Have you heard the word "Pipeline" from a filmmaker or animator?

If you’re working making at lot of films, animations and visual effects ultimately you should end up with a number of well defined processes for doing a given thing. Although you may have a bunch of custom jobs you need to work on, at scale, on a regular schedule or you’ve just found you need to make sure your that really difficult thing that comes up every now and then - all of these would be a lot easier if it went through a we defined pipeline next time around.

I’ve been involved in setting up a few pipelines in my time. It works best as team, with different parts of a project being able to run in parallel. Past projects we’ve had character art being worked on at the same time as sound design and music. The sound drove the animation timings and the art assets became rigs which would all be complied for an animator before they made a start. These days I’ve got a personal photogrametry pipeline as I have countless scans that have to go through process and QC and at some point will be selling as 3D assets. Having a pipeline often sounds like a souless process, but within each stage you have you still need to make sure the people working on the art, sound animation etc are well supported and feel enabled to make the creative choices you hired them for. I have my own personal pipelines as with a lot of spinning plates, it can be easy to loose track of everything, especially if you’re only coming back to that pipeline when other work is done.

And that’s another thing, you may need serval pipelines. I’m very used to a cycle of storyboard > anmatic > blocking > animation > environment > renders on a character project but equally did hands on filming for story-based music videos that mean song analysis > concept > concept into song structure > shot list > shoot > edit > VFX > grade. I wouldn’t be in these pipelines all the time, and the scale of projects means that the amount of time (or budget) could be used to scale.

The real project planners in here will probably also realise that once you have these well defined processes you can then do a critical path analysis. But I’d caution some aspects for factory thinking here. Just because something was done in very quickly once or twice, doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Areas of a pipeline (aka people!) can get bored, run out ideas, get tired or simple did that crazy run once and burnt out, never to return. Be realistic if you’re imposing timescales. A pipeline should be something a producer takes time to engage with, and without knowing it down to the last voxel, they need to have a realistic idea of how long each stage could take, upper and lower limits. Settting a timelimit on a projects final output it’s probably going to end badly if you’ve not explored it’s consituant parts and factored in some slack and time for ammendments. If you’re working on a tight deadline and the timescales don’t get you to the deadline.

Why is this important for other creatives to think about? Well is it’s really important to learn to work with others. A lot of freelancers and even staffers can spend long periods where they’re just being asked for an output, but then when they encounter a team situation it can be a bit daunting. Some of the best projects I’ve worked on have been with a team. It means talented people are working on an aspect of a project they’re really good at, you can build up some camardery and make something amazing. You’re not spreading people thin around a ton of disaplines they haven’t any training or experience on (much as a creative project will always push people to learn new things and excel). With more and more people going straight into work, leaning online etc that makes work more democratised but it’s important to learn common language around design, animation films etc so you can engage with other collegues. Sometimes you might need to tech a niche technical phrase to a producer (I remember teaching one E.P about track mattes, after which he started asked to use these more as a creation option he knew) or you yourself my need to actually got back to learning fundamentals around your skills set you may have skipped as they seemed to basic at the time, but learning about form or gesture could be the one thing you really need to discuss with an art director to nail the animation you’re making.

If you’re on here and you’re looking for work or you’re trying to work out what to train on within a niche, look at the pipelines other studios are using. Their may be an area they are screaming out for. Everyone wants to direct, everyone wants to be a concept artist - but can you rig this four armed lizzard demon the writers just pitched? What skills keep that pipeline flowing? Will that skill still be needed for years to come? Learn what you can about your adjent rolls - on animation and motion design projects, whilst I now do some of my own art, I’ve frequently needed to speak the same language as the graphic designers and artists, but I also need to be able to understand fellow producers and what they need from project. Do your homework, pipelines are often extremely different between teams and my be improved upon over time but make use of them and learn how you can use them to get the best out of your projects.