Disney staffers are telling me they're getting a wee bit fatigued at the extra hours they're putting in as Moana sails ever closer to the end of production. ...
"We've got three weeks of animation left, then there's a fairly long gap before the next feature. I don't know how that's going to impact people's schedules."
"The lighting department will wrap at the end of September. Schedules have stayed short through the last few pictures. Moana doesn't seem much different from the schedule for Zootopia, but something feels like it's a little different." ...
I've seen this kind of production fatigue before. It happens toward the end of many demanding pictures. People get burned out, staring at flat-screens all day long, watching the same scene or sequence over and over. The Disney crew is working sixty-hour weeks; some people choose to do five twelve-hour days and others opt for six ten-hour days. Either way, it's demanding, especially after going on for months.
The original Space Jam back in the '90s had a much crazier schedule. The crew had less than ten months to do a pile of hand-drawn animation. People were sleeping under their desks and working 12-hour, seven-day weeks. To walk through that production was memorable. Artists were imbecilic with chronic fatigue. Artists were dozing over their light boards.
Moana's schedule isn't close to being as radical as Space Jam's was. Still in all, the crew is feeling the weight of a long, complex production.
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How long is the actual animation production process? If 10 months is too tight (even though that was 2D animation), how much time is usually given or needed for a CG animated film to produce its animation. I know there's numerous variables but can you give me a ballpark?
Yeah, same question, How long is the actual animation production process? It was only 2D animation, 5 months extra would be enough, I guess.
That's almost an impossible question to answer in a general way, because each production is different. If the story is planned well , if there's a minimum of fussing and fixing the story (although sometimes that is unavoidable) a movie can be done on-budget without an extraordinary amount of overtime (i.e. everyone works a normal 40 hour work week for most of the production, with maybe a few weeks of longer hours near the end to finish up ) . But it's unpredictable. Some great movies only became great movies when the hard decision was made to scrap a lot of work that had already been done and rework the story late in the game (Zootopia is a recent example) , which necessarily causes much of the production work to be crammed into long hours in a short amount of time. (so you can have a great movie that costs more in overtime or you can have an average "meh" sort of movie that is finished with minimal overtime . Which one do think will do better at the box-office over the long run ? So that's why we do the overtime.)
The actual animation/effects/texturing/lighting time has gotten shorter over time. (This is separate and apart from story development, which can sometimes take years and years).
It used to be something around a year. Then it went down to 9-10 months. Now I think it's shorter than that. The pace has quickened over the past five years. Somebody on one of the Disney shows could say. I'm not sure I can give exact production lengths.
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