Reader's Questions: How Much Time Do You Spend on Each of the Workflow Steps

Another reader question on workflow: How much time do you spend on each of the workflow steps?

When it comes to AnimationMentor.com, there is a guideline to live by – the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. Animation Mentor students are definitely a hard working crew, and this is because animation is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it well. Finding the timing of your workflow is just like the rest of it, you have to see what works for you. Your first instinct may be to rush the planning and go right to animating, but you will soon discover that this is not the most ideal way to work, since you will most likely spend more time fixing things in the end. Finding the right amount of planning, roughing in, getting feedback, blocking, getting feedback, refining and polishing is something that takes time. For beginners, it also takes trial and error, since you can’t be told what the best workflow for you is.. you have to build it yourself!

But to answer your question more directly, you can expect to spend at least twenty hours a week on your AM assignments. But you probably should plan on it taking longer, upwards of forty hours a week, so you aren’t surprised when it turns out to be that sort of time commitment. Animating is time consuming, and until you have really hammered out your workflow, you should expect it to take a while. Rock star animators can move more quickly, but that is because they have spent their time “in the trenches,” taking their knocks, and learning from experience.

And you know what they say… “experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” So don’t expect it to be easy, or else you may be let down.

Good luck!

Animation Mentor Staff