Animation on a Budget
By Ann Fisher
Today's subject is the animation industry and the variables that affect how much animation facilities charge their clients for services rendered. The vocabulary words are macroeconomics and microeconomics.
Think of macroeconomics as a broad overview of the animation industry that includes unseen issues, such as a facility's location, its ratio of inside versus outside projects, its rationale for housing all necessary equipment or jobbing out, its quantity/quality ethic. Consider microeconomics to be the details in a project's production pipeline, such as partnering with the client on design, limiting revisions, working with specific tools.
All these factors apply when clients want to produce animations on a budget.
Wreckless Abandon: balancing quality and budget Mark Bannon, co-owner of Hartford, CT's Wreckless Abandon (www.wrecklessabandon.com) has the macro view down pat. He says viewers judge a production on whether it's good or bad, not in the context of a given budget. "If a studio wants to survive and prosper today they need to make sure that, regardless of the budget, the integrity of the project is not compromised, that it's the finest quality production," says Bannon. "The key is making sure the largest portion of the budget ends up on screen. We'd seriously considered opening in LA, San Francisco or New York and we ended up in Hartford, midway between Boston and NYC. The reasons were because of budgets and the cost of doing business." He ticks off the benefits of his studio's location: minimal overhead, cheaper cost-of-living, low stress, lower payscales for comparable quality of labor, and a talent pool from area art schools.
Wreckless Abandon has also carefully calibrated its in-house/outside animation production schedule for commercial and entertainment clients. Its animators and editors always have something to work on, whether it's contract work or one of six proprietary programs that the studio is currently creating, such as A Freezer Burnt Christmas, a 1/2-hour clay animated special for the 2001 holiday season. It is being posted now and will eventually show up on television, video, DVD, and in publishing and merchandising arenas. The special was shot on 35mm, transferred on a Cintel Ursa Diamond with ITK Y-front and da Vinci, and had CGI effects created in Alias|Wavefront Maya v. 3.0, Fractal Design Painter 3D, Digital Fusion, NewTek LightWave 5.0 and Adobe After Effects v.4, among others. The facility houses all tools necessary to create various forms of animation, from clay and stop motion through CGI, which is another way it controls internal costs.
"We make it a practice here that none of the staff working on a production has any idea what the budget is," Bannon adds. "We do that deliberately because it's not for them to decide whether they can take certain latitudes. I'm interested in my studio in the long term. That's why we founded it that way and made sure we had enough work and all the tools and equipment here so the day rates weren't ridiculous. And if it gets tight, if there's anywhere to cut, it's the producer and director fees because they're us [he and his brother Mark]."
Xaos: collaboration and creative license
Xaos (www.xaos.com) in San Francisco produces a lot of 70mm large format work, with generally tight budgets, and is again starting to pick up more character animation work from agencies. Its president, Arthur Schwartzberg, says that background points to a production pipeline that is very cost effective.
Internally, Xaos switched a few years ago from SGI boxes to an all NT shop running Discreet 3D Studio Max. It has seven seats of Nothing Real Shake, a compositing software that handles large format imagery. The studio recently finished a one-minute-and-40-second signature open for a five-minute IMAX film in the San Jose Museum of Technology. Schwartzberg says they participated intensely in the design, as is often the case on large format projects.
"I think the singular most critical issue [for producing animation on a budget] is if the client is in the position to partner in the design," says Schwartzberg. "They should know how much money they have to spend, that's their job. They should know what they want to communicate. They should turn to the facility with those answers and say, ‘What's the best way to do that?' There are so many ways to produce things with impact, but if you determine in advance specifically what you want, and you're absolute about that, then you lose a tremendous amount of flexibility. You don't really take advantage of the skills of the house you're turning to. When they do that, we're excited because we don't have to waste time on the numbers and we're getting to input our own thoughts and magic."
Xaos animators did that on a 10-spot branding package for TechTV. The :10 IDs aired in September when the cable station client switched owners and dumped its ZDTV moniker. The three IDs are character-driven, created with 3D Studio Max and proprietary software. One organic painterly image was created with proprietary software. One was shot live action and image processed. "The budgets were small but we had terrific creative license," says Schwartzberg. "It allows us to explore certain areas that we want to go into. We can rationalize the lower budget for our own reel building and R&D."
Diecks: creative options via a digital camera
The Diecks Group (www.diecksgroup.com) in NYC has addressed budget issues by purchasing digital equipment that enables it to provide clients with more creative options. It, too, likes those little digital cameras, in particular a Canon XL1, which is being used on almost every project regardless of the budget, says Brian Diecks, president and creative director. It's quick to use, easy to plug into the studio's seven Media 100 workstations and allows the client to incorporate live action footage into smaller budget projects. A digital still camera, a Nikon Cool Pix 990, is a companion tool.
