Public Funding for Hibbert Ralph Animation Limited

Scripts or screenplays remain a vital part of the entertainment industry. Of themselves scripts and screenplays are purely textural, but within the entertainment industry their purpose is almost exclusively to drive a visual representation of the story in question. In fact all screenplays form the foundation of a multi-media production where textural elements are re-imagined into different media formats. The purpose of this feasibility study is to consider a cloud based system to allow for the inclusion of associated multi-media data which can be tagged or “pinned” to the screenplay whilst maintaining the screenplay's well understood format and structure. In addition the study will develop a mobile and tablet based “App” to allow for remote management, review, amendment and addition to the aggregated textural and multi-media cloud dataset. Version management and the evolutionary aspects of screenplay development will also be considered and the final dataset will also be available for export to other online systems and of offline review and presentation.

Animation production is a complex technical process and business value chain, with a number of distinct phases. The stages and organisation of the technical process and business chain still reflect the procedures of hand-drawn 2D animation. However, an ever-increasing proportion of film and TV animation is produced with 3D CGI technology. GreenPipe will align 3D animation with hand-drawn storyboarding and production planning processes. The project will research and develop novel tools and methods for creative animation control, making it possible automatically to communicate concepts and assets from the storyboard stage into digital layout and then on to posing and animation stages. The project results will enable directors to retain the original freshness and vision of a drawn storyboard and carry it through, accurately and automatically, to the CG (Computer Graphics) stages of the production. The outcome will be a novel pipeline control system, which will drive a 3D animation package, automatically creating not only accurate digital layout but also appropriately timed and posed key-framed animation and an initial animation pass. The approach is based on using novel technologies to automate critical processes in a flexible solution that allows animation companies to work with little or no disruption to their established methods. The research will apply concepts derived from emerging intelligent content technologies with advanced computer vision and image processing, CG animation and games. The business concept is to offer a ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) solution with a consultancy-based service supported by a web-based asset management and data transfer service (for multisite working) with local software tools.