Re: Semi OT - master scene and/or shot-by-shot (long email ahead)

[Jeff Wilson <jwilson(at)blur.com>]

I can understand the temptation for continuity's sake but from my 
experience, working that way introduces far more problems than it solves. 

We did 45 minutes of cg for Disney's Twice Upon a Christmas thing, and 
we decided early on to break out every single shot.  I think it saved us 
tons of time down the line because things were heavily edited late in 
the game and lots of shots were cut.  So instead of having to go in and 
carve out a bunch of stuff from a master scene, we just ignored those 
shots and kept on going.

For a while, we tried to take a hybrid approach with our cinematics.  
Any shots that made sense to keep together, we did.  The rest were 
broken out.  But invariably, even those shots would be broken apart 
because of some editorial change, or just to make the scene more 
manageable.  Now everything we do is a file per shot.  Continuity is an 
issue when shots are broken out.  Especially when different people work 
on sequential shots.  But tweaking posing or positioning or lighting is 
much easier than managing a massive file where everything lives.  And 
you're right, even when things are actually continuous across shots, we 
often times cheat it for effect. 

We do, however, keep our layout/previz shots more grouped.  It's kind of 
an anything-goes approach on that end.  When animation starts rolling, 
we will just break out shots from the layout files to use as our base.  
It usually takes me a half a day or so to set up the animation files 
this way.  Of course, that is for a 3 or 4 minute cinematic...

Having gotten away from that way of working here, I can't imagine going 
back to it.  I never again want to go digging through those huge files 
to trim 10 frames from shot 37 and add them back to shot 43, but delete 
shots 39 and 40 :P

My 2 cents...

Jeff

Jeff Wilson
Animation Supervisor | *blur studio*
jwilson(at)blur.com


Bernard Lebel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're about to start layout on a 45 minutes full-cg show.
>
> A few of us here are debating the idea of doing the majority of the
> layout-previz and animation in a "master" scene. Such master scene
> would include basically all the cameras and animation for an entire
> sequence.
>
> There are several motives behind this approach:
>
> - To enforce continuity between cuts. The idea is to be able to
> playback the scene and have all the action take place more or less in
> one go. So we make sure, for example, that the character's hand that
> was at a given position on the cut out is not breaking the continuity
> at the next cut in.
>
> - I have good reasons to think we won't have good old-style
> storyboards, or complete ones. It seems the plan is to have the layout
> artists do full-fledged storyboards in 3D, in order to reduce
> continuity problems but also to make sure things are always at the
> right scale in the FOV.
>
> Now, I can see an interest in doing this for the layout/previz stage,
> but I have a hard time figuring how advantageous such an approch to
> animation can really be.
>
> Continuity is a strong argument in favor of this workflow, but.....
>
> - Accounting for "cheats" introduces some hazards. For instance, it's
> not uncommon, to fit a specific shot, to move props or even characters
> from their "standard" location to another location, simply because the
> director likes it better that way. So it means that the animator might
> have to animate the position of props, stage elements and even full
> character rigs. As a result, some objects may just jump from one place
> to another.
>
> - It is my understanding that shots that have requirements too complex
> to fit in the master scene would become separate scenes. So again I
> foresee a nightmare of trying to keep track of what part of what
> master scene has been done separately. Worse, what if we want to make
> modifications to the master scene, and then pipe these changes down to
> the specliazed scenes? I mean it certainly is possible, but then it
> need to be extremely tightly tracked, right? Lastly, from my
> experience, what everyone thought to be an exception or a special case
> actually happened to be quite a common scenario. I'm probably
> paranoid, but getting bit by an inadequate workflow is the last thing
> I want.
>
> - That would also mean having animators (or else) "slicing" the
> animation and export it for the "special" version, and possibly
> migrating the "special" version back in the master scene. This is
> entirely possible by using the Mixer as a "montage table". But again,
> I see big red signs that say "PROBLEMS AHEAD", mostly because of human
> errors.
>
> - Our characters have syflex simulations. Obviously if characters are
> jumping, bad things will happen. So we'll need to have some "rollout"
> frames between cuts for the simulation to get back in a stable state
> (unless the character is moving violently, of course). I guess this
> problem also applies to motion blur and various time-movement
> dependent effects.
>
> - Then if we have to move objects around in the same shot, and we have
> to put delays between "action" time, then I see the whole thing
> becoming a nightmare in terms of management. It means someone will
> have to keep a very, very tight look at frame ranges and make sure
> this info is propagated.
>
>
> Given all the previous points, where is the advantage of doing
> "master" scenes? I'd be interested in people who have tried this, if
> they have some thoughts to share.
>
>
> Thanks
> Bernard
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