How to make an animated feature film in 120,000 easy steps

We are super excited to announce Stuart Forest, CEO of TriggerFish Animation Studios (http://triggerfishstudios.com/)will be speaking at our next talk. TriggerFish Animation Studios is Africa's largest animator and is often referred to as the Pixar of South Africa.

An average animated feature film consists of around 1,500 shots. Each shot requires 47 pipeline steps. With asset production and edit workflows, the process requires the synchronisation of 120,000 tasks in a 2-and-a-half year timeframe.

In addition, each step requires several iterations and lots of problem-solving until it’s considered complete. Yet each step in itself is not crazy difficult - as long as you can allocate the step to someone who is capable of solving it, and the whole process is intricately managed to ensure interdependent steps are synchronised.

Basically - you need People, Equipment and Management. And Money to pay for it. And you need to actually sell the product in order to pay for the Money.
At the product meetup, I'll talk through the steps of our 2 animated feature films as case studies in producing a world class product - taking a project from idea through fundraising, testing, planning, execution, delivery, distribution and Getting Paid - and the lessons I learnt along the way.

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/b/5/4/600_441107956.jpeg

About Stuart

Stuart is a Producer on animated features Adventures in Zambezia and Khumba and the CEO of Africa’s most globally successful film company, Triggerfish Animation, with over 9 million cinema tickets sold worldwide. He also coded the software that Triggerfish has used to run 5 large productions.

Last year City Press named him as one of 100 world-class South Africans (2014). He was named as one of Africa’s Top 20 Tech Influencers by IT News Africa (2013). Stuart won Innovator of the Year at the 2012 Sanlam/ Business Partners Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. He has repeatedly been a judge for the International Emmy Awards and has spoken at conferences around the world including South Africa, New Zealand and California.

Stuart has a BTech Fine Art (cum laude) from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. In true start-up fashion, Stuart used to run Triggerfish from his kitchen and created stop-frame animation for Sesame Street in his living-room.

Twitter: @stuart_forrest