Animated Shorts from a Box
I’ve not talked much about how we actually made Concerning Heaven and Hell, so I’m going to get a bit technical this time and explain how we did it. I’m hardly the first person to highlight how much filmmaking technology has changed in recent years, and I’m not exactly unaware of it working in digital post-production, but if you take a step back, then it is pretty astonishing what you can now achieve for very little money (relatively speaking).
Aside from initial character and background sketches, everything on the film was done on a computer. We essentially went all the way from the second step of the process to the film being available to people from almost anywhere in the world, without leaving the digital domain. In addition, aside from a couple of cd-r’s for sending dialogue recordings and sound mixes (which could have been sent over the internet), we didn’t have to create any hardcopies. While Mark was animating the film, we were exporting SD clips from Anime Studio Pro and cutting them in Final Cut, only exporting HD when we did the final HD master (1920×1080 pixels and about 12GB for 60 seconds uncompressed). The final deliverables were submitted on a data DVD as Quicktime and avi, but could have been uploaded straight to the site.
If we were buying from scratch all the kit we needed to make the film, I reckon you could get everything you need to make an animated short for less than £2000, and not just any short, an HD short too. Mark used Anime Studio Pro (£150) on a Dell laptop with a Wacom graphics tablet (£200) and a couple of freeware programmes. It was cut on a MacBook (£700) running Final Cut (£700 if you want HD, £100 if you’re happy with SD) , but you can use Anime Studio Pro on a Mac so you don’t even need a PC. We hired a studio to record the dialogue and used MudShark’s facilities for the sound mix and music, but with a decent mic, Soundtrack (part of Final Cut Studio), and a mix of programmes like GarageBand, you could probably do all the audio to a reasonable level on one machine, which means that you could animate, cut and mix the whole thing on a Mac for about £2000. Going back 20 or 30 years, it would cost you several £k’s to buy one piece of kit that would do just one job!
However, if you think that’s amazing, then just wait till you hear about some of the ways people are using digital technology when they’re not having to operate within the confines of a 100 year-old medium.
Link of the Week 1: Ralph Bakshi
Link of the Week 2: Concerning Heaven and Hell
Filed under: "Concerning Heaven and Hell", Editing | Leave a Comment
Tags: "Concerning Heaven and Hell", 60 second, animated, animation, commission, dialogue, Editing, Film, Filmmaking, Short, Short Film, Short Films
No Responses Yet to “Animated Shorts from a Box”