Masters and Apprentices in Traditional Animation

Traditionally an animator would have an assistant (or sometimes 2 or 3). The assistant would, in most cases, be an animator in training, learning the art and craft of animation from the animator. The animator would draw the main drawings, the key poses that capture the acting, the timing and the essence of the shot. The assistant would then draw the frames between the key poses, or the inbetweens. Eventually the assistant would be skilled enough to move up in rank and become an animator themselves, with assistants of their own to train.

 

There are two main reasons why this relationship developed:

 1. In the early days there were no animation schools. Art and design were taught at school, but animation had to be learned on the job, and with a growing industry it was important to have new animators rising through the ranks.

 2. An animator could get much more done with an assistant doing the inbetweens.

 

So it’s easy to see why it’s been forgotten. At first glance the reasons for the master apprentice relationship seem to be obsolete:

 1. There are now hundreds of animation schools, both at colleges and online, so animators don’t need to learn on the job any more… or do they?

The trouble with all but the very best animation courses is that with such a limited time many students come out knowing how to use the software, but with little experience or skill in the art of animation. Acting, posing and timing are all skills that require practice and experience, and few students come out of school ready to be thrown into production.

 2. With computer animation, especially 3D animation, the computer creates the inbetweens for us. So animators don’t need assistants any more…. or do they?

There is still a big difference between the stage of blocking out a scene, providing the major poses and timing, and the stage of polishing and secondary motions. Blocking out a scene still requires much more experience than tweaking, polishing and secondary motion. If an animator is doing both, since each stage takes roughly the same length of time, an experienced animator is under-utilized for up to half of their time, an inexperienced animator isn’t able to animate at the same level or speed, and there is a big difference in quality between scenes.

 

So it seems that the master and apprentice relationship might not be so obsolete after all. Here’s how the traditional master and apprentice relationship can be introduced today , with a few minor tweaks to accommodate the differences in the CG animation process.

 

Masters and Apprentices in CG Animation

A mentor animator blocks out each scene, providing the major poses and timing, the key frames. The scene is then handed over to an assistant animator to finish and polish, in much the same way as inbetweeners for traditional animation. The assistant adjusts the motion arcs, easing in and out, makes sure feet are solid on the floor, etc. The assistant can also animate the secondary motions, the ones not important to the acting and story such as tails, ears, clothes, etc.

Benefits to Experienced Animators

The benefit to the mentor animator is they can easily oversee the work being done by the assistant, ensuring the overall quality of the scene. By not having to do the repetitive work in polishing a shot, an experienced animator can get twice as many shots done, and the completed shots in the show will have a more consistent style and level of quality. And let’s face it, half the fun of having an apprentice is that they have to do the crap jobs that you had to do when you were an apprentice, or learning your craft.

Benefits to Inexperienced Animators

The benefit to the assistant animator is they would get solid practice in while observing first hand, and learning from, the acting, posing and timing created by the mentor, a much faster way to learn. Over time the mentor would give the assistant more responsibility and occasionally entire shots. Eventually each assistant would demonstrate the skill necessary to advance to become a stand alone animator or even a mentor themselves. At this point 2 more assistants could be employed, or the original mentor can move on to another project leaving his original assistant to gain experience as a mentor on a familiar project before themselves moving on to new projects.

Benefits to Studios

The benefit to the studio is they can maintain a higher overall quality of animation with fewer experienced animators. Together a mentor and apprentice can equal the speed and quality of 2 experienced animators, at a lower cost. It creates tighter bonds within the animation teams. It creates a training ground for new animators, an important requirement for all animation studios, and newly hired animators will learn the art of animation, or the specific style of the show, much more quickly. The only way for an inexperienced animator to learn from their more experienced colleagues is to look at shots in their own time or at the expense of their own productivity. As an assistant, it’s part of the job so it enhances their productivity.

 

With so many benefits it’s hard to see why the master and apprentice relationship isn’t fully utilized in animation today. I believe it should be at the heart of every animation studio, and can just as easily be implemented into other disciplines such as modeling and compositing with similar benefits.

