Pipeline

How do you get from a pencil sketch to the big screen?

This is where the production pipeline comes in. By nature it’s a technical beast. You can’t live without it , it’s hard to tame and you can expect it to bite you from time to time. Luckily there are pain points which can be eliminated by scripting but more on that later.

In pre-production the story is mapped out by editing temporary sound and storyboard frames into an animatic. This is a video file which is a bare bones version of the film. The animatic should tell the full story in a relatively unpolished way. Most of the editing decisions will be made here before sequences are chopped up into shots for animators to work on. This is a different approach to that taken in live action film making. In animation the bulk of the editing is done up front for efficiency.

Once the animatic is approved then production proper begins.

The main tasks in production are modelling, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering and compositing.

We use a custom script based on Open Timeline (OTIO) to turn our animatic edit directly into 3d animation files. All the animation files are created in the background with the correct frame numbers and handles. The sound files are automatically chopped up and assigned to each scene and the characters are referenced in. This is a huge time saver which leaves us free to work on more creative tasks.

The most technically demanding part of the pipeline is character rigging. Rigging is a dark art. As an audience member you will ideally not notice it at all and yet the film is impossible without it. We have built our own modular auto-rigging tools. This ever evolving system allows us to build a character rig in a fraction of the time that it would take to do manually. The main idea is that we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel for each character.

The spine rig is a good example. Most characters will have one. Most of the time it needs to have squash and stretch and separate hip and shoulder controls and the ability to bend into any shape required. To build one from scratch a talented rigger would need several hours. Then it would need to be tested and quite often fixed. Our automatic spine rig instead takes 2 clicks and never needs to be tested. The only time we need to get under the hood is if we need to add a new feature.

Once all the modular parts of the rig have been created and put into place – usually a spine, a head and some limbs – then it’s all skinned to the characters 3d geometry. This process works best if the geometry has been carefully created with rigging in mind.

After that we usually do a test animation scene to make sure we’re on the right track. After all the final tech issues are ironed out then it’s on to the animation process where the characters really come to life.

Animation takes time. You need to make sure the characters remain consistent throughout. You want them to be surprising, entertaining and believable.

After that it’s all about making it look good. We do this with shading, texturing, lighting and compositing. After the final frames are rendered we have a script which will reassemble the edit from the original animatic. Again a huge time saver. As the sound and picture come back together certain aspects of the film usually need to be tweaked, re-edited, beautified and reworked.

Once it’s all approved we create a DCP ( Digital Cinema Package ) for theatrical distribution or ProRes or similar files for broadcast and web distribution.

That’s a whistlestop tour of the pipeline. Easy right?

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