Virtual Production Is The Future Of The

Animation Industry
Dec 7, 2020,03:00pm EST

[...]

Virtual Production In Animation

A stellar animator at a leading animation studio (such as Pixar, Dreamworks or

Disney Animation) can animate just 2 seconds of film per week. That the process
is immensely labor intensive explains why the costs of these films often approach
$200 million or more.

The overwhelming majority of this labor is not creative. It is animating a

character’s motion in a space and mapping how a character reacts with this
physical environment. Something as simple as a character reaching for a set of
keys can take a skilled animator a full week to finish.

A critical component of virtual production is how the technology interfaces with

the motion-capture techniques used in every major action film. As actors walk
across a stage in a suit covered with dots, the actor’s motion is recorded and
translated into a format usable by a visual effects artist. A marriage of this
motion-capture technology and virtual production technology allowed the Na’vi
to move in Avatar’s world of Pandora and allowed The Hulk and Thanos to
move in the Avengers films.

Virtual production allows filmmakers to see their virtual characters and

environments in real time while working with actors on set.

This same technology is applied to the motion of animated characters. Instead of

an animator working away at his or her computer to animate Violet from The
Incredibles running across the room, a stunt performer wearing a motion
capture suit could actually run across the room. Once this motion is recorded, it
can be applied to an animated character, and that character can be inserted into
the animated world. Using this technology, an animator can animate more than
20 seconds of film per week, instead of 2 seconds of film per week. As a result,
the cost of the highest quality animated content will fall precipitously in the next
few years.

Toy Story 4 (2019) cost a reported $200 million to produce. The film’s
humanoid characters make it a fit for virtual production animation, a process
that could have halved its production budget.
Industry Impact

Mark Andrews, the Academy Award-winning director of Brave, said, “Animation

is still stuck in the 2D process of old; its pipeline is compartmentalized, making
the transition from 2D to 3D problematic from the beginning. Working out of
context and the back-and-forth iterating means you’re making the movie or
series twice. Technology has arrived that allows storytellers to skip 2D altogether
and jump straight into 3D, saving huge amounts of time and money. But
nobody’s doing it! Yet!”
Faced with this new reality, and with hundreds of animators on each of their
payrolls, the major animation studios will be forced to make a decision: reduce
staff by ~80% and continue to make one or two films per year or maintain staff
and increase output by ~5x.

Studios should choose the latter. Audience demand for animated content is
insatiable. The genre is consistently a top performer at the box office, and the
franchises that originate in animation are often worth billions of dollars to
studios. Next time you see a trick-or-treater dressed as Elsa or a Minion,
remember, those characters came from animation. What’s more, the intense
competition among streamers has dramatically increased the demand for
animated series, and production is struggling to keep up.

Instead of making only one or two movies per year, Pixar, with their current
workforce, could produce one or two movies for theaters, one or two additional
movies for Disney+, and one or two seasons of television for Disney+. More
interestingly, the substantially lower cost of production could translate to
increased risk-taking by studios. Sure, a $200 million animated film needs to
appeal to everyone to make back its budget in theaters. But a $30 million
animated series? The possibilities really do stretch To Infinity and Beyond.

CREDIT: EJ BORG / RANDALL GOLDFARB