directing The Nuts and Bolts of Filmmaking

Rusty Bolt

Rusty Bolt

I really like reading the posts about the actual making of a film, but can't really comment as I'm coming from a whole different angle. As I mentioned in a reply to another thread, I'm an animator, so while the "bread" on the filmmaking sandwich (pre- and post-production) are pretty much the same, it's what happens in the "filling" that is vastly different. Even within animation itself, there are so many techniques (from stop-motion through hand-drawn to 3D) that it's even difficult for animators to compare notes sometimes. So keep up the posts on how you make films as I'm really interested!

And now a pet peeve if I'm allowed (and nobody here has committed this faux pas, but just wanted to air my grievance, lol) - just to clarify something that even festivals get wrong: animation is not a "genre", it's a technique that can utilize just about any genre (although "genre" films these days usually means horror, action or sci-fi). End of rant! :)
 
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I have mad respect for people that do any form of animation. I made a 30 minute brick film on VHS when I was in 8th grade and while it was fun, when I finished I told myself never again. I do a little CG animation now and then for my live action films, but it's almost always objects like vehicles, weapons, and trees. Never characters - I don't have the patience for all the little details lol
 
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Yeah, some animation styles take a lot of patience - and stop motion is top of the list! I don't have the patience or stamina to do those any more, so I stick to hybrid 2D/3D now in my advanced years, lol. ;)
I always read your posts and updates on the making of your film to get some insight into how the "other half" does things.
 
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Animation is getting a lot easier to work with these days. Don't get me wrong, it's still a ton of work, but if one were really dedicated, one could produce an animated film solo this year. It might take you 2-3 years to complete a feature at reasonable quality, but that's a big step up from "impossible" which is what it was a decade ago.

At low quality levels, like south park quality, you could conceivably produce an animated film in 3-4 months, with a few VO actors, a good script, and some AI background voices, and get it all done for under 5 grand.
 
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That's quite true - I work completely solo (except for VO and sometimes music) and can usually produce 2 or 3 shorts a year, depending on the quality. I'm presently working on some incredibly detailed stuff, so probably 6 months for a 7-minute short. The software tools available now can be truly incredible, though, and often mesh well with each other.
 
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Animation is a lot cheaper and easier than it has been, I'm glad for the software such as Clip Studio since I'm 2D anime inspired. However depending on what you're doing it' can be still very time consuming. In terms of directing I agree with Rusty that animation unfortunately is viewed as a genre instead of a technique and there are still prejudices in the animation world in my opinion. I apologize if this is a little ranty but at least from my impressions animation that is "less energetic or bouncy" such as say mainstream anime/Disney 12 principles don't often get as much respect. There's also a bit of a genre/age ghetto as well although not as much as it used to be, it seems rarer to get a serious slow-burn animation piece than for film.
 
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Some great points from Noirlax! The animation software one uses today can be quite simple or extremely complex - there's an incredibly wide range of possibilities. I'm working mostly in 3D these days (with Blender), but also incorporating 2D elements as that's part of my animation background, so it takes me a while to get it tweaked exactly as I want it through to post. Within the serious animation world itself I think there is also a slight tendency to look askance on anything CG not handrawn....as to the age ghetto - here's a pic of the Q&A at a recent festival (not specifically animation). Guess which one is me? Hint - I don't have a beard. These guys were actually really amazing and fun to talk to, but the age gap was decades! It was at this Q&A that I really realized that we were talking apples and oranges when it came to the nuts and bolts of live action vs animation.
fest qa.JPG
 
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Blender and UE, along with a number of other significant software platforms have really gone a long way in democratizing animation. It wasn't so long ago that Blender was much more difficult to use, and UE wasn't really ready for non interactive production until a few years ago. Now everything has changed, and both platforms are free, competent, and have a more accessible learning curve. It's kind of a whole new world for animators.

Or it was.

A few years back, I started down the track of the total replacement technology that AI will bring to animation. A complete paradigm shift that bears only a fractional resemblance to the workflows we've become accustomed to. It's pretty much progressing as I expected, but a partially unexpected problem has surfaced, and it's a big one.

The speed of development in this new field has begun to accelerate at an unprecedented pace over the last 2 years specifically.

Here's what I'm dealing with. I bought a cinema camera a decade ago, and did my research at purchase time. A camera from 1982 (studio camera) and the camera I purchased, were almost interchangeable in output quality. 30 years of stability, where a cinematographer could invest in a tech tree, utilize it, and build on experience with that technology over a long and stable period.

Today I'm having to rebuild my pipeline every 3 months. It's obsolete after that. It will take years to build a product that's competitive in the global market, so basically any product I make will become outdated by the time I publish it.

Meanwhile, I'm being swarmed with low effort people trying to cash in overnight. 10,000 new instagram accounts per day showing AI pictures they made by going onto a website. You can absolutely tell the difference between what they make and what I create with a hand built custom pipeline with a 200gb data back, but it's turned me into a needle in a haystack. What I'm creating today would have made me world famous 5 years ago.

I've always been a big proponent of democratization, and still am, but simultaneously I'm experiencing a huge problem where a screenshot from 3000 hours of work, looks similar enough to a screenshot of 3 seconds of work, that a layman can't always tell the difference. There are solutions, and I'm already ahead of the game on those, but still, this enormous wall of noise, mostly young children playing with toys, is quickly reaching a level where a Pavarotti or Grieg, were one to emerge, would almost certainly be buried beneath the endless cacophony.

How are you guys planning to address the issue of the devaluation of creative currency that has inevitably accompanied this tech surge in visual authoring?
 