I’d love to know what you think. Do you think this could work for your studio or animation team, or have you already implemented a similar workflow?

Just 5 minutes a day is all it takes

Very few people take the time to schedule properly. It’s often seen as a waste of time, and therefore given a very low priority. I must have heard the excuse a thousand times “But I’ve got to get this finished, getting the work done is more important.” This attitude is most prevalent in people who feel uncomfortable, or unable to estimate task lengths. And instead of working on the problem they choose to ignore it.

Scheduling is often seen as a Management tool that’s of little use in the real workplace. This is often enhanced by difficult scheduling procedures that some managers put into place. I have seen some scheduling procedures that really do take more time than the work itself. This approach is both unproductive and unnecessary. Scheduling exists to make life easier, not more difficult.

Once you settle into the routine of regular monitoring of your progress it becomes easy. Literally 5 minutes is all it takes, whether you do it as you complete each task, or do it at the end of each day.

 

Benefits of scheduling

The benefits of proper scheduling are abundantly apparent once you start putting it into practice.

1. An accurate record of what you’ve done and how long it’s taken.

Have you over looked back over a period of time and wondered what you did? I know I have often looked back over the last week wondering why I didn’t accomplish more. With proper scheduling you can look back and see exactly what you did. More often than not this feeling is caused by an unexpected problem, or a problem that took longer to overcome than expected. The schedule can be very reassuring in times like this.

2. You’re better prepared for next time.

With a good schedule, when you need to do the same or a similar task to something you have already done, you can merely look over the schedule to see how long it took, what problems there were, and estimate more accurately how long it will take this time.

3. A record of personal progress.

If you have a number of tasks that are similar, more often than not each successive task will take a little less time than the last. You can look at your schedule with pride seeing how you’ve improved from task to task.

4. A solid foundation for quotes.

When you next quote for a job you can look over your schedules and, if you have done similar tasks before, see exactly how long they actually took, or if you haven’t done the task before you can see what patterns emerge from previous estimates of untried tasks. More often than not you will find that you tend to underestimate the length of time something will take.

Unfortunately our memories aren’t adequate when it comes to doing this. Over time it’s easy to forget the difficulties involved with a job. You might remember a previous job taking 3 weeks, but forget that the last week involved 16 hour days with a couple of all-nighters at the end. Next time you quote for a similar job you may under-estimate the hours involved and be caught in the same situation again. Conversely you might remember a task taking 3 days, but forget that 2 of those days were spent solving a problem that won’t be an issue next time now that you have a solution. Next time you quote a similar job you may over-estimate the hours involved.

With a schedule you no longer have to rely on memory, or loosely recorded times. You can break down a job into individual tasks, and accurately estimate times for each of those tasks. This will make your life and the clients or employers lives much easier.

One issue that often arises from clients is when certain tasks will be complete within a job. Clients are usually results based. If they don’t see something they assume nothing’s being done. Unfortunately the reality of production is that often there may not be something to show early in the process. Planning and pre-production rarely reflect the amount of time involved, or while you’re animating there may be elements of the scenes that are unfinished so you hold off on final rendering until later. With a history of scheduling you can accurately convey to the client at the start of the job how long various aspects will take and when they can expect to see certain results. You can explain if they want to see a particular result early in the process how it may adversely affect the total time for the job.

 

Part 2 – Scheduling example

I first found this scheduling technique on the web. A programmer had developed a quick and easy system for monitoring his own progress. Since programming is one of the more difficult areas to estimate I knew I was onto something good. I have since lost my records of who this person is, but I credit him with the fundamental principle of this method.

Disillusioned with complex scheduling packages such as Microsoft Project, I put this new found method into practice straight away, initially expanding on the example I had to make it a little more useful in a production environment. Since then having scheduled and quoted many projects, both solo and team projects, I have enhanced the schedule far beyond its initial form. The schedule uses Microsoft Excel and, I must stress, is not meant as a replacement for MS Project or other project management tools. It is meant to accompany those tools when dealing with a large project.

Download the Excel file used in these examples.

