Animation pipeline for Short Game cinematic

What the talk is about

Denys Romanov describes how his team built an animation pipeline from scratch for short cinematics for their games, each about 20 seconds long, with a detective story. It starts with a script that is already heavily edited at the first read-through, followed by a storyboard and a rough animatic with self-recorded voices, which helps cut unnecessary parts and checks that colleagues understand the story and that character motivation is logical. Next come previs, animation from blocking to polish, frame composition, rendering, and compositing and color correction in After Effects. Pre-production, production and post-production run in parallel: modeling, animation and secondary animation. In Q&A he covers timelines, tools and why a tempo map for the composer helps. Useful for animators, directors and leads of small studios.