And at Rough Draft, there’s no substitute for seamless non-photorealistic rendering, a.k.a. Rough Draft’s 2D workflow is straightforward, but things can get tricky when is involved. The editing software needs to be flexible and not bog down. You can’t do that in live action without making things jump. In animation, you can often slice, splice, and retime footage to your heart’s content. “With its drag-and-drop features, you can just bring footage right over. “We used Final Cut for Futurama and Drawn Together,” says Vanzo. Then they scan and paint each drawing and send the data back to Rough Draft, where it’s composited and edited into a finished product. The approved layout is shipped to Rough Draft Korea, where animators hand-draw every frame, the old fashioned way, on paper. When we have something put together, we export a QuickTime file for the client to review. Final Cut is good at editing monolithic pieces of QuickTime, but it can also handle multiple layers of artwork really well. “In layout animatics, you have a lot of individual pieces of art that you have to put together in a single frame, but on many different layers. “We’ve been using Final Cut to put together animatics for years now,” says Vanzo. To cut the animatics together, they use Final Cut Studio. Nothing resembling animation appears until the Rough Draft crew cuts animatics - stills set to audio in a video track. Artists then hash out storyboards, which are scanned and sent back to the directors and writers. The studio receives voice tracks from the actors - basically radio plays of the episode or scene. To get it all done, Rough Draft has developed a slick workflow to crank out project after project without hiccups.Īt Rough Draft, the typical animation project starts with an audio file. Now the studio can take on full-length animated films even while producing weekly series. The studio occupies prime real estate in Glendale, CA, and works with a team of highly trained, efficient 2D animators at Rough Draft Korea. Rough Draft has come a long way from that Van Nuys garage. To us, Macs are the best way to deliver that quality, because they give us so much freedom.” “With some studios, you can recognize their work. “We strive to deliver what the client needs and wants,” says Producer and Senior Vice President Claudia Katz. This flexibility lets Rough Draft take on virtually any animation project. We run Maya on the Mac for our 3D work, and if we need to, we can use Boot Camp to run any Windows-based app.” QuickTime is the de facto delivery and review medium for our facility. We love Final Cut Studio - we use it for storyboard and layout animatics. “But since the release of OS X, and more recently the incorporation of Intel processors, they’ve represented great flexibility for us. “We’ve always used Macs, and we have tried to include them in as much of our production as possible,” says Vanzo. Today the studio uses Macs in every aspect of production: office work, storyboarding, film editing, and 3D animation. Soon after, he became the head of all things technological, and oversaw the studio's transition from early Silicon Graphics machines to Windows-based PCs to Macs. Gregg's brother Scott Vanzo joined the studio in 1993 to set up digital ink-and-paint and camera production facilities. The studios quickly earned maverick reputations for their work on edgy shows like The Ren and Stimpy Show and Beavis and Butt-head, as the staff perfected cutting-edge techniques like non-photorealistic 3D rendering Rich Moore, former director on The Simpsons and supervisor for The Critic, completed the core team in 1995. Claudia Katz joined Rough Draft in 1994 to produce The Maxx, and later became a partner. Gregg Vanzo founded Rough Draft in a Van Nuys garage in 1991 he and his wife Nikki established Rough Draft Korea in Seoul shortly thereafter. There simply isn't another platform out there that can do as much as the Mac." Every Mac in the studio can do what we need it to do. An iMac can be an office machine one day, and the next day it can be put into production. "The work we do involves everything from traditional 2D animation to 3D CGI to video editing. "Macs are extremely flexible, and that's key," says Scott Vanzo, Director of CGI and Chief Technology Officer at Rough Draft. Rough Draft Studios produces a staggering amount of animation - and its assembly line is 100% Mac. And Rough Draft is still going strong: The studio produced half the animation for The Simpsons Movie, the soon-to-be-released final installments of Futurama, and Comedy Central's Drawn Together.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |