Inspired 3D Short Film Production: Production Planning — Part 5
In part five of the production planning section of Inspired 3D Short Film Production, authors Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia discuss raising cash, simplifying the intended cinematic vision, expanding production time and lowering production costs.
By Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia
[ Posted on May 10, 2005 ]

Be sure to check out Parts 1-4 of Production Planning to learn about basics such as the production pipeline, budget analysis and production planning.

	All images from Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Reprinted with permission.

What To Do if Your Financial Bid is Too High
If you run the numbers and your cost estimate is beyond what you can afford, don't throw in the towel just yet. There are several possible solutions to the problem of an over-inflated production budget.

• Raise more cash
• Simplify your intended cinematic vision
• Take more time
• Lower your production costs

Raise More Cash
Is it possible to increase the amount of money you can spend on your production? If you are a hobbyist working at home, perhaps a friend or relative might be willing to make a donation. Consider a part-time job. Take out a personal loan or borrow from a credit card. See whether any software or hardware companies might be willing to sponsor a filmmaker who is using one of their products. Such scenarios are rare, but they are possible. If your production costs fall under the category of art/film school tuition, can you get scholarships, financial aid or student loans?
Simplify Your Intended Cinematic Vision
As we've mentioned many times, simplicity in design and execution are worthwhile goals for a CG short. Minimizing the complexity of your proposed film idea can significantly lower your production costs by allowing you to reduce your team size, use less powerful (and less expensive) software and hardware, delete unnecessary production steps and even do without certain equipment that you had previously thought you would need. Simplifying your film idea will also shorten your production cycle, which will mean less money spent on potential teammate salaries, upgrades, repairs and technical support fees. If you are working on your short as a full-time endeavor between jobs, the shorter your production cycle, the sooner you can go back to work and replenish your savings account.
If you plan to use dialogue, carefully consider whether you can possibly tell your story silently instead. Doing so will save you money and time because you will no longer have to find or hire voice actors, schedule recording sessions, utilize audio equipment and software, model phoneme face shapes and perform lip-synch animation. If your story absolutely needs words, perhaps you could use narration instead of actual dialogue. This option will still require voice actors and audio equipment, but phoneme face-shape creation and lip-synching will not be necessary. Or, if appropriate for your story genre, consider silent-film-style dialogue cards or even comic-book-inspired word balloons.
Can you reduce the length of your story? Delete unnecessary scenes and make sure all existing story points are told efficiently. The shorter your film, the shorter your production cycle.
Can you tell your story using fewer characters? Each character in your film needs to be modeled, rigged and animated. Are you absolutely certain that you need to show every single animal species in your Noah's Ark story? Surely you can leave out a few dozen or so.
Will you be able to render all of your scene elements in single passes, thereby removing the need for a compositing stage?
Can you simplify your characters and background elements so they take less time to build, animate and render? Perhaps your goofy cartoon alien works just as well with three fingers instead of five. Maybe you don't need to actually model every single tree. Look into instancing or using 2D cards or background plates instead (see Chapters 13 and 20).
Take More Time
Although lengthening your production cycle might very well end up costing you more, giving yourself more time might actually save you some money. You might be able to get away with half as many teammates if you give yourself twice as much time to complete your film. Also consider that rendering times can eat up a substantial portion of your schedule. Although you can indeed decrease these times with RAM and CPU upgrades, doing so can be costly. On the other hand, if your schedule is long enough to accommodate slower rendering times, you might be able to get away with weaker and less expensive equipment. Giving yourself an extended deadline might also mean that you can spend fewer hours per day on your short, thus allowing you to simultaneously work a full- or part-time job to offset your production expenses.

	[Figure 16] A hypothetical cost analysis chart.

Lower Your Production Costs
Don't buy more computers than you really need. A 3.0-GHz CPU is certainly faster than a 2.8. However, the speed difference will probably be barely perceptible, while the cost difference might be a bit more painful. It is certainly tempting to assemble the finest workstation money can buy, but even a package deal at a local chain store will be sufficient for most production needs these days. Do you absolutely need a $1,800, 23" flat screen LCD monitor, or will a 19" CRT for $300 do the trick? Look for secondhand equipment in classified ads and on eBay, as well as returned or discontinued and heavily discounted store items.
Carefully consider your software choices. Prices can range from free to several thousand dollars. In many cases, you do indeed get what you pay for; however, just because a particular piece of software costs 10 times as much as its competitor, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is 10 times as powerful. This holds true for sophisticated 3D CG packages, paint programs and editing software, as well as simple databases and renamers.
Also keep in mind that you can very likely get away with older versions of your chosen software packages. Often the absolute latest version of a particular program only has a few extra bells and whistles compared to last year's version, which you should be able to find for a significantly lower price.
Borrow or rent as much as possible, especially when it comes to seldom-used items. If you are only going to need a scanner once to convert your storyboard drawings into digital files, go to a local print shop rather than buying a scanner. See whether you can occasionally use such items at work or school if feasible and permitted.
Try to get multiple uses out of single items. A camcorder can double as a microphone, and a digital camera can double as a scanner.
Use talented friends and relatives instead of professional actors for dialogue/narration recording. If your teammates will be charging you by the hour, see whether you can possibly do a bit more of the work yourself and hire a smaller team.
Time Estimate
Now that you've analyzed the financial feasibility of your production, the next step is to create an approximate overall time estimate, which will not only determine whether your deadline is reasonable, but will also act as a preliminary production schedule.
To do this, you will need to determine how much time it will take to complete each of the three phases of your project cycle — pre-production, shot production and post-production. You can accomplish this by analyzing each individual production step within each phase.
If you don't feel that you have sufficient experience to generate fairly accurate time estimates for any of the individual tasks, seek advice from friends, colleagues, fellow students or books.
For bidding and budgeting purposes, a producer at a professional studio will need to make his estimate extremely accurate and will often crunch the numbers down to the hour. For your purposes it is probably not crucial for your estimate to be quite so precise, so think in terms of days rather than hours. When you are making these estimates, consider the concept of a man-day. We define a man-day as an eight-to-10-hour block of time. A man-day might differ from your actual workday, depending on how many hours per day you will be able to spend on your film. If you will be working on your film part time, say four hours per day, then it will take you two workdays to fulfill one man-day. So if you estimate that it will take five man-days to complete a specified task, realize that it will actually take you 10 part-time days to finish, not five. Same total hours, but different end dates.
Similarly, if you want to think in terms of weeks, consider what a week means to you. If you're working full time but taking weekends off, then a week would be five days. If you are a bona fide workaholic, then a week to you is probably seven days. If you estimate that a certain production task will take 35 man-days to complete and a workweek for you is Monday through Friday, then your estimate in weeks would be seven. If you plan to work seven-day weeks, then this task will take five weeks. Remember, the ultimate goal for your overall time estimate is to determine your completion date. The actual hours spent getting there are of secondary importance at this stage.
Once you have estimated the total amount of days that each production phase will take, you will need to divide these tallies by the number of members on your team and adjust for the actual contributions that each teammate will deliver. Also factor in any periods during which you might not be working at full capacity, such as holidays or vacations.