Preparation

The basics of the schedule involve breaking down a project into major features. For example if the job is to create a 3D character you might break it down into:

• Modeling
• Morphs
• Texturing
• Rigging
• Tweaking

Then break down each feature into specific tasks. For example:

Modeling
• Head
• Body
• Extremities (hands and feet)
• Clothes
Morphs
• Mouth expressions
• Eye/eyebrow expressions
• Lipsync targets
Texturing
• Head
• Body
• Extremities (hands and feet)
• Clothes
Rigging
• Weight maps
• Bones
• IK
• Muscles and joints
Tweaking
• Model
• Morphs
• Textures
• Rigging

The idea is to break down to the point that each task is estimated to take less than 8 hours, if possible. It’s very important to take your time during this step. I have witnessed people use this schedule without breaking down the job properly, either into features or tasks, and as a result receive much fewer benefits.

The next step is to estimate as accurately as you can how long each of these tasks will take, and place these estimates into the Initial Estimate column. Now copy these values into the adjacent Current Estimate column. As you can see the time remaining column is filled out for you. This will also give you an estimated finish date.

You can also fill out priority orders for the tasks in the Priority column. You can use as many priority levels as you wish, but I usually find 3 is sufficient.

Maintaining the schedule

Now that your schedule is ready to be put to use we come to what is probably the most important step, maintenance. As you work on each task, fill in the Time Elapsed column. You can also update the Current Estimate column as soon as you have a better idea of how long it’s taking. When you have completed a task, change the Current Estimate column to reflect the amount of time it actually took.

Now you have a record of how long you estimated a task to take versus how long the task actually took. This will be useful in the future.

I have also provided a couple of visual clues as to the status of a task. As a task is completed it will automatically get crossed out. Also tasks given priorities of 1 and 2 are highlighted for easy recognition. You can see towards the bottom of the worksheet as you complete tasks how many hours you have spent on the project, and an estimate of how many hours are left. This is very valuable when discussing your progress with the client.

Quite often as you get into the project you will find it useful to change some of the breakdowns. You may see a need to breakdown a task even further, or add to features or tasks that you had not anticipated initially. The beauty of this system is that you can do this quite easily, just by adding to the bottom line. All of the pertinent values will be immediately updated, reflecting your change.

Project Management

This schedule is very useful when dealing with other aspects of managing a project such as working to a deadline, and optimizing productivity. When you fill in the starting date for the project in the header, you will see a number of other values are calculated:

Estimated finish date is based on your current estimate of task times and your expected hours per day. This is a good indication of how long the project should take.

Projected finish date indicates how long the project is likely to take, based on your current task estimates and your average hours per day instead of your expected hours per day.

Average hours per day is the average of how many hours you’ve actually worked on the tasks listed. Sometimes you may work on multiple projects at once. You will probably want to reflect this in the Expected hours per day or Expected days per week in the header for each project if you have a separate schedule for each of the projects.

If you know at the beginning of a project when it will start and when it must be finished, make sure you fill in those values. Then when you’re creating your initial estimates for the tasks you can see immediately if you’re likely to fall within the deadline, or blow it out. As you progress you can keep an eye on the finish dates to see how you’re going.

If you can see that you’re blowing out the timelines during the project a number of solutions present themselves. You can work more hours in the day to make up for lost time, or decrease the time you allow yourself for later tasks. You can ask the client if it’s possible to push back the deadline, or ask if there are features that are less important to the project that you can then allocate less time to.

The important thing is that you are able to detect the problem early in the process, making it much easier to work out, rather than realising the day before the project is due that you’re not going to make it, putting you and your client in a difficult position.

 

Part 3 – Conclusion

The more you use a schedule, the better you will become at estimating how long things will take you. To begin with your initial estimates and actual times may vary considerably, they usually do. But as you do more projects and refer to past schedules you will soon find that your initial estimates become closer and closer to the actual time taken.

You can also use the principles of this schedule to take the idea much further. If you have read my earlier article on setting an hourly rate you will be able to quote for a project more easily knowing how long you expect the project to take, and what your hourly rate is. Just multiply the number of hours by your hourly rate and you have the total amount the project is worth. I have also expanded on it to schedule team projects, with each different element of the project scheduled together.

