How long does it take to make an episode?

[Joshuanimation]

Hey there! So this is just a general question that I've been curious about: How long does it take you to make a cartoon episode? By this I mean like a quality short episode, probably about a 5 minute episode, with many characters, angles, backgrounds,music, etc. I'm curious to know because it is taking me way longer that I had expected. Thanks!

[Lukas]

Depends on way too many factors to answer. If you're doing everything alone, and it's the first episode... I'd say half a year to a full year.

[slowtiger]

It helps to separate the different tasks. You have these big jobs to do:
- script and design
- building and rigging of characters, props, backgrounds
- animating
- sound, editing, finalisation.
Each of these may take any amount of time, depending on your talent and the complexity of the task.

I'll do an estimate here, for seasoned aritists who don't make many mistakes any more:
Design might be done in 2 weeks. Script may take the same time.
Creation and rigging of 2 main, 6 secondary characters: might be done in two weeks. Backgrounds and props according to number and complexity. I can paint 1 BG in 2 hrs (not in AS).
Animation: with everything else finished and prepared, I was able to do nearly 5 min of animation in 1 month. This is damn fast.
Sound etc: Recording stuff may take some days, same goes for editing etc.
This is a tight schedule (did I mention all estimates mean full time?) for somebody who does this for years.

[dueyftw]

I average about 2 hours a day of working on my animations. The most I will get done is 10 minutes in a year. Most of the time I accomplish two animations a year that are about 3minutes or less in a year.
If you want to do half hour episodes every 30 days you better get like 20 friends that have 3 to four hours a day to help out or quit your day job.

Even jib jab animation which is not that hard adds up quickly in time because animation is more than just moving things on the screen.
You have writing, storyboards, voice work, Foley, editing and a few more things.

Dale

[Greenlaw]

It really depends on how efficiently you design your show for production, the size and skill level of your team, and the resources you have available (specifically time + budget.) Design and production planning are probably the most important steps to consider because everything else will be put in place to follow it. If the show is an on-going series with a tight deadline, low budget and tiny crew, you would quite naturally design the show so that elements and animations can be easily re-used and re-purposed for many scenes and episodes.

My wife Alisa and I are finishing up our first Anime Studio Pro short film this week--it should be ready after this upcoming weekend. The film is called 'Scareplane' and there's a teaser pic on our blog: http://littlegreendog.blogspot.com/

TBH, we've never worked on an episodic 2D animation series before but we've both have many years of experience working on cg productions for films, TV commercials and and video game cinematics. This particular project is actually a one-shot based on my comic strip Brudders but we do intend to develop another project as a regular episodic series, and 'Scareplane' was created to test our ability to produce a 2D cartoon in a reasonable time and budget.

Anyway, to put the schedule for this one project into perspective, here's how it's been going. In October 2013, I wrote the script and storyboarded the project. At that time, we also recorded the dialog, made our music selections, and cut an animatic based on the boards. This part of the process took about two weeks (and during our rare moments of 'free' time.) When the animatic was completed, we had a reasonably clear idea of what we needed to do to move forward and finish the project.

At the time, neither of us knew Anime Studio at all, so I expected to spend several weeks learning the program before diving into full-on production mode. The learning curve was actually steeper than I expected, and with my 'day job' as a visual fx artist, family life, and the holidays at hand, it took me a bit longer to get started on the actual production work. (Thank goodness there are so many good tutorial videos online for ASP, plus this forum has been an excellent resource for information.)

By Thanksgiving, Alisa had all the background paintings finished and I had a several character scenes drawn and animated. We still had a lot of work ahead of us but at this stage we had a predictable workflow in place. That was when our production really started to roll.

Most of the really complicated scenes were drawn and animated over the Christmas holidays. The show has five cg shots, which I finally got around to creating this past week. I have remaining four 'hand drawn' character scenes to animate and title cards to design this week, and a final audio mix for this weekend. In total, we have 26 scenes in 'Scareplane' of varying lengths and complexity. In the beginning, I tried to keep things simple but challenging--making a 2D short was new territory for me and some things turned out to more difficult than I expected. But many things were a lot easier too. Also, a few scenes grew more complicated during production simply because I was discovering new features in Anime Studio that I wanted to try out. It all worked out in the end, partly thanks to helpful advice and useful scripts from more experienced users in this forum.

If you go by total days since we started this project, it's been about four months but the actual 'hands on' time with two artists (me and Alisa) has really about two months, working off and on as time permitted. Now that we have good sense of what to expect from working in ASP, I think we can cut our production time down considerably for our next project, mostly by simplifying designs and making better use of 're-usable' elements. Oh, and also by not repeating the mistakes I made during 'Scareplane'.

To summarize, it would not have been possible work out a reliable schedule for this project without the careful planning that was put in during the first two weeks, and even with our careful planning, our work on 'Scareplane' has gone longer than anticipated. Whatever schedule you come up with for your own project, be sure to factor in time for 'the unknown'. I find that in almost every creative project I've worked on, however long I think a task will take, in reality it often takes double that estimate or longer. Other artists I've worked with have told me the same thing. But in any case, you can't formulate a realistic time estimate without first coming up with a detailed plan.

