I was so lucky that Petter Lindblad had to go on a shoot and passed his teaching job at Animation Sans Frontiers in Viborg on to me.

For the first time ever at Viborg I held a practial 2 day Budgeting, Planning and Financing Animation – workshop. It was so much fun. Even that most of the participants were directors I (hope) made them realize that:

A) Directors have to be a part of the financing

B) If you do things in the right order, the budget isn’t scary at all.

So first they set up the conditions for their films: how many characters, locations, backgrounds, minutes of animation etc.

Then we drew som pretty darn nifty pipelines. Then we made a timeline and a production plan, where we defined how long each step of the pipeline should take according to the conditions.

And first then did we start to put numbers down in the budget. And lo and behold. Suddenly the budget made sense, because behind every digit there was a conenction to the conditions, the pipeline and the timeline.

Not scary at all.