Animation Production Budgets: Frames & Shot Lists, Artist Days per Second, Render Time & Farm Costs, Schedules and Cost per Finished Minute

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn a fictional short film's shot list from frames into seconds and mm:ss:ff timecode, add up the runtime and count the long shots that will drive the work.
• Look up fictional throughput rates by stage and complexity, turn every shot into artist-weeks for layout, animation, lighting and compositing with one copyable formula and measure the animation days per finished second.
• Turn artist-weeks into the team each stage needs to meet its deadline, allow for meetings and reviews, work out how long the stage then really takes and how many finished seconds the team delivers per week.
• Turn test-render times per frame into node-hours per sequence, add a re-render allowance for changes and work out how many days the studio's own fictional render farm needs.
• Compare the node-hours your own fictional farm delivers before the deadline with the need, rent the gap, price the mix and test whether buying extra nodes would be cheaper.
• Chain the production stages with WORKDAY and a predecessor lookup, skip the studio's closing days, find the longest stage and measure the slack before the animation lock.
• Price the artist-weeks of every stage, add the render farm and generic software seats, put a contingency on top and turn the total into a cost per finished second and per finished minute.
• Count the shots and seconds in each status, weight them into a real % complete, compare it with the plan, project the final cost from the money spent so far and chart the pipeline.