More than 200 dedicated animators and millions of dollars worth of time & patient hard work.
Rising Sun Pictures produced over 170 final visual effects shots in Thor: Ragnarok, which is a mammoth task, but why so many animators and why the large cost?
What most people who are not in the animation space, have no exposure to, is the level of time required to produce quality animation.
We’ve heard comments such as, don’t you just create it in After Effects? Isn’t as simple as like editing a video?
The reality is, quality video editing vs dad’s video editing of family movies are like the difference between State of Origin vs the under 6’s junior rugby no contact game.
Quality video editing, can take for a 30 second output around, 4 hours as a minimum, if the source footage is all clean and easily usable for the desired end product. If the footage is even a little bit off, this can triple or more, with great ease.
Animation is a whole new beast altogether.
There are differences between how things move in slow motion, fact action, character traits such as smiles and other facial expressions. In animation, aside from the character design alone, it’s all about the timing to present a digital representation of a concept, that feels “real”.
That feeling of realism isn’t for amateurs to achieve, in fact, many highly experienced animators will get their first drafts wrong on their timing.
Why Thor:Ragnarok took over 200 animators and millions of dollars, because every layer of cloud, shading, characters and background, was all created digitally element by element. The ONLY slower method of producing this level of quality detail, would be to actually create it for real. That is spending the time to create those mountains, create real clouds and flying horses. We all know that’s not currently possible (of may never be), so if the end outcome desired is outstanding visuals, then the current ONLY option is to animate.
Once upon a time, such animation and visual effects was not thought possible, I wonder what we will see tomorrow?
