This animation was nominated for Best Short film in the 2010 Suzanne Awards: https://vimeo.com/13376654.
It’s pretty funny and great work (in my humble noob opinion).
However I see that it took a team of students 3 months to create – so my question is, why a whole 3 months?
As a noob, I don’t know much, but it seems that the character design, texturing, rigging and animation for this wouldn’t take an entire team of people a whole 3 months to create.
Anyone have any insights as to why this would take so long? (…And what aspect of it likely took the longest?)
I’d like to create 3D animations with Blender myself (as an individual), so it’s a little discouraging that something as short as this would take a whole team 3 months to make! I came across one comment on another board suggesting that 3 months is actually impressively short for an animation like this… but why?
Well… Animation is a ton of work! Besides all the hard work that an animation takes. People have other things in life, they didn’t spend 3 months straight working on it with no sleep, I’m sure they had other classes, and work and family obligations to take care of as well.
There’s also concepting and storyboarding, render time, and sound design, to contend with as well.
3 months is pretty short time to make something like that. I’ve seen people spend longer on less complex things.
Also, keep in mind that they’re still students, and still learning as they go.
edit: Also, just saw that this is nine years old! both software and hardware have improved in nine years.
3D is really hard. A lot of people don’t realize that. There are dozens of disciplines in 3D animation that people dedicate their entire careers towards doing. If you’re going to be creating your own animations, you are going to have to become at least competent in many different types of skills. For an animation like this that might include screenwriting, concept art, modeling, texturing/surfacing, animation, and editing/sound.
However, I don’t want to scare you off. Doing something of this quality as a one-man team in a similar time frame is certainly possible. But to be able to achieve that you are going to have to put a lot of time into really becoming good at the skills listed above. Skilled artists are able to churn out high-quality stuff very quickly, much faster than say some university students creating a final project. If you are willing to put in the time and practice efficiently, I’m sure you could reach that kind of level fairly quickly. I’ve been using Blender for over a decade, but if I practiced efficiently I could be the same level I am now in 1/20 of the time.
I’m rambling a bit but if you tell us about your current experience and goals, maybe we could give you a better idea of a time frame and point you in the right direction.
“I’m rambling a bit but if you tell us about your current experience and goals, maybe we could give you a better idea of a time frame and point you in the right direction.”
I’m actually just starting to learn Blender. (My goals are to use it for short 3D and 2D humorous animations that I plan to post online fairly regularly, perhaps monthly, as a hobby. I would love to also create animations for advertisers, such as for tv commercials, but that’s a real stretch at my age and current low skill level.)
From my (admittedly limited) perspective, all that a video like the above involves is:
Character & set design
Sculpting
Retopping
Texturing/surfacing
Rigging
Animation
Sound
Rendering
Let me know if I’m missing anything.
Seems a team of people should be able to accomplish that in far less than 3 months, even if character and set design ate up the entire first month.
Yes, I realize that they’re likely working on other projects during the 3 months, however, I came across a comment elsewhere saying it’s actually impressive that this was done in just 3 months, so I’m curious as to what aspect of it would take so long.
Is it the creative stuff, like character, set and sound design? …Or more “technical” stuff like rigging, animation and rendering?
I’d say 3 months is pretty good time for a team of students. For one thing, they’re students, so they’re still learning. And they are undisciplined, so there’s bound to be some goofing around instead of working.
In the professional world, just the post-production work on a project alone can take huge teams of highly trained, disciplined, (and paid) artists several months or even more than a year, working 8-12 hours a day.
Next time you watch a movie, take a look at all the names in the post production categories. The list will be LONG and this isn’t always everyone. Quite often, the main studio(s) will work on the crucial scenes, while everything else gets sent off to smaller studios. Sometimes only the art director and/or lead artist from these studios make the credits, even though 10 people may have worked on it. So when I say “huge teams”, I mean hundreds.
In your “list of 8 skills,” you’ve really only barely scratched the surface of … movie-making.
If you look closely at what you see, you see first of all a movie that is made up of many dozens of individually rendered “shots,” edited together in what Alfred Hitchcock referred to as “assembly.” Each shot went through many rendering steps after the animation had been finalized. The scenes include many props. All of this – all of this – was hand-made.
And then there’s the music … and the “foley work.” After all, animations don’t make a sound. And yet, he screams. Things go “clunk” when they hit the floor or when an actor grabs them in his mouth. Every one of those sonic elements were hand-chosen and hand-positioned in the sound track, precisely timed to the final-cut action.
