Comment by billconan

5 years ago

I'm curious how do film studios manage this process using software. Do they have something similar to jira?

5 comments

billconan

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egypturnash  5 years ago

When I was working in the industry around the turn of the century it was mostly just folders. One per scene. They'd start with just the scene number and the storyboard panels on them; they'd go off to layout and get drawings of key poses and background roughs, then go back to the set of shelves designated for that episode. After directorial approval they'd go on to further parts of the process - we were a Flash studio so the layout drawings would get inked, get approved, get scanned and cleaned up and put into a file (with a studio-wide standard for naming both the file and every single piece of art in the file so as to avoid conflicts when putting the final file together), get colored, then get handed off to the Flash crew who would make the animation happen.

If you had wanted to sabotage our process, the set of shelves that held all the scene folders would have been a great place to go. Every scene lived there when it wasn't being worked on by someone.

If you want a glimpse at the modern process for 2D animation, have a look at Toon Boom's suite of software. https://www.toonboom.com - not everyone uses it but it's pretty widespread.

Though realistically? I'm not in the industry any more but the bits I see of the process from my friends who are directors lead me to believe that it's still not uncommon to have a checklist that lives on a wall in the director's office, tracking the journey of every scene from storyboard to finished shot.

jedberg  5 years ago

Each studio has their own (usually crappy) tools. Sometimes it's just spreadsheets.

One thing I hear Netflix is doing right now is focusing on making better studio tools so that creatives prefer to work for Netflix because they have better tools.

  • asdff  5 years ago

    Its not the tooling keeping people away from wanting to work for Netflix though. People want to work where they have creative freedom and reasonable expectations.