The roles in animation

- [Instructor] Let's face it. Making your animation is an epic task not easily accomplished by yourself. Working as a team requires great vision, team management, and most importantly, understanding the roles that everyone has on an animated project. In this video, we'll go over each of those roles and what their function is to the whole pipeline of the animation project. First, it helps to understand the flow of production. We have pre-production in the beginning when we're coming up with ideas, production, the meat and potatoes of the actual thing, and then post-production as we sprint towards the end. Pre-production's important. This is where the writer, director, and producer, sometimes the same person, sometimes multiple people come up with the idea and try to craft the story with some of their storyboard artists and editors. Later, we move into production, or, like I said, the actual meat of animation where artists come together and actually produce the final-looking frames of animation. That leads into post-production where the director comes back with the editor and producer and tries to tie everything together into one full narrative piece. That is called a final edit. So let's take a look at each of the roles. The first person is a producer. They're often the person with an idea, the money, or the resources to bring a project to life. But they're going to hire someone with creative vision, like a director or writer to actually shape it into an animated project. That director is going to be only driving creative decision-making and crafting the whole experience around what they are trying to say or what they're trying to get across to the audience. They're going to work in tandem with a writer whose job it is to create the pacing, dialog, and the narrative structure throughout the animation project. They're going to give characters life through their voice and through the pacing that happens throughout the piece. All of these people will be working with storyboard artists who are the visual storytellers of our project. They're going to take the script and turn it into storyboards, often working on multiple sequences to craft a visual narrative. And in tandem, they'll be working with an editor who's going to take all of that visual stuff and put it together with scratch audio, temp audio, temp music, and create a timeline, or an animatic, for everyone to watch. And unlike a live action thing, animation tends to have editors from the get-go so we can craft the experience early on before we get into the deep end of animation. Now as we move into production, we start to employ people like concept artists who'll design things like the environments, the backgrounds. Maybe they'll take the storyboards and color them and create what's called mood lighting boards for other artists to use and be inspired by. That concept artist is going to hand off their work to modelers who are actually going to take all of their ideas and turn it into actual 3D geometry to be used by the animated project. And they in turn will work with a shading or surfacing artist who's actually going to color and generate textures so that all of that geometry has a certain look to it. Around this point, a rigging artist comes into play. These are people who are going to take all of the geometry, sometimes props, some vehicles, et cetera, and create rigs, or armatures. These are a collection of joints so that animators can move them. So that sometimes involves scripting. Sometimes it involves a bit of math. And often it involves a lot of creativity to come up with an object that can move easily and be manipulated by layout artists and animators. Now, a layout artist is right before animation. They're going to take everything from the rigging artist and block out the scene with temp geometry and temp camera moves. They're going to actually take the storyboards and figure it out in 3D to make sure that we can actually accomplish what we're trying to do. Because you never know, something might have been drawn in 2D that may not work in 3D. It's going to be a layout artist's job to fix that. The next step is the meat of production, or animation by animators. These are our actors who'll be creating the performances by using the rigs from the previous rigging artist. Often this is the longest part of an animation production. Next is a lighting artist. Once an animator is done crafting the performance, a lighting artist is going to take the layout cameras, the performances, the backgrounds and put it all together and throw lights on it so we can get an idea of mood and tempo and shadow into the scene. They in turn will start working with technical directors, people who handle smoke, fire, effects, water, crowd simulations, et cetera. This is a very complicated role, and these people have to technically solve the demands of a shot. Maybe we need a whole bunch of characters. Maybe we need a whole bunch of fire in the background. It's going to be an effects technical director's job to figure that out in a shot. Now we start to move into post-production, and we get to one of the most important roles, the render technical director. This poor person has to balance all of the technology, the hardware limitations, the budget, and the creative vision of the directors and writers and get everything done on time. They have to optimize scenes. They have to take all of this and create a final rendered frame whom to hand over to a compositor, whose job is to take all of these different rendered frames and create a final composite, or a final image, to be used by the editor for the final piece of the movie. A compositor is going to fix things as needed, and they're also going to take in live action, if there is any, and blend it into the animation. This is often the second longest part of an animation production. Now, there's a whole bunch of roles that we haven't even touched on. Voice actors, composers, marketers, developers for the pipeline, colorists, et cetera, are all very important. And there's even more that I haven't been able to highlight, but the idea that I'm trying to get across is that animation is a team sport. And everyone is working together in really close quarters, and tensions can be really high. So you have to make sure that when you're talking and working with other people on the team that you offer them a critique, because you don't know at what point in the pipeline they may be or what their role is. And maybe they're only highly focused on one small piece. So help everybody out because it's a team sport. And the last thing I want to leave out on is trust the creative vision. Whether it's a small project or teams of hundreds of people working on a giant animated film, animation can be tough. And you have to trust the creative vision of the director and the writer and what they thought of in the beginning, and do your best to get there. Because once everyone knows what you're aiming for, you're guaranteed to have one awesome animated project.