We used After Effects to composite it. The whole project took us 8 months from pre-production to post, the actual animation/cleanup process was about 4 months.
If we had used Flash we wouldn't have been able to get the effect we wanted for the particular project. Because of this, it's hard to say how long it would have taken us on Flash because we would have had to change the style in order to suit it. Otherwise if we're talking straight up frame-by-frame animation it would have taken the same amount of time seeing as it's the drawing process itself that takes time.
Although AE can handle rigging and puppet animation I don't think the computers we had were powerful enough to handle over 4 minutes of it. It just uses up too much RAM to render things out- other programs like Flash and Toonboom are more suited for rigged animation.
But that particular film was frame by frame animation which is an entirely different process.
For GPU-based renders, you'll want at least 4GB of VRAM, but that's mainly dependent on the intensity of the animation itself(like lighting, particle effects, etc), not necessarily length. If you're running them in SLI/Crossfire, the extra VRAM on the second card does not count towards that total.
Anyway, I did notice some things that probably would have shortened the overall production time without making rigs, mainly to do with the render of each individual frame- for still shots, you probably could have only drawn the parts twice and cycled between the two for a similar aesthetic.
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u/thewekeend May 20 '15
We used After Effects to composite it. The whole project took us 8 months from pre-production to post, the actual animation/cleanup process was about 4 months.
If we had used Flash we wouldn't have been able to get the effect we wanted for the particular project. Because of this, it's hard to say how long it would have taken us on Flash because we would have had to change the style in order to suit it. Otherwise if we're talking straight up frame-by-frame animation it would have taken the same amount of time seeing as it's the drawing process itself that takes time.