Hope this first hand account sheds some light on the subject.

G.

[DonnyCage]

For those of you that are saying a project takes 6 months to a year.... Do you have a link to some of the animations you've made?

I'd like to see what a 5 minute project that takes 6 months to do, looks like.

The reason being, is I just made my second cartoon (only after learning how to use the software) and it took me 4 days from scratch to finish. It's a 2:30 second video. It's not the best cartoon ever, but hey, it's my second video (first original). The other one was an online tutorial, so it doesn't count.

I've seen others such as Darkmatter2525 who use the same software, and it usually takes him about 2 weeks to pop out a 5 minutes video... But he's had a lot of practice over the years and probably created quite a big character library by now.

I just need to see some of these 6 month videos, so I can see how much I need to increase my game. Apparently I'm doing something way wrong.

[Greenlaw]

For those of you that are saying a project takes 6 months to a year.... Do you have a link to some of the animations you've made?

Scareplane is going to be our first 2D cartoon. We're expecting to finish it this weekend so I'll post a link sometime next week. As mentioned above, it's been four months since we started it but probably about two months of actual work time, and a lot of that time was R&D.

Here's a link to other animated shorts Alisa and I have made:

http://vimeo.com/channels/littlegreendog

Hello Frankenstein was our first and it was made quite a while ago. It's mostly compositing tricks with some animation here and there. This one took us about a month of weekends and late weeknights to make. I recall I was pulling long hours working on a Call of Duty commercial at the same time, so it was a brutal month.

Happy Box was created as R&D for our other short Pooper. It took us about six weeks I think. A lot of that time was spent figuring out how to get two Kinects working for motion capture and applying that data to our characters.

Pooper is a project that's taking us a really long time to complete. What's posted on our channel is the first minute of a three minute music video. We started this project a couple of years ago and it's turned out to be a huge research project for us. Pooper was planned out as best we could at the time but we encountered so many 'unknown' factors along the way. We finally established our workflow last summer and the project was finally getting done. Then I had to put this project aside at the end of summer to focus on freelance work. I'm hoping to get back to finishing Pooper after we finish Scareplane. Anyway, I guess this is an example of a project that can take a year or more--but, as I said, most of this time was spent in R&D.

We have one other short film called RVJ, which was started after we did Hello Frankenstein. There's nothing to show there because that project is being completely rebooted after we finish Pooper. Hopefully, our 'reboot' won't take nearly so long to finish.

G.

[GCharb]

To give You an idea, an episode of the Simpsons takes around 9 months to produce with a large crew, including writing, while an episode of Southpark take 6 days to produce an episode with a small crew, and this also includes writing.

really depends on your skills and the complexity of the project!

[dueyftw]

http://www.youtube.com/user/BakerBini?feature=watch

I did the animation on both animations. About 3 to 4 months to complete.

Dale

[hayasidist]

these took about 40 hours work each -- but they're only 20 seconds with no sound:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... pC0X2VykvM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3oMTsrL ... r_embedded

to do "the other" 4m20 of your 5 minute target at this rate would take me another 520 hours, plus sound and compositing... so if I could spend 10+ hours a week that's one elapsed year - at "full time" (40 hours/wk) that's 3 months

[neeters_guy]

On the Animators Forum, someone posted this work: Epic AE Alien invasion music video with Mecha bugs

The poster says it took two of them 2 years to make this 5-minute video. This example isn't done with Anime Studio, but it supports the rough equation that each second of animation equals a couple hours (or more) of work. My own Pokeballs animation took me 6 months (the script and voice tracks were furnished): neeters_guy / pikaparody wip [complete]

Ultimately how long animation takes just depends on the factors explained already (Greenlaw and slowtiger posts in particular). The primary goal may be to push out the idea fast as opposed to making beautiful animation, as is typically the case on a youtube channel. On Darkmatter2525's channel, for example, I'd say its popularity is due to its religious views more than its animation.

[RichardC]

Hi
This 4 minute or so short animation was made by myself and my wife Sue, start to finish, in about 6 days....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQHAT3AW ... e=youtu.be
It was for a local competition in 2012, and got best script, somewhat bizare for a dialogue free movie.
Looking at it again it looks like it only took 6 days; lots of repurposed shots and pretty basic stuff all round! It's all in the compositing - Premier is your friend.
Rick

[Joshuanimation]

Thank you so much everyone for the replies! And nice animations guys!

[heiseman]

I'd say 5 minutes including script, storyboard, artwork, animation and audio should take roughly 8-10 weeks. Of course, if there is a team involved, it could be cut down to 2-5 weeks. Also depends on the level of detail in the artwork and animation.

[DonnyCage]

This took me about 4 days to complete...

Granted, it's not the best animation in the world, but then again, it's only my second cartoon I've ever done. (Third if you count the tutorial)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvDWHriTw4k