How this became part of my work

In 2016, I got a rare and amazing opportunity to become one of the founding supervisors of a brand-new animation operation being built inside an already established and very successful live-action VFX company. There were 11 of us at the beginning, mostly sitting tightly packed into one little room, and it was on us to figure out how to build an animation studio while simultaneously making a feature film for our client.

What followed was one of the best experiences of my professional career. It tested just about every limit I had at the time, and we did it—sort of. More on that later.

Not long afterward, I had a brief stint at another studio that had produced smaller animation projects, a short film, and visual effects. I was brought in as CG Supervisor as the studio scaled up to take on its first animated feature. Directly after that came a third studio. It had built a very successful business around game trailers and cinematics, but had never made anything remotely as long as a feature. I joined as VFX Supervisor to help expand that capability and lead its first animated feature—this time an ambitious musical, made on the tightest budget I had encountered yet.

I did not set out to make building and scaling animation studios a specialty when I started my career as an artist. It just happened, and a lot of lessons came with it. Our industry is navigating some difficult waters, but periods of disruption also tend to create opportunities to build something new. I hope some of these lessons will be useful when those opportunities arrive.

Begin with investigation

Whether you are a studio head, a consultant, or—as I was the first time—a department supervisor actually making the first feature the studio has ever attempted, one of the first jobs is to take a very careful look at what is already there: the tools, the pipeline, the processes, and the team. Then you have to ask a difficult question: which of these are actually capable of supporting a feature film, and which are not?

This is also where you are likely to encounter the first major challenge: owners’ expectations, particularly when those expectations are not quite right. That is completely understandable, but very real.

Studio leadership may quite reasonably think, “We built this company from nothing. We have already figured out how to take on larger projects.” Or, “We are a successful visual-effects company. We already have a production pipeline.” A track record of success creates pride, and it should.

The problem is that the system responsible for those successes will not necessarily translate to feature animation. A feature introduces a different scale of dependencies, iteration, asset reuse, review, continuity, team size, pipeline load, and production complexity. That scale is difficult to fully appreciate until you have experienced it from the inside.

The goal is not to dismiss what came before. It is to understand why the next level may require something different.

Respect, political awareness, and evidence

Telling someone who has built a successful company that part of the system they built is not going to work anymore requires care. You do not want to belittle what came before, nor should you. The best way I have found to handle this requires emotional intelligence, political awareness, and, whenever possible, data.

Fortunately, feature-animation scale often lets you math your way into a very good decision.

The facial-animation decision

At one of the studios where I worked, we already had a facial-animation system. It worked, and it had been perfectly adequate for what the studio had needed up to that point. During our investigation phase, however, the Animation Supervisor identified two problems. First, it was slow to work with. Second, there was a ceiling on the acting performance we could achieve with it.

We were making a drama. Acting mattered quite a bit.

Our Character Supervisor had previously helped develop a much better, Pixar-inspired facial-animation system that we could add to the pipeline. We had an opportunity to license the software and bring in the developer who knew it intimately. The problem was that, for a small studio, it was not cheap. From management’s perspective, the existing system already worked, so how do you make the case for spending the money?

I asked the Animation Supervisor a simple question: how much longer will facial animation take per shot if we do nothing? His estimate was about half a day.

Half a day does not sound particularly frightening. If your studio is accustomed to projects with 30 shots, you are talking about roughly 15 additional artist-days—annoying, perhaps, but manageable. Now change the scale. A feature might contain roughly 1,400 shots.

Suddenly we are having a completely different conversation. That is roughly enough work to employ three animators for an entire year, and the calculation does not even include the other problem: the quality ceiling on the acting.

Now the cost of the new system and bringing in the developer for a period of time starts looking considerably different. It is not simply an expense. It is an investment that can reduce hundreds of artist-days, improve the quality of the film, and permanently improve the studio’s animation capability for future productions.

We made the investment.

Evaluate decisions at the scale of the work

I have used variations of that calculation many times before and since. Sometimes artist-days are enough. Sometimes it helps to convert those days directly into dollars. Most studios already have some understanding of the fully loaded cost of an animation day, a lighting day, or simply an artist-day, so the arithmetic becomes very straightforward.

That leads to one of the most useful lessons I have learned when helping a studio take on its first feature: evaluate almost everything in terms of scale. How many artist-days will this tool, process, or limitation add? How many will it remove? Can we achieve the required quality without changing it? What happens when something that costs half a day per shot is multiplied across an entire feature?

Small inefficiencies become enormous inefficiencies very quickly, and small investments can become extraordinarily inexpensive when viewed against the scale of the production.

The question that follows

The obvious next question is: how can one person possibly evaluate every tool, process, and department required to make a feature film?

You cannot. And that is exactly where the second article in this series begins: Assembling the Right Team.