Nailing that shot

In live action film making the conventions are different.  At college I was always told "tape is cheap" "shoot everything you can"  "You'll only use about ten percent of it, but if you have the time, do another angle!"

Sony pictures showing off

Single camera film units repeat the action of the whole scene three or four times to get the coverage and then the shots are chosen in post production to assemble the scene the way it works best.  It's a bit tough on the talent but with the exception of Hugh Grant they all love it, really.  The only limit is the time it takes to go again and again.  I've seen bigger productions use several cameras to shoot the scene just once but from so many different angles it makes no difference.  DP Gabriel Beristain maintains he will work no other way.  But of course that's a luxury available only to the multi-millionaire project.

Animation (on whatever budget) is the opposite thing altogether. Because it can take weeks to shoot a single take, more pressure is on the planning of your shots so that they not only work out first time but can be cut together exactly the right way.  You simply cannot afford to get the coverage that live action film makers take for granted.  Your options at the edit bench will often amount to roughly a half second at the beginning and end of each shot to trim for perfect timing. 

If you have multiple stages you can have several identical puppets working on different scenes simultaneously, but of course you'll need multiple animators for that and that's costly too.

Biddly dee de deeee, Two cameras...

I tried once using two cameras on the stage to shoot a scene from two angles so that I could cut back and forth between them and only work the animation through once - Shoot One, Get One Free.

I was allowing indecision to get the better of common sense.

Not only was half of the material useless to me in editing (naturally - why would I want to see the whole action twice in the film) but it saved me no time whatsoever!  Both units were controlled by one computer so I lost time switching between capture windows and making sure that the action looked right from both cameras.  The computer ran more sluggish so I had to wait longer for it to capture frames and - here I blame my tools - when the infernal auto-exposure buggered about, I had two problems to solve instead of one.  Turns out it took almost exactly twice as long as single camera shots of the same length.

What's more, so much of my attention was spent elsewhere that the quality of the animation itself came in just short of mediocre.

...although I did have two identical versions of it!