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I know that AI is definitely the elephant in the room here. While I have the utmost respect for people like you who put the hours in to making quality creative images using your own pipeline, I for one won't be going that route any time soon. I know I'll be steamrollered over by the new technology, but it's a matter of personal priorities for me. Film festivals are my main focus for exposure - I don't go the monetization route only because I don't have to support myself through filmmaking (I'm retired and do this for the sheer love of creating). If the day comes that it's no longer valued, I'll still keep making films my own way for the sheer love of it. Yes, I'm an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud. But I also think that solely human-made works of art won't completely disappear and there will be venues (like many film festivals) for them. And if not, maybe there'll be room for an antiquated obsolete filmmaker in a museum somewhere, lol!
 
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I'm glad they accepted your work Rusty, when I think age ghetto I was thinking "animation is for kids" mentality which luckily is more a thing of the past. I think acceptance of CG or other animation approaches such as stop motion probably depends on the festival as well. The festival I went to where I got official selection, a 3D short one won for my category by audience vote. I believe whether people are doing animations for festivals or for commercial reasons such as anime are serious about their craft. My issue sometimes with some commercial/mainstream animators is they are too narrow in what they think is "good animation" which can be either too slavish to Disney's 12 principles or trying to up one another in these hyper-energetic/expressive sakuga drawings. It limits the medium because to me anything done on film can be attempted on animation, I've come to this type of thinking partly because my favourite series is an anime that in many ways is more like (and some argue better done in) live-action than animation but to me doing it as an animation works. Also looking at some of the classic films of the past and art films I wonder why don't more animations approach things in this manner?

For AI, I can't say with first hand experience how to make a living while decades of work can be challenged by someone typing prompts on a screen. I don't make a living from my animation work but I've played with AI myself and I think there are limitations on what it can do for now and heard what some people say about it. People can argue about banning/morals about AI all day long but if I had to ponder how to make a living with AI competing, I guess some of the things I might do are 1. Get people educated and involved in the production process. Younger artists struggling with AI might engage their audience and their process rather than focusing on the end result, 2. Get some artwork out of the AI process, AI requires training data and by refusing artwork and some images into the AI training data, this limits what AI can do.
 
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On a bittersweet, but positive note, all of us animators should be looking forward to Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron" which I think is arriving soon. It may be one of the last great animated films produced the old way. Miyazaki is very old at this point, and is often considered to be the world's greatest living animator, with a career going back as far as Don Bluth. While I have no choice but to consider and act on budget and production realities as they will exist in the near future, I do truly appreciate and respect the spectacle and emotional depth that only a truly hand crafted animated film can provide. Critics are calling this his "magnum opus", so expectations are high, considering that this is a director that similar to Scorsese, has spent many decades building a reputation as a master craftsman of the genre.

 
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Noirlax - sorry I completely misunderstood your comment about age...maybe I'm just a wee bit sensitive about age???? 🙂

The 12 principles are one of those things that you really need to acknowledge when you're just starting out, but then you can ignore them (mostly because they'll be there in the back of your mind).


Noirlax said:
when I think age ghetto I was thinking "animation is for kids" mentality which luckily is more a thing of the past.
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Nate North said:
On a bittersweet, but positive note, all of us animators should be looking forward to Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron" which I think is arriving soon. It may be one of the last great animated films produced the old way. Miyazaki is very old at this point, and is often considered to be the world's greatest living animator, with a career going back as far as Don Bluth. While I have no choice but to consider and act on budget and production realities as they will exist in the near future, I do truly appreciate and respect the spectacle and emotional depth that only a truly hand crafted animated film can provide. Critics are calling this his "magnum opus", so expectations are high, considering that this is a director that similar to Scorsese, has spent many decades building a reputation as a master craftsman of the genre.

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I'm pretty sure it's already out in theatres as of the 8th ( I saw it listed at the Cineplex). Its premiere was at TIFF in September. What a massive undertaking, especially at his age; I expect it was one of those projects that he just had to do as I think it was, in part, based on his childhood.
 
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Rusty Bolt said:
Noirlax - sorry I completely misunderstood your comment about age...maybe I'm just a wee bit sensitive about age???? 🙂

The 12 principles are one of those things that you really need to acknowledge when you're just starting out, but then you can ignore them (mostly because they'll be there in the back of your mind).
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Oh well there's no need to be sensitive about age, I'm above 40 myself and never really animated anything until I was 30. I agree Disney's principles are just rules that guide but can be broken. I'm curious what led you to that conclusion?
 
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Not necessarily broken, but internalized early on and used judiciously. If you're doing character animation they will breathe life into the character (if that's your goal). Some animators go overboard and it becomes distracting.
 
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Nate North said:
How are you guys planning to address the issue of the devaluation of creative currency that has inevitably accompanied this tech surge in visual authoring?
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I've recently come across animation film festivals that have a separate category for AI animation. I think this is great as (let's face facts) AI is here and will only gain in influence, so AI driven works should be judged against other AI works and not thrown into the pot with human-made animation. There are also some fests that cater solely to AI integration and "effective utilization" (a fest's quote). I think this is showing a slow shift to acknowledging AI but also attempting to separate it from specifically human-made works. Unfortunately, the waters could become quite muddy...
 
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Rusty Bolt said:
Not necessarily broken, but internalized early on and used judiciously. If you're doing character animation they will breathe life into the character (if that's your goal). Some animators go overboard and it becomes distracting.
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Yes I think some people think breathing life into a character is the only goal there is which is quite limiting and going overboard is distracting. My work actually is more about clinging onto life as time passes as I age and jade (although sometimes I'm concerned if that's all I'm saying) so breathing life is not what I'm looking for. Also I want to capture in animation the subtle moments of when the wind blows gently and that beauty of ambient empty space.
 
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