Before you know it you will wonder how you ever did without scheduling. You will feel more organised and better prepared to handle mishaps. When unexpected problems arise you will be able to deal with them calmly and with detailed knowledge of how they affect the big picture. You will have a record of your progress and how you’ve improved your production speed. But more than anything else you will feel confident quoting times for jobs knowing that your quote is based on actual experience, not just a guesstimate.

Remember, spending just 5 minutes a day on your schedule will end up saving you days, even weeks, in the long run.

Research

The very first thing to do is to research as much as you can. One of the best places too look up is IT recruiting agencies. Often they will publish average or expected pay rates for different types of jobs. If you are lucky you will find not only salary rates, but hourly rates as well. Also look at job advertisements, for work similar to what you are doing, to see how much they are offering.

Network with as many people as possible doing your kind of work, even in vaguely related industries. Quite often they’ll be open about their standard rates, and it’ll give you a better idea of the market in your area.

Budget

As a freelancer you are basically running your own business. This means you need to consider things like phone and internet costs, electricity, rent, and most importantly both hardware and software upgrades. Once you have factored these into a budget you need to look at your personal items such as loans, food, entertainment, hobbies, toys (or ‘reference’ as I like to call them) etc.

You need to prepare as detailed a budget as you can, for at least a 12 month period. This will allow you to include the major hardware and software upgrades, which you should budget for once a year. Don’t forget to allow for income tax. Usually at this stage adding 25% to the bottom line is sufficient.

Don’t undervalue yourself

Now you’ve done the research, and prepared your budget, Let’s do some preliminary calculations to get things started. Have a look at the budget, and your total costs for the 12 month period. Now you need to decide how much you want to work. For now let’s assume a normal working week of 40 hours and 46 working weeks a year (Giving yourself 4 weeks break plus 2 weeks emergency/sick time per year).

Divide your total costs by 46 (the number of weeks) and then divide that figure by 40 (the number of hours per week). The figure that is left is your average hourly cost. (If it seems excessively high you may want to leave that 150” Sony plasma TV off the budget for now)

Before we continue, let’s think about the figures we’ve used. 46 weeks work a year is certainly good to aim for, but how likely is it that you will find that much work? Certainly in my experience the ratio of paid work to self-promotion, looking for and generating work opportunities is usually starts at around 1:2. Unless you’re really lucky the best it will probably be for a while is 1:1. What this tells us is that out of those 46 weeks you are planning to work, you are likely to only be paid for 15 to 23 of those weeks.

You may be asking why the ratio is so low when many production companies usually have a much better ratio. Well the reason is simple. Companies are in a position of having people dedicated to promotion and work generation, while others in the company are doing the work. On the other hand you have only yourself to do both tasks. When the pressure is on to complete work by a deadline you rarely get the opportunities to get out and network to promote yourself. Of course as time goes on and more people are aware of you, and you have more jobs under your belt the ratio should rise, hopefully to the point you have to turn down work, or sub-contract because you’re too busy.

So getting back to our sums, let’s do that last one again, this time using 15 paid working weeks, and again 40 hours per week. Quite a difference isn’t it?

Now this exercise has given us a good understanding of just how much it costs to be in this business, but there’s still a little way to go before we have our actual hourly rates figured out.

 

Step 2 – Calculate your rate

Now that you’ve done some preparation and worked out your costs, it’s time to work out your asking price. There are 2 figures that you need to arrive at. One is your optimum rate, the amount you believe you are worth, and that you should usually quote. The other is your cut-off rate, the lowest amount for which you can work and still comfortably pay the bills. We can use what we’ve already done to calculate both those figures.

You’ve already estimated how many paid hours you are likely to work and arrived at a figure that is your average hourly cost but we need to factor in some more things before it can be used effectively.

Profit

A business only exists to make profit. Sure, it’s nice to think that it’s providing valuable services, and is a fun place to work, but at the end of the day the profit margin is all important.

It’s easy to forget this principle in our line of work, because more often than not we are made to feel guilty for getting paid to have fun. At least that’s the limited impression of many people outside our industry who rarely factor in the often outrageous working hours and pressures involved. So since we’ve already established that as a freelancer you are running your own business, you need to think about profit.