So, it really does add up fast, especially when a small team of students are doing it. They have other things to do with their daily lives.
Apparently Toy Story 4 is 100 minutes long. If the animators put out an average of 3 seconds a week, that’s 156 seconds a year, or 2.6 minutes, which would mean they would have taken around 38 years for the animation of a feature length film. Did I miscalculate something here?
It all depends on what you want to do. The first thing to remember is, there is no quick and easy option. if you want to learn, or even ‘master’ a subject, it’s going to take time, regardless of what it is. Saying that 2D might be better for you could be true…but don’t think it’s going to be any easier or quicker.
The only way you’ll know whether 3D animation is for you is to actually try it. Download a free model that’s rigged, check some videos online on the basic workflow for animation, and have fun. If you think, wow, this is tedious (Like I did when I tried it) it’s probably not for you. But if you have a great time, and quickly stick to it like glue, then chances are, it’s something you’ll want to explore more.
Saying that to make an animation you need to know how to do story boarding, script writing, concept art, modelling, texturing, rigging, animating and on and on the list goes…is true, but you don’t need to do all that at the start of your journey. You work up to that.
As I say, download a free model that’s rigged (or you could use MakeHuman if you want to work with people) and just play around, and see what you can come up with. Just make sure you’re transparent if you share your results.
Learning skills is hard…generally there aren’t any shortcuts, or buttons to do it all for you. But that shouldn’t put you off. It should make you excited to learn. If it doesn’t…then, perhaps it’s worth trying something else.
When the movie’s over, stay in the theater and watch the entire “credits crawl.” What is by far the longest list of names? Followed by a long list of contractors and the people who worked for them? CG movies cost tens of millions of dollars to make, and every dollar is earned. It is the work-product of a seemingly endless list of specialists.
That’s 3 seconds a week per animator. A movie like a Toy Story is not animated by one man.
That’s an average.
Those animators may make longer animations under one week. They may work on same character on different shots. They may control all props and characters of one shot.
They may make lots of iterations for each thing.
So, that is a rough estimation expressed to explain how much they are taking attention into details.
Now, a complete newbie can create a 3D landscape, animate a camera and, nowadays, with EEVEE, render 30 seconds of a flythrough during same day.
It is just a question of expectation.
Don’t expect a character animation (in 2D or 3D) to be a quick task because it is not.
But tools and process to animate in Blender have never been as easy and fast as they are in 2.8.
They will continue to improve in future years.
Video you linked, is 9 years old. Same students would probably have done it in a shorter period, nowadays.
And students of 2030 will do it faster than what we are experiencing.
(In reality, gain in production time is more often converted into gain in production quality. So, there is a chance that students of 2030 will chose to make a prettier animation rather than a shorter production.)
Unfortunately, the answer is once again “it depends.” We don’t know, for instance, to what extent compositing was used to build the final shots. Most movie frames are not rendered “all at once,” but involve multiple passes that might have been rendered separately. (The simplest example is the background, when the camera’s not moving: you need only one frame of that background, and separate render(s) of the moving characters, the shadows they may cast, and so on.)
You’ll ordinarily see that “lavish attention” is spent on the Star character(s) and on important scenes, while other characters and other scenes receive much less. (Trivia: in the initial theatrical release of “Star Wars Episode One,” a briefly-seen shot of the crowd in the podracer scene actually consisted of colored cotton swabs! No one noticed until a “Making Of” video pointed out the trick. The shot has since been replaced, but that’s part of what let the team meet the release date.)
Ok this is an interesting question, I’ll try to calculate it myself.
The animation is 165 seconds, divided into 12 weeks is about 14s/week. I don’t see any information on how large the student team was. Let’s say 5 people. Looking at the cast (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1979376/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast), about 300 people made Toy Story 4. Remember, there are not only animators, but many other disciplines that are required. Now I’ll be generous and reduce this number to one half, 150, taking into account people who are credited, but only had minor contributions.
So they had a team about 30 times as large. With the same speed as the students, that would be 14sx30=420seconds a week. That works out to 6000s/420s = 14,3 weeks for the movie. Which actually seems fast.
granted i’m only one person, but I can only dream of being able to do my spider mech animation in only 3 months, and that was only a minute long. i’m suspecting the OP has no clue at all about what’s involved in doing animation from scratch.
