It really depends on how efficiently you design your show for production, the size and skill level of your team, and the resources you have available (specifically time + budget.) Design and production planning are probably the most important steps to consider because everything else will be put in place to follow it. If the show is an on-going series with a tight deadline, low budget and tiny crew, you would quite naturally design the show so that elements and animations can be easily re-used and re-purposed for many scenes and episodes.
My wife Alisa and I are finishing up our first Anime Studio Pro short film this week--it should be ready after this upcoming weekend. The film is called 'Scareplane' and there's a teaser pic on our blog:
http://littlegreendog.blogspot.com/
TBH, we've never worked on an episodic 2D animation series before but we've both have many years of experience working on cg productions for films, TV commercials and and video game cinematics. This particular project is actually a one-shot based on my comic strip
Brudders but we do intend to develop another project as a regular episodic series, and 'Scareplane' was created to test our ability to produce a 2D cartoon in a reasonable time and budget.
Anyway, to put the schedule for this
one project into perspective, here's how it's been going. In October 2013, I wrote the script and storyboarded the project. At that time, we also recorded the dialog, made our music selections, and cut an animatic based on the boards. This part of the process took about two weeks (and during our rare moments of 'free' time.) When the animatic was completed, we had a reasonably clear idea of what we needed to do to move forward and finish the project.
At the time, neither of us knew Anime Studio at all, so I expected to spend several weeks learning the program before diving into full-on production mode. The learning curve was actually steeper than I expected, and with my 'day job' as a visual fx artist, family life, and the holidays at hand, it took me a bit longer to get started on the actual production work. (Thank goodness there are so many good tutorial videos online for ASP, plus this forum has been an excellent resource for information.)
By Thanksgiving, Alisa had all the background paintings finished and I had a several character scenes drawn and animated. We still had a lot of work ahead of us but at this stage we had a predictable workflow in place. That was when our production really started to roll.
Most of the really complicated scenes were drawn and animated over the Christmas holidays. The show has five cg shots, which I finally got around to creating this past week. I have remaining four 'hand drawn' character scenes to animate and title cards to design this week, and a final audio mix for this weekend. In total, we have 26 scenes in 'Scareplane' of varying lengths and complexity. In the beginning, I tried to keep things simple but challenging--making a 2D short was new territory for me and some things turned out to more difficult than I expected. But many things were a lot easier too. Also, a few scenes grew more complicated during production simply because I was discovering new features in Anime Studio that I wanted to try out. It all worked out in the end, partly thanks to helpful advice and useful scripts from more experienced users in this forum.
If you go by total days since we started this project, it's been about four months but the actual 'hands on' time with two artists (me and Alisa) has really about two months, working off and on as time permitted. Now that we have good sense of what to expect from working in ASP, I think we can cut our production time down considerably for our next project, mostly by simplifying designs and making better use of 're-usable' elements. Oh, and also by not repeating the mistakes I made during 'Scareplane'.
To summarize, it would not have been possible work out a reliable schedule for this project without the careful planning that was put in during the first two weeks, and even with our careful planning, our work on 'Scareplane' has gone longer than anticipated. Whatever schedule you come up with for your own project, be sure to factor in time for 'the unknown'. I find that in almost every creative project I've worked on, however long I
think a task will take, in reality it often takes double that estimate or longer. Other artists I've worked with have told me the same thing. But in any case, you can't formulate a realistic time estimate without first coming up with a detailed plan.
Hope this first hand account sheds some light on the subject.
G.
