Rough Draft Studios: Drawing Inspiration
“We used Final Cut for Futurama and Drawn Together,” says Vanzo. “With its drag-and-drop features, you can just bring footage right over. In animation, you can often slice, splice, and retime footage to your heart’s content. You can’t do that in live action without making things jump. The editing software needs to be flexible and not bog down. Final Cut makes it a breeze.”
Multiple Dimensions
Rough Draft’s 2D workflow is straightforward, but things can get tricky when 3D is involved. And at Rough Draft, there’s no substitute for seamless non-photorealistic rendering, a.k.a. NPR. NPR makes the Planet Express spaceship in Futurama look like hand-drawn animation, and the 3D antics of Bart and Homer in The Simpsons Movie mesh with the toon’s distinctive style.
Rough Draft first used the technique in the groundbreaking animated series The Maxx. “Back then it was unheard of, and the 3D software wasn’t set up to do NPR,” says Vanzo. “We had to make do by blending the 3D with the background. Now most 3D software — like Maya with Mental Ray — has NPR tools built right in, so we can integrate the look with the 2D characters.”
This technique is key to Futurama. “For a sci-fi show you really have to nail space and the ships,” says Katz. “If you don’t have that, it really works against the genre. We felt that if you have 2D animation in the Simpsons style, and then you have shiny, realistic 3D animation, it’s just not going to work. So we developed cell-shaded 3D. In Futurama, it lets us animate things that would be impossible or extremely difficult to animate in 2D and make look good — like cars, and ships, and vehicles that fly and turn in space.”
To process all the 3D footage for shows like Futurama, the Rough Draft team uses an all-Mac render farm. “We work with HD-resolution footage, and we had to set up a render farm for it,” says Vanzo. “We set it up ourselves using Mental Ray and Axceleon EnFuzion. It’s very simple to set up, and extremely flexible. Any of the Mac Pros in our studio can be recruited to work in the render farm with the click of a button. It allows us to scale our processing power for each project, and we’re not wasting resources on dedicated render-farm machines.”
Connecting the Dots
Networking is key to production at Rough Draft. CGI animators and directors produce and swap large images and video files constantly, funneling them over the studio’s high-speed gigabit Ethernet network. There are about 60 machines on the network, each tapped into an Xserve RAID storage system and a couple of Mac Pros running OS X Server. It sounds complicated, but Vanzo set up the infrastructure in a matter of days with no outside technical help.
“I set up the network myself, and it was very straightforward,” says Vanzo. “Keeping things running smoothly is easy. Apart from Mac OS X Server's admin tools, we use Apple Remote Desktop to monitor our servers and all the machines on the network. It lets me log into any machine from my desk, or even from home, and address technical issues. Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server let us have a very small IT staff. I supervise administration in my spare time, and we have one other person who’s dedicated to IT. It’s great. Other places have this gangly IT structure, while we can do it from our desktops very easily without specialized training."
“We’re a small independent studio that works on big things, so we have to run efficiently,” says Katz. “It would be a financial burden to have a big IT staff. For us, it’s about putting every penny on the screen — using our resources to make quality animation. If we spend a lot of time and money on IT infrastructure, it’s not going into our projects.”
Finding the Future
Rough Draft has brought Futurama back from its long slumber in the cryogenic chamber of canceled sci-fi shows. The first of four straight-to-DVD movies, Bender’s Big Score, has already been released — and the next, The Beast with a Billion Backs, is primed to hit the shelves this summer. Rough Draft also continues to work on animated series like Drawn Together. Thankfully, fans seem to have an insatiable need for good animation, and the studio is almost always swamped with work.
“We have a lot of projects going right now, and we’re excited about all of them,” says Katz. “But we’re very excited about developing our own projects. The studio just optioned a novel for the big screen, and we’re working on several series as well.”
It’s a lot of work, but Rough Draft is ready for it. “When I joined the studio, we couldn’t handle this kind of volume and keep producing high-quality work,” she says. “Now, with the Rough Draft team in Korea, our staff here, and our Macs, we can. There’s really no limit to what we can do — I can only imagine what the future will hold for the studio.”