How much to add? The most accepted figure to aim for in the business world is 30%. A successful business is earning at least 30% profit. Of course this has been re-written in recent years by many IT companies who earn significantly more profit, but let’s keep our initial expectations to the accepted 30%.

Without profit, you will find it very difficult to advance your freelance career. Consider these points:

• If you’re working from job to job just to put food on the table, are you spending enough time planning for the future?
• What happens when a job comes up that requires you to purchase an unexpected piece of equipment?
• What about training? In our business we need to spend significant amounts of time learning new features and programs.
• What happens when a client doesn’t pay on time, or at all?

Salary vs Hourly Rate

Now it’s likely that most of your research resulted in some knowledge of salary rates, but very little in the way of hourly rates. If we want to compare our figures to salaries, we need to break down those salaries.

Take a salary of $50,000 for example. What hourly rate is the company paying? Easy you say…

$50,000 / 1840 (46 weeks x 40 hrs/week) = $27 per hour.

But no, it’s not that easy. When a company hires an employee, it doesn’t only cost them the salary. Other costs include superannuation, workers comp, non-productive time, leave, overheads (coffee, toilet paper etc), just to name a few. When all these are added up they come to roughly 50% of the salary. But that’s not all, there’s also equipment costs and furniture, which are large initial expenses as well as ongoing ones. You’re looking at roughly $10-12,000 to setup an employee, plus yearly hardware and software upgrades. So you can easily add an additional 30%. Those add up to a whopping 80% of the salary.

So let’s look at that salary figure again… $50,000 x 1.8 = $90,000. To hire an employee at $50,000 costs the company $90,000. Surprising isn’t it? So re-evaluating the hourly rate we get $90,000 / 1840 = $56 per hour. The employee is receiving $27 per hour, but it’s costing the company $49 per hour. In other words, to pay the employee $27 per hour the company needs to charge the employees time out at $49 per hour.

So if you do this calculation on all the salary rates you have found in your research, you’ll have a good basis for comparison:

 

Salary x 1.8 / 1840 = Hourly rate

 

So let’s take your average hourly costs and add a percentage for profit. We’re getting very close to an appropriate hourly rate now.

Let’s compare this hourly rate to the hourly rates from your research. If the figure lies within the limits of your research then you’re probably on track. If your rates are significantly higher or lower than these rates then you may need to go back and look at your calculations again. Analyze your budget, profit margin and paid weeks estimate to see what areas you can massage in order to arrive at a reasonable hourly rate.

Optimum vs cut-off

So what’s the difference between the optimum rate, and the cut-off rate?

The optimum rate is the amount that falls within the industry standards, covers your costs, covers your unpaid time, and includes some profit. This amount (or a little higher) is what you would normally start with when preparing a quote, in the knowledge that it’s likely to go down a bit through negotiations.

The cut-off rate is the lowest amount that you can afford to work for. If negotiations fall below this amount you walk away from the bid. You may decide that your cut-off rate doesn’t have any profit included, or maybe it’s for longer term work so your paid weeks estimate may be higher. But under no circumstances can you accept lower than this amount. If you do then you will go into debt in order to do the work. You might as well pay the client for the privilege of doing the work.

Once you know these amounts, quoting suddenly becomes a piece of cake. No longer do you have to agonise over how much you think the client can pay, because you know how much you need to do the work.

The other decision you have to make is how flexible you want to be with your rate, how willing you are to negotiate. You may decide that you will nominate a percentage that you will easily negotiate down, after which you become less flexible.

GST

The dreaded tax man will take more than just income tax. Because you are working for yourself you are considered a business by the tax department. This means that you will be responsible for charging and paying GST for your services. If you haven’t already, you should apply for an ABN number, and you will need to fill out a BAS statement each quarter. You should have a few deductions, but basically you will need to pay 10% of your earnings to the tax man.

So whatever you’ve calculated your hourly rate to be, the last step before you quote is to add 10% for GST. If you don’t, then the GST will eat into your costs.

