Thursday, September 18, 2008

What are Technical Directors?




What are Technical Directors?


History
The earliest Technical Directors are in the world of stage theatre. As theatre productions got more complex, things like lights, mechanical props, and sound became a growing part of the stage experience. The directors of these shows could not focus all of their time on these new technical aspects or they wouldn’t have time to direct the performance of the actors. Thus, enters our esteemed Technical Director.
The technical Director position transitioned over from the world of stage to film and animation. When computer graphics (CG) began to enter the scene. CG directors often needed to hire technical directors to deal with the technology. Now Things have gotten so complex (especially on features) that there are sometimes dozens TD's that often work on a show. Some places have so many TD's that the title "technical director" is has been changed to technical artist, technical animator, technical lighter etc. The trend seems to be going that there is one Technical Director or Lead Technical Director and a technically trained hierarchy under them.
In general the goal of Technical Director is this: To develop creative ways artists can focus more time on developing their ideas without feeling bound by technology. TD's are problem solvers that are often the bridge between art, engineering, and programming.

Types of Technical Directors
I have heard of all sorts of TD’s. Titles range from company to company. Here are a few examples: Lighting TD, Effects TD, Character TD, Animation TD, Shading TD, etc. In my case I am an Animation Technical Director (this position is referred to as Character TD at other studios). Character and Animation Technical Directors often create and enforce pipelines. A pipeline is a flowchart of how all the computer generated models, textures, rigs, lights and animation etc. all come together. It specifies the order and methodology in which things must adhere. The better the pipeline, the faster you will get things done. If the bottleneck has to do with a person, then generally a department lead or producer will address this problem. If there is a bottleneck in production that has to do with technology, a Technical Director will often address it.




Why TD’s are Valuable
Lets pretend we're working for a production with no TD. Generally one of the animators are forced to rig (which generally they would rather not do). Say it takes 3-4 days for our savvy animator to rig a character. . If there are 30 characters...that’s 90-120 days. If we're talking work days that’s 18- 24 weeks! And what if we decide to change proportions of the characters later on? That’s a lot of waste you say. Your right! TD's tackle the problems differently. They treat the 30 characters as one character by developing scripts (or programs) that can automate most of their repetitive workload. On most realtime projects, I can rig a humanoid character from scratch including weights in about a half hour. If I already have the skin weights it takes about 1-2 minutes. Granted, it takes some research and development timeto do this, but the savings in the long run is inarguable.
TD’s allow both the creative and programming teams to stay more focused on their own disciplines. They are always finding new ways to save a production time and money. And when they have a good day, they make miracles happen. So go ahead, give your TD a hug…

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