Several thousands of designs may be built for the production of a TV animated series. SPI pre-production helps producers to organize, to distribute and to follow the building of their 2D-3D assets.
Any production starts with a breakdown list. It is comprised of 2D-3D assets often classified into categories such as characters, props, locations and so on. These elements may be further arranged into episodic packs which will later be sent to animation studios for shot construction. SPI pre-production helps director's assistant to build and organize those lists. SPI provides a simple mechanism to distribute assets construction among many different studios. It allows the producer to review and comment designs as they are built. It also takes care of all data transfers between the different partners.
One important point of SPI pre-production is that all this information is organized in a database which can be consulted by all the different authorized partners. This information is accessible through a simple and easy to learn interface. Common functionalities such as visual representation on mouse over, search by keywords, list editing, uploading and downloading Excel files are provided. Another advantage is that each time a design at a given stage is build by a studio, the source design is automatically transfered to the producer.
Many producers rely on SPI Pre-production every day
SPI Pre-production allowed us to have a coherent database and to regroup all the relevant information. This was of paramount importance in our process, which relied on key contributors in France, Italy and the United States. It would have been impossible to coordinate the creative process and the approval process without the SPI pre production tool.