Reflex works in a way immediately familiar to traditional 2-D animators while remaining compatible with today's 3-D tools and workflows and adopting some capabilities new to both. Reflex can be used simply as a great animation tool that has narrow impact on an existing pipeline. But for studios ready for deeper transformation, Reflex enables fundamental changes in how modern studios are structured and operate, at all levels from human resources to production management, within production departments and across departments. Reflex even brings an opportunity for new forms of collaboration between studios and across borders.
Improve Recruiting and Retention
Draw on the large pool of experienced 2-D animators with limited CG experience. New hires, with either traditional or CG backgrounds, will need minimal training to get going, as our quotes from CalArts confirm. Even the most technophobic of old-school animators will feel comfortable in an environment that was built for artists. Happy animators are productive animators, and they'll stick around for the next show.
Leverage Your Talent
Reflex allows a senior animator to think and work at a high level. The animator can focus on abstract conceptual issues such as weight and timing without becoming bogged down in the minutiae of the motion. When it comes time to deal with the detail, layers allow a single animator to descend to the appropriate level and direct the motion in as detailed a manner as he or she wants, perhaps later returning even after the animation is finished to re-adjust the broadest levels of timing and movement. But Reflex also allows a senior animator to easily hand-off rough animation to an assistant for further work, allowing the department to...
Adopt a Hierarchical Workflow
Traditional 2-D animation studios discovered long ago that a little hierarchy can be a great thing. 2-D directing and lead animators, overseeing progressive tiers of assistants, junior assistants, inbetweeners and so forth, are able to do broad work quickly on many shots, shaping large sections of a project in as rough or specific detail as is appropriate. This ensures shot-to-shot and start-to-finish consistency and lets the top animators impact the whole of the project. It also provides a natural pathway for recruiting inexperienced junior talent, apprenticing them under more senior draftsmen, and over time developing new generations of great animators. This is ubiquitous in 2-D, but previous 3-D tools cannot support the tight collaboration required. Reflex can.
Work Together
Reflex is designed around the idea of many users simultaneously working on different aspects of large, complex shots, gracefully managing the interactions between multiple departments with parallel workflows. It is equally comfortable for work on a 2-minute short film, an intimate indy featurette, or an epic feature involving multiple-studio collaboration.
Outsource
Take the ability to hand in-progress animation from a senior animator to an assistant, mix in great support for large-department and cross-department collaboration, and add the ability to A/B animation done before and after as if holding both over a lightbox, and you've got all the ingredients that allow 2-D to be outsourced effectively without loss of tight quality control. For the first time ever, Reflex brings outsourcing of animation finishing into 3-D. No longer does outsourcing 3-D mean giving up all control to outside animators. Keep your in-house animators working on real value-add, and get all those fixes and cleanup work done economically.
Flex the Rigid Pipeline
Choice creates flexibility. Being able to move animation work easily between lead animators and senior and junior assistants, being able to outsource portions of shots or even just animation cleanup without losing quality control, and most of all gaining visibility into your pipeline and workflow, gives your studio options. When work falls behind, you now have a way to catch up. Hire junior assistants to do cleanup work. Outsource a set of tweaks or animation fixes. Promote a senior assistant animator to be another lead. Or even try layering on top of crude motion capture to produce finished animation at breakneck speed. Story change? Model change? Layers and motion paths let your animators, even junior assistants, adapt motion quickly without scrapping existing work.
Protect your Investment
Embracing open standards and providing a wide range of input and output options and work methodologies, Reflex fits cleanly into existing pipelines, thereby minimizing retooling costs and protecting studios' investments. All native Reflex data formats are completely open and easily human- and machine-readable, ensuring that your valuable assets will never become inaccessible to you in some abandoned proprietary format.
Move that Bottom Line
We have detailed cost-benefit and return-on-investment projections for Reflex adoption. Contact us to discuss how Reflex can save your studio millions of dollars per year in production, right from the first year you use it.
Reflex at CalArts
In September 2005, the California Institute of the Arts became the first educational institution to use Reflex as their primary teaching tool. To learn more about what CalArts had to say about Reflex, click on the link below!
