GameChangerWeek - a long story of fast production

[slowtiger]

The project I worked on since June is online this week!
https://gcw.kindernothilfe.de, german only, sorry. It's 3 point-and-click escape room-like games/stories intertwined with animated sequences, cut into 5 parts of which 1 is revealed each day. The stories take place in Brazil, Zambia, and India. I'm afraid for now you have to register to play and watch, but I will eventually get a reel of the animation only and be able to show it.

I will tell you this story so you will be able to avoid some of the traps I stepped in.

This was heavy, demanding, very interesting, frustrating, and still lots of fun for me. I've learned quite a lot on the way, not least because usually I'm working alone, but this time I had a team to lead. And despite all the problems I have to say this was one of the best clients I ever had, because no matter what happened, we managed to maintain a friendly and respectful style of communication until the very end. We only met via Zoom and emailed a lot.

When I joined the party lots of stuff was already decided: the overall concept, the stories, the amount of games. I was one of 2 full time animators, and had 5 animation students to work with, everybody using TVPaint. The client had some documentary filmmaking experience, but not with animation. So I made myself head of animation and immediately had more work than necessary ... The deadline was fix, so they planned with 1 month of animation for each of their stories. Well.

At that point only one script was finished. 23 pages. 11 talking characters who needed to be designed and animated. "That's a lot" I said, but it couldn't be changed.

They wanted the animated characters on a life video background. I said No Way. To make this work you need much more preparation, time, and communication than you can afford. We compromized on still photographs as BGs. I had some animation test lying around, sent it to them, and they bought the style, so this was done. We already agreed on very limited animation and only basic lip sync.

Then the photographer in Brazil quit. The new one could only do the job one month later. I had no BGs but had to create a storyboard. I researched on Googlemaps which streets and views would be useable. Characters were not designed yet, the storyboard was very sketchy. Then I got the layout sound and created the animatic with about 190 shots. It was 18 minutes long. According to plan this was to be animated within a month, of which I already used a week for planning and preparation.

Fortunately one of the students was very good at character designs, I just had to adapt them a bit and could use them right away. We had to start animation without BGs, so I gave out all scenes with talking heads first. I didn't know anything about those students' abilities, turned out it was a mixed bag. The other full time animator was a godsend, no layouts needed, she could animate right from the storyboard.

People got sick, one after another, including me, COVID in June. The BG photographs came in July, and as expected some of them were not useable at all. I had to montage and stitch a lot and paint what was missing. We already were late.

Then I got the next story script, and it was 55 pages long with 15 talking characters. The animatic had over 250 shots and it was 38 minutes long. No way to pull that off in TVPaint. But the script consisted of about 80% talking heads, so I suggested to switch programs and do that part in Moho, using automated lip sync. Unfortunately no one but me had a license. My fellow animator R. decided to buy one since she was planning that already, next afternoon she was visiting me and got a crash course into Moho. For this story I was using a hybrid approach, head views done in TVP imported into Moho switch layers, the same with other body parts, but any full figure shot done in TVP.

There were several half minute passages with voice over narration, those were easy, but the rest ... well. It was too time consuming to go into the several views and sublayers and assign the sound to each of those switch layers, so I needed something faster for the third story, which only had a script of 36 pages, but this time only 8 characters. And the animatic was 32 minutes long and had 250 shots as well.

So I did my very first head totally in vectors and with smart bone dials for turning and talking and everything, and it took me 6 hrs. By re-using the setup I was able to do the others in just 1 hr. Body only done from neck to waist. All full figure shots still to be done in TVP, but there were few of those. The stories in Zambia and India are really illustrated radio only.

At this point my faithful R. had to fulfill other obligations, fortunately for me my old colleage A. stepped in, bought Moho and got the same crash course ... Those 2 long stories were for more than 80% done by just 2 Moho animators.

I left out the part when the photographs for those stories didn't arrive in time, were done in the wrong season, left out important locations, and basically created more work as if I had painted them all right away. Also not mentioned are my frustrations with FinalCut, I wrote about that elsewhere viewtopic.php?t=35276. I rendered every scene at my place, and both TVP and Moho behaved well the whole time.

I delivered the final files on Sept. 5th, then came in some minor change requests, done until Friday. We did 88 minutes of animation in 3 months with a very small team, and within budget. Sound and edit were done on the clients' side.

Of course some stuff had to be dropped on the way. Some TVP scenes are scarcely on model, but we had no time for revisions (only 3 scenes I had to redo myself). I was cheating a lot with the BGs. No time for character or colour variations, the first version looks good? Approved! Most stuff I improvised, props, blocking, storyboard, the 1st version of everything. I was getting increasingly sloppier over time with planning and bookkeeping, an assistant for that would've been fine. No compositing, no colour corrections. In the first story we had different skin colours for all characters; in the third they all shared the same. You'll spot different line widths, mainly when I combined TVP and Moho in one shot. The voice actors are no professionals, some are quite good, others not so. And the whole thing is Not A Good Movie, because it was never meant to be. It will be watched once and mostly on smartphones.

On the plus side: I can manage such a thing. With a willing client decisions can be made fast. A lot of the animation is more than just "good enough", and we did some really expressive scenes with good and subtle acting in Moho. I used a lot of Anime production tricks in staging and they worked quite well. And I got even faster with everything.

Now I imagine what could be possible with proper planning, a reasonable production time, a fully professional team, and a really good script ... amazing possibilities.

[funksmaname]

Sounds like a nightmare, but also rewarding
Thanks for sharing your story.

[neeters_guy]

The trailer gives a good preview of the work. This reminds me that sometimes "style" is often just a creative solution to limitations. Thanks for sharing the back story.

[Hoptoad]

Thanks for this fascinating post.

It sounds like the client asked for the impossible, and you convinced them to be satisfied with the extremely difficult but nonetheless slightly possible, and then you managed to deliver the goods. Congrats.