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NPCs: a weekly 3D short film pipeline for a team of three
Team
Three people: a screenwriter, a 3D generalist and me
I led
The R&D and the weekly production pipeline
Decision I owned
Buy what does not need making
Context
Research and development for producing a 3D animated short film on a weekly basis. The question was not whether three people could make one, but whether they could keep making them without the process collapsing.
The problem
- 01A weekly cadence with no room for conventional animation production overhead.
- 02A team of three: one screenwriter and two 3D artists, covering roles a studio spreads across dozens.
- 03Comedy timing to protect, which is the first thing a rushed pipeline destroys.
What I did
01
Buy what does not need making
Environments and rigged characters came from the Unity Asset Store, animation clips from Mixamo. Building those from scratch weekly was never going to work, and nothing about them was the point of the films.
02
Spend the custom effort where the jokes are
Stuart Ansley and I added rigging to the characters' jaws and eyebrows specifically for comedy. That is a small amount of bespoke work placed exactly where bespoke work pays back.
03
Render in real time
Maya handled 3D layout and blending the Mixamo clips; Unity handled previsualisation and rendering. Taking the render wait out of the feedback loop is what made a weekly cadence arithmetically possible.
04
Finish in one place
After Effects carried editing, compositing, music, dialogue and sound effects, so the last mile stayed in a single tool rather than fragmenting across the week.
More footage
Result
- 01Two short films produced: one built to a known creator's script and camera angles for rapid testing, and one original from a script by Luke Minaker.
- 02A pipeline proven under a weekly constraint with three people.
- 03A method that carried directly into later client systems work.
Credits
- R&D
- Stuart Ansley and Jorge Feres
- Original script
- Luke Minaker
