Jump on over to Dreamworks animator/animation supervisor Jason Schleifer’s blog to check out the series of articles he has written on one of the great animation debates: Quality vs. Quantity.

Any animator worth his or her salt is a perfectionist. In fact, computer-generated animation demands it. The computer wants to make things mechanical and mathematical, and it’s up to the animator to make it organic and natural. This constant battle, however, takes time. A lot of time. But we all know that time is money, and studios aren’t made of time.

As an animator-turned-supervisor at Dreamworks, Schleifer has a ton of experience balancing the demands of meetings and dailies with actually animating. He also mentors and lectures for Animation Mentor! Here he offers a few tips and tricks for animating smarter and faster while maintaining studio-level quality.

Schleifer also blogs a fair amount about productivity and is a supporter of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) program. These articles are a great marriage between the GTD method and animation. For example:

“Here’s the agreement you can make with yourself that will reduce your stress 10-fold. Agree that you will give yourself 3 hours at the start of every shot to explore ideas. Give yourself 10 minutes to write down the emotion that you want the character and the audience to feel. Give yourself 20 minutes to talk to another animator about it. Give yourself 1 hour to thumbnail (do you know how many thumbnails you can do in an hour?). Give yourself 20 minutes to look at other shots of the character that other animators have done.”

Check out all four articles over at Jason’s blog:

Part 1: Quality vs. Quantity: The Great Debate

Part 2: Quality vs. Quantity: Learning to Focus

Part 3: Quality vs. Quantity: What About Quality?

Part 4: Quality vs. Quantity: Intent