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Details
The amount of detail that you put into your character design is dictated pretty much by two factors:
1) The budget of your production,
2) The ability of the artists working on the production.
The two of these are actually linked. The budget of the production tells you how much you can spend on any given part of it. If you have a high budget, you can pay the animators more for the footage that they draw. So, a more complicated character will take longer to draw and require more money to pay the animator.
Let’s use the following example (I’ll use fictional round figures to make it easier to understand).
On production ‘A’, we have a budget to pay the animator $10.00 per animation drawing. The design is quite simple so each drawing takes about 30 minutes to complete. For an 8 hour workday, the animator has produced 16 drawings. There are about 12 drawings per second so, the animator has drawn 1 1/2 seconds of animation in a day. $10.00 x 16 drawings = $160.00 for the day’s work and $800.00 per week. At this rate the animator could complete 7 1/2 seconds of animation in one week. If the production being worked on was 5 minutes long (300 seconds x 12 drawings per second = 3,600 drawings), it would take this one animator 45 weeks to complete (3,600 drawings ÷ 16 per day = 225 days) and you would end up paying him $36,000.00.
On production ‘B’ however, the drawings are much more complicated and require 2 hours to complete each one. Here’s where we have to make decisions. Do we want the overall deadlines the same? If yes, then we’ll have to hire more people and pay them more because of the complexity of the character designs. Let’s use the two common figures that we know:
- Overall production time: 40 weeks
- Total length of production: 5 minutes (3,600 drawings)
Now add on the third new figure:
- Each drawing takes 2 hours |
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