 

Step 3 – Putting it into practice

The most prominent factor when quoting is the value of the work to the customer, or the perceived value, versus what it costs you to deliver the work, the cost of services. Somewhere between these 2 amounts is the amount you and the client will end up agreeing upon for your hourly rate.

So how do you figure out the perceived value?

You should find out as much about the client as possible.

• What kind of work have they done before?
• What clients have they worked with?
• How long have they been in business?
• What impression do others have of the company?
• Does the company already have the project, or are they bidding for it while looking at who might be available?
• Where is the company based?
• Where does the project originate?

Once you have done this you should have a fairly good idea of what position the company is in, whether they will be looking for cheap labour, or are willing to pay for high quality work.

One mistake that many people make when they’re starting out is feeling intimidated by the negotiation process. It’s easy to do, but keep in mind that the client needs you as much as you need them. Be strong and the client will respect you for it. The client may even tell you that they can’t afford your rate just to see how low you are willing to go. Often a client will appear to walk away, before reconsidering and agreeing to your rates. This can be a test to weed out who’s serious and who’s not. The ones who are prepared to negotiate down to nothing are usually not going to provide quality work.

Along the way you may miss out on a few jobs because your rates are too high, that’s normal. Those jobs probably wouldn’t be worth putting on your portfolio anyway. Of course if you haven’t eaten for a few weeks you can always make an exception. But remember, if you accept a job for too low a rate, you may be missing out on a much more attractive offer just around the
corner because you’re too busy.

Other variables

There are some other factors we need to consider when comparing rates or preparing quotes.

Acceptable hourly rates can differ from state to state and country to country. Don’t panic, this doesn’t mean that if you live in South Australia you will be poor. It means that you may need to adjust your hourly rate up or down depending on where the work is coming from. Take note of where your researched salaries and rates are from to get a feel for the marketplace value in different locations.

Keep an eye on the industry to see where the highest demand is. The higher the demand and lower number of people skilled to fill that demand drive the rates up for that type of work. For example there is currently a glut of web designers in Australia, but there’s been a downturn in the demand for web designers. This means that the rates for web design work are potentially lower than over the last couple of years.

So in considering different rates for different skills, you should break down your skills into different areas, such as 3d graphics, 3d animation, 2d graphics (Photoshop), 2d animation (Flash), traditional illustration, web design, etc. Each of these can demand different hourly rates depending on the level of skill involved versus the number of people with those skills.

Your rate will also depend on your abilities within an area. The better you are the more you can charge. Although the industry may determine that 3d character animation is worth more than 2d graphics, if you’re better at 2d graphics your rates should represent that.

Your level of experience, and the number of satisfied clients will affect your rates. If a client can see that you’ve worked successfully with other clients they are more likely to agree to your rates. Also if the job involves team work, having worked with others on projects will greatly enhance your chances.

Also related to experience is speed. The faster you are at doing something the more you can charge per hour. This can be a difficult one with a new client, but as you do more work for a particular client this can become a bargaining point.

A big factor to consider is the length of the project or job. The longer a project is, the more flexible you can be with your rate. Remember we were estimating a fairly low number of paid working weeks. If a job comes along that is measured in months rather than weeks your estimated paid weeks figure suddenly jumps up which means that you can quote less while still maintaining the same level of finances.

Sometimes you are offered a job that is too much fun to pass up, or will help enhance your skills in a particular area, but the money isn’t great. If you’ve got enough money that you can afford to do the job for less than your normal rates, or even less than your cut-off rates, it can be worthwhile for the experience or just plain fun.

Conclusion

A few years ago I was talking with some contemporaries about hourly rates. I suggested to them that they could look at increasing their rates, as their rates were well below industry standards. At the time I had just adjusted my own rates up. When I told them what rates I thought they could be receiving and told them my new rates, they laughed at me and said I was nuts.

A few weeks later I had a 3 month job at my new rates, and those contemporaries were still working insane hours just to cover the rent.

If you put the time into determining your hourly rate, and understanding what factors influence that rate you will make your life much easier. There will always be exceptions to the rule, but as always, the more you know the rules of the game, the better decisions you can make when bending those rules.