How long should each section of a film be?

[laniangeline]

I was wondering if your working on a project that's five minutes or longer. What's the max time you recommennd for each act of your cartoon? What is easiest on the animator?

[slowtiger]

Usually the sequences an animator works with are exactly as long as the scene one's working at. Right now I'm on a project which scenes can be between 30 and 800 frames long, which translates to 1 to 32 seconds of video.

[areyouguystwins]

I was wondering if your working on a project that's five minutes or longer. What's the max time you recommennd for each act of your cartoon? What is easiest on the animator?

We are working on a 70 scene project (about a 70-75 minute animated movie). Our scenes average between 40 secs -2 minutes. We decided to animate each scene as its own anime file. We usually average between 1000 and 2800 frames per file.

We have a few scenes that are 4+ minutes long, so we broke those scenes up into two separate anime files. We find working on anime files that are larger than 2800 frames to be tiring. (hey that's just us)

Also if you use a soundtrack (wav file) and import it into Anime on files longer than 40 secs the soundtrack (the picture of the wav) has a tendency to disappear. (bug with Anime) Kind of irritating to constantly reimport the soundtrack if you use the wav picture for animating purposes (like we do sometimes).

I think shorter anime files are the way to go -- easiest on the animator -- no endless scrolling on the timeline. But if you are working on a large project you then have to edit them together in a video editing program, so you have to determine the best way "cut" your files before you start animating.

Just how we do it, I am sure other people do it differently.

[slowtiger]

Only 70 scenes in a 75 minute film? That's going to be really slow editing ...

[Mikdog]

Wow. About a scene a minute.

That's going to be like, a lot of long scenes...unless you're including camera movements within each scene that act as extra scene edits.

[areyouguystwins]

Wow. About a scene a minute.

That's going to be like, a lot of long scenes...unless you're including camera movements within each scene that act as extra scene edits.

Here's how it works.

We wrote a screenplay with 70 scenes.

We take each scene and animate it as a file in Anime.

Now, these scenes are not "shots" they are scenes in the old fashion screenplay sense.

In each Anime file, we have a main switch layer that holds various group folders, and in each group folder there are various camera angles/movements. The group folders and camera angles make up the "shots" to each scene.

For a one minute Anime file we can have 5-6 switches (different group folders which hold different character, backgrounds, etc), and in each group folder we have various camera angles (zooms, cuts).

Basically we are doing our "editing and shooting" in Anime for each scene.

We will then take the 70 scenes, compile them in our video editing software, add some music, transitions and we are done.

Perhaps that is not the "correct" way to go, but it is the way we have chosen to animate our 75 minute film.

As I said, others animate differently using Anime. I just wanted to let the original poster know that we average 1-2 minute scenes (not shots) using Anime. Anything longer for us is too tedious using Anime's timeline and would require too many group/switch layers to keep track of. (plus the problem with the soundtrack bug)

[slowtiger]

Ah! I'm used to say "scene" when life-action says shot, that was the habit in all the studios I worked with. Now it makes much more sense.

Still, I don't see much advantage in putting different shots into one file. The only combination that profits from that is a file with several shots on the same background with the same characters.