s true for professional animation studios (like Pixar)?
I’m not speaking from experience at a big studio but this tracks with what I’ve heard from other people in the industry. ILM does about 6-10 seconds of animation per animator per week depending on the production. At Disney, animators usually only work on a handful of shots each. Maybe adding up to a minute or two max for a whole film if they’re lucky. So yeah, that’s a pretty accurate metric for feature film animation based on what I’ve heard from colleagues and interviews.
It’s not that it’s inefficient, it’s that when you’re working at that level there’s a very high bar for quality. It takes time as an animator to truly sit with a shot and work through it. Sometimes it doesn’t even mean they’re spending a week on the same 6 seconds of animation, either - maybe they go through a variation or two on a shot after talking with the director or animation supervisor. But at the end of the day, there’s still only 6 seconds of final animation, and it took them a week to get there. That’s usually what people mean when they say they can output 6 seconds of animation a week, or 30 seconds of animation a week, or whatever they can do - it’s a combination of quality assurance and revisions.
Thanks for the explanation. Seems like a good high-end PC isn’t enough for producing quality animations.
You need more patience as well, as an animator.
It’s actually some kind of relief - to know that when you are spending hours upon hours polishing your animation, its not necessarily because you’re a poor animator, as Disney animators do the same
And that’s what is sad to me - especially in human character animation.
I have yet to see a feature film where the human character animation is believable. The character model, the facial expressions, the body language, the hair. I’ve never seen anything that made me say “WOW! Fantastic!”
Even simple body movement. Disney’s “Snow White” (1937) had more believable body movement than most modern films. (Take that, Pixar!)
The tricky thing about overcoming what is known as the ‘uncanny valley’ in animation is the layers upon layers of subtlety that is required. Our tools have advanced to where these effects are now a bit easier to create than before, but now we have the added challenge of a runaway increase in display resolution.
To elaborate on that last part, it took decades for shading technology to overcome the uncanny valley on HD resolutions, and it took decades for computer hardware to get to where it does not take weeks to render at said resolution. However, display companies are quickly moving to 4K and are already starting to go to 8K and beyond. It is borderline impossible for users on home hardware to create the assets needed to make every pixel perfectly believable once you get to 8K, even with the higher end commercial solutions (because there’s no hardware configuration under 10,000 USD that can store and then load that much data, nonetheless animate it). The only way otherwise is working in the cloud (but that means you don’t actually own your machine and are dependent on how reliable the servers are).
I used to work as an animator on Illumination McGuff movies (despicable me, minions…) for a few years. I can relate some of my past experience.
Indeed, the pace is very slow for multiple reasons. On average, animators do 3-4 sec a week there. Some reasons:
It’s high quality, very detailed animation. Each pixel, each frame is checked carefully. Polygons penetrations/overlaps should be checked and fixed. There is also lot of “overhead” due to technical requirement, conventions, data management…
It’s not so much about how you conceive the animation for a given shot/character or your skills, but about what the supervisors/directors want you to do. If your animation style/intentions are too different from their point of view, they make you redo the shot until they like it. Sometimes supervisors don’t agree with each other. Sometimes you’ve almost completed the shot, they said they were ok, and finally, they change their mind and want you to try some other things. And sometimes you end up going back to the previous versions, because the new cool ideas ended up being not so cool
Sometimes there are changes from above (story, director…) that require to change the whole shot and redo it almost from scratch.
The production pipeline may get bloated with performance issues, bugs, that need to be fixed before going on
And, ironically some of the shots may get cut before the final release of the movie
I guess that doesn’t sound too shiny unfortunately. But maybe some other people around here have different experience.
When working with smaller animation studios, things are more smooth generally.
It’s funny you say that, because I always thought animators used addons to make feet stick to the ground instead of going through, or some kind of anti-overlapping configurations. Like you have in Blender’s Cloth simulation - but more advanced.
Apparently it is not so simple. You still have to do manual keyframe animation and know what you’re doing.
Don’t get us wrong, a lot of tools like this exist. Ways to help keep feet on the ground, auto-suspension rigs on cars, etc, but they only get you so far and there are a lot of times you need to manually tweak something. It could be self-intersections on the character, or interactions with an object, or another character, or literally anything. Like everything else, these “auto” tools are just that - tools. You still need the eye and talent as an animator to bring everything else to life.
What you mention here (ground constraint) is a very simple case, and can indeed be automatically adjusted with constraints. But in more advanced scenarios, character meshes may be twisted crazily to match some specific poses. Also collisions with props and background elements is not automated. It’s also required to ensure the meshes are not too distorted since this could break the lighting, shadows, or clothes simulations. I’m not sure it still applies, since stereo 3d rendering seems to have vanished in these days, but we were also asked to check the character depth were correct, and ensure the animations are still correct out of the camera field, since stereo rendering comes with 2 cameras that are shifted, with some margin on the sides of the screen.
A colleague of mine left in the middle of a feature production to work on Minions. Very talented guy, who did great shots before he left us. He told us later that he was more like a inbetweener as he only worked on shots that had all the keyposes already done by his supervisor. Is that the way McGuff works in general or is that just for junior animators?
Same at Disney. A friend of mine had worked on a 3 sec shot for almost half a year cause his supervisor made him. I bet Hjalti from BI has some simliar stories to tell from his time at Pixar.
Never understood why people are willing to suffer just so that they have a big studio name in there résumé.
Yeah, I think the main reasons are passion/love for animation to some extent that only a few have, and probably $$ as well
At the time I worked there, there were no in-betweeners. Maybe things have changed. But juniors could be hired in the crowd departments (secondary characters) or fixing departement (animators are also supposed to fix bad deformations, but this is the second layer/pass to ensure all of a bird feathers are not overlapping for example). Edit: Well if it was on Minions, I was there too in the crowd department, and was not aware of any inbetweeners at that time. Dunno… maybe he was fixing. If you can share his name maybe I’ll be able to tell… or check the movie credits. But maybe it’s just that the supervisors were being bossy and didn’t let him choose the key poses, happens often.
It depends on the country, company, and experience so it’s hard to say, but from -my- experience typical animators rates are below that. In larger studios, wages can reach these amounts though.
