Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Well, a lot of it's production and whoever the upper echelon of management is at the time for that particular feature. So they'll say, hey, these are our goals that we got to hit by this release or 3.0 or Gamescom or PAX or whatever thing that we're pushing forward, and say, these are what we want. What do we have in our current library of animations? If we have something that fits it, then we'll go and we'll draw from that and we'll make it work. And if it's not there, then we go, okay, these are what we need to shoot. And then we spend a lot of time actually saying, all right, because a lot of times you're not only thinking, what do I have to shoot? You have to think, how am I going to shoot this? If it's something that requires a metric, you have to make sure, okay, we got to go to a cafeteria line and we got to get your tray and you got to put on the thing and slide it down and grab the apple and this and your pie and put it on there and grab the tray and walk over and set it down, because you want this incredible mess hall animation of cool interactivity and stuff like that. So you've got to think, all right, how big is this tray? How high is this thing? What are the elements that design needs to be able to hook this up? We need to enter this particular line. And how does it work from there? We've got a bartender scene coming up and we're talking about how does the bartender function behind the bar? Well, we're going to have these zones, and these zones are going to be shot this way. And so you have this zone for mixed drinks. You're going to do the mixed drinks. You have this zone for taps. You can pour beer into a mug from a tap. Where are the glasses? The glasses are kept under here. We have to figure all this stuff out in advance before we can go to the stage, or we could just capture a bunch of stuff that can't be used. And we don't want to do that.

Tyler Witkin · Host, Community

Pre-production is super important.

Bryan Brewer · Animation Lead

Pre-production is super important. To the point where, going back to your cockpits, the full-size cockpits that these actors are jumping into for the ship animations, right? All that stuff was measured out and it went to a prop master over at Imaginarium. Him and his team built out these really nice cockpits. I mean, they look like skeletons, like things that you're climbing up onto, but they build all that out and then we show up. And the actors show up and they break their ankle. Or they get on there and they play with it. They figure out how to get in and get out, and then we shoot.