Discover the technology behind 3D animation

If you watch TV or surf the web then the chances are that you have already seen some of Flock’s work without even realising it. They’re a team of creative media talents who specialise in producing high quality 3D digital animation and Flash based content for the TV, Film and Advertising industries.

You’ll find Flock’s offices hidden behind some pretty discreet Victorian frontage in west London; step inside and you enter into a warren of rooms filled with the whirring sounds of processors and the tangible atmosphere of artistic minds at work.

I was there to meet Adam Falkus, Flock’s CEO, and Flock producer Martin Bisiker, to find out about the kind of skills and technology that go into creating the video content that you and I watch on our screens every day. I also wanted to find out what it takes to get to the top of one of the most innovative and exciting industries in the UK today.

What are you currently working on?

AF: “Today we’re just finishing up some titles for Coca Cola. We’re doing a programme for them called ‘Celebrating the Goal’ [I can see an animated ergonome figure on a massive monitor in the background performing celebratory somersaults]. We’re also finishing off some corporate videos for Procter & Gamble and Unilever.”

“Just before Christmas we completed a series called How the Earth is Made, for the History Channel. We created a whole bunch of explanatory graphics of volcanoes and tectonic plates. We did the first series for them and we’ve just finished the second. Hopefully the third one is just about to be commissioned.”

MB: “We also do promos for ITV and stuff like that. We’ll have the directors come in and instruct us as to what they want. It’s quite fast turnaround but pretty intense. We also go out and shoot if needs be – we did one just before Christmas for HSBC that involved shooting outside and then a lot of editing on a Mac.”

What’s the most difficult part of the job?

AF: “Rendering is our most time consuming process. This is where a completed animated graphic is put through a video editing file to produce final video output. Adding geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information.”

“Modelling and animation take a long time too, but once the animatic is clicked off a render can be going for days.”

MB: “There has to be an understanding between us and the client that once they’ve viewed the animatic and signed it off, you have to sit back and let it happen. To go back and make changes once an animatic has been rendered basically means going all the way back to the beginning of the process. Many people are surprised at how long a render can take, as you would expect it to just be a click of a button.”

AF: “It’s the nature of the beast. An animation sequence that’s as little as 30 seconds long – depending on what’s being shown, and the colours or animation etc – can be tens of gigabytes in size. After years of working in this industry, it bewilders me still. I’ll think: how are you that big? For something that doesn’t even seem to involve that much content.”

What kind of hardware do you use?

AF: “They’re all PCs. We’ve got Ice Boxes next door, they’re external hard drives linked up for back up. Each machine has a standard terabyte hard drive capacity, 8GB Ram and Quad Core processors powering a 2.83 GHz 64 bit operating system on Windows 7 with SLI graphics.”

“The beefier the better basically. It’s a big investment but it saves us a lot of time and stress in the long run, because a lot of the files that the guys work with are so intensive. With millions and millions of polygons – in their 3D environments – you can’t move around it, navigate cameras around it, without the machines being relatively beefy.

What about editing software?

AF: We use MAYA 3D Animation, Visual Effects and compositing software, and Maxon’s Cinema 4D R11 Studio Bundle.

What editing systems do you use?

AF: “We’re investing in a PC based Avid system – which is an editing machine. Traditionally we’ve gone down an FCP (Final Cut Pro) route which is a Mac based editing system – but actually we think that the Avid [Avid symphony – non linear editing software] based system (on a PC) is something that we will go back to, simply because it really enlarges the capability of what Flock does.”

Do you worry about PC security and viruses?

AF: “Touch wood nothing has ever happened. But we’ll do everything in our power to prevent it because that would just be devastating. We have McAfee Total Protection loaded onto every PC.”

Where do you get your inspiration and ideas from?

AF: “At the start of the project we try and take some time out – all of the guys that work here we know well and we all have a huge number of ideas bouncing off of each other. It’s about the team”

How do you start out in CG editing?

AF: “Well we often use a company called Escape Studios – [one of the most successful and well respected CG academies in the UK based in West London] – who will sometimes send their students down. But what we do is very specialist – if you were to do a degree through university what we do would probably be a third year specialism rather than a whole course.”

What about self learning, is that possible?

AF: “There isn’t much online that you can’t learn from tutorials and there are a number of web based communities out there where you can ask questions to specific problems and discuss new concepts – people are happy to share their knowledge. Just a simple search will find them. You can get started on any decent PC. The only restriction is the software costs, they’re pretty brutal.”

What kind of personal attributes do you need?

AF: “Above all you have to have total passion for what you do. You have to go above and beyond, in terms of commitment and dedication. The deadlines we work to are often intense, and our guys will work around the clock to get the job done. And ultimately every designer knows that they will be judged on the quality of the work they produce, so they take an enormous amount of personal pride in what they do – it isn’t one for the nine to five brigade.”