25 March, 2007

Inspired by new technology...

Dave Thomas, director of El Tigre (and owner of Wendy's), describes here how he converted from traditional pencil drawing to an all-digital paperless production using the Cintiq.

Even though we've been using Wacom tablets for 9 years, going the very expensive-Cintiq-route has been a fearful and costly idea for us.
We hope to eventually convert our storyboard/layout departments to this model. The quality speaks for itself, as you can see in the samples here.

We've always been paperless for the entire full animation & BG line art/paint process, but not until now have I truely seen the potential efficiencies of using Cintiq for aspects of character/prop/location design, story art, and rough background layouts.

We've been apprehensive about this for too long, if no quality is being sacrificed, and production gets optimized, then why not? Technology has advanced to this, trees will be saved, speed is increased, creativity and draftsmanship is not compromised.... we'd be foolish not to.

Even before I saw that blog, we had already decided to slowly convert our storyboard, design & layout team to this model by next Christmas (avoiding a big confusing switch-over in mid-production). The least we can do is try it out, right?

2 comments:

Jake Macher said...

This would make a nice little bonus instead of cash, wink, wink.

-Jake

David Germain said...

Those things cost like $4000 each right? I know someone on your staff has one of his own already. I'm sure that comes in handy for him.