While the shift to remote work may not have upended animation in the same way as it did physical production, it has still brought on some unique challenges for teams. 

Whether it’s the shift out of a physical studio and into a work-from-home structure or the onboarding of team members in different time zones, your whole team has had to learn new technical skills and how to adjust to a global schedule. 

We’ve selected some of the most common remote workflow challenges that remote animation teams face during virtual production for movies, live-action productions, and other projects, and how to handle them like a pro. 

Challenge #1: New Equipment Requirements

Most animators likely already have the equipment to build storyboards and create motion graphics, but they may not be fully equipped to handle the additional challenges that remote work presents. 

For a remote animation workflow to be successful, each team member must have adequate equipment for viewing and transferring large files, listening to high-quality audio, and otherwise communicating with the other members of the team, ideally on video calls. 

For this to be possible, you need to ensure that every member of your team, from animators to project supervisors, is properly equipped with a set of remote work equipment to be able to collaborate freely and easily in their home-based animation studio. 

We recommend that every member of the team have, at the bare minimum:

• High-quality (preferably over-ear) headphones that allow them to hear the finer details in audio files
• An HD webcam for video conferencing
• A computer or laptop with enough memory and graphics capabilities to stream 4K video 
• An ethernet cable and, if needed, an adapter to allow them to hard-wire directly into their router or modem for maximum bandwidth
• A high-quality USB or headset microphone

These tools are vital to their home setup because communication between team members is something many of us take for granted when sharing physical space. 

However, once your team moves fully remote, you need to ensure you can be seen and heard during meetings to get the same kind of seamless communication flow that you’re used to having in the office or studio. 

Challenge #2: File sharing

Remote collaboration requires sharing lots of files, many of them massive. To ensure that your animation team can quickly and easily share files of varying sizes, you’re going to need to look into some file sharing programs. 

For basic document exchange, cloud-based programs like Dropbox have the security and ease of use to work just fine. But when it comes to video and audio files, things get much more complicated. 

You’ll need to keep these files secure while also allowing access to them by the people that need them. 

You can utilize standard cloud-based file transfer systems like Google Drive and Dropbox, but will likely run into transfer speed bottlenecks and storage limits.  

We recommend investing in a high-speed file transfer service like MASV, which will allow you to transfer large quickly and securely. This will enable you to share large assets without delays, which is vital for keeping a team on-track.