For a trio of ESPN spots advertising a sports almanac book, that went on the air in November, Diecks used the Nikon still camera to create visual imagery for a product that had none. The studio obtained slides of leading athletes in each sport, such as bicycling, golf and baseball, then made slides of some statistics. Both were projected, in a studio, through different color acetates. Diecks shot over 600 digital stills
which went right into a Mac Powerbook G3 266 laptop on the set, where editing began. Stills were then transferred to a Media 100, where editing was finished.
This project extended from broadcast through print and the Web, another example, Diecks notes, of how today's digital technology is helping stretch a budget. "Because of higher resolutions we're able to put one visual image into print rather than having to re-create it and worry about it. That's more time to be creative without having to worry about resolution," he says.
Deep Blue's staff wears many hats
Fort Lauderdale's Deep Blue Sea (www.deepbluesea.com) touts the strong experience of its talent as the facility's most valuable resource to clients with limited budgets. Lead designer David Woodward is able to double as production director and Flame compositor, so clients don't have to hire external production companies. Jim Johnson, Deep Blue Sea's executive producer and GM calls it "one of the true economical aspects of the entire process."
For a graphics package for the Latin American pop music channel HTV out of Miami, Woodward directed the action on the set, worked on its art direction, oversaw the editing and rotoscoping, then assembled all the pieces in the Flame. A :30 show open for VJ Invitado incorporated a live action shoot of a video jockey spinning videos a la a disc jockey
with vinyl records. The actual VJ was rotoscoped with an animated character to emphasize the show's revolving celebrity hosts. The client's concept was designed by Un Burro (Miami). Deep Blue Sea was contracted to produce it economically and create the special effects. The package went on-air this fall.
The facility made decisions based on the budget challenges. It shot Digi Beta instead of film, then processed it in the Flame to look like film. Rotoscoping was done using Pinnacle's Commotion software on Mac G3s and G4s. Offlining was done on the Avid. The conforming and finishing was done in the Flame. Creative approvals were sought and made at the offline stage. Yeyo Marquez coordinated production and post with Woodward.
"The real quest is to meet their expectations and not exceed their budget," says Johnson.
Razorfish: taking Control
Justin Leibow, art director/animator/designer for LA's Razorfish (www.razorfish.com) says the shop's animators will create things on a budget "if it's going to be neat or we're into whatever the client's trying to say." Razorfish is a global digital graphics solution provider of broadcast, Web and film content.
However, Leibow quickly ticks off a list of criteria that must be met if the budget is tight. 1) Limited client revisions. "To take more control of the creativity and artistic license of the project, and limit the client's ability to extend the life of it." 2) Stay in After Effects on Macs. "We do most of our work on AE anyway, a lot of it finishes on the Discreet Flame. But if it's a shorter piece or an all-graphics piece we'll just finish it straight on AE and render it out uncompressed, put it to Digi Beta or whatever delivery format." 3) Shoot a lot of stuff with digital video cameras. "My favorite is the Sony PC-100, a tiny little camera that takes amazing pictures and plugs right into the back of our G4. We use [Apple] Final Cut Pro to digitize the images instantly. We didn't have to go through an Avid, we didn't have to do telecine, we didn't have to deal with all the traditional expenses of film or even an expensive nonlinear system. It's the next level." Animators and designers can shoot what they need themselves.
Jobs overlap. Leibow often designs while he animates. He did it for an :08 end tag for an eBay spot that went on-air this month (which he notes was created efficiently, though not on a particularly low budget). Liebow simply wanted to streamline the process and show the client exactly what he had in mind. The client sent him a piece of audio and some mock-ups done in their Avid. The end tag is a long sentence said quickly so Leibow animated the type in a fun, quirky fashion that was easy to read. He took the track right into After Effects and began animating immediately. He sent the client five different, fully animated ideas set to the soundtrack, putting it to tape using a Media 100.
Conti: affordable tools, rates
Joe Conti (contifilms@att.net) is a cost-efficiency guru. This feature film/commercial visual effects designer, and now director, has continued to surprise the establishment with his budgets for high quality work. He produced the Men in Black open for $800,000.
He is one of the few talents that has stayed away from the big companies, charting his own course by successfully putting together hardware, software and talent to produce work within reasonable budgets.
Conti continues to work out of his home in New Mexico, just outside Albuquerque and close to Santa Fe, which houses a motion picture-quality soundstage, equipment and many filmmakers. It doesn't hurt that he teaches at a local university and is helping develop a core of new animators. He is working with state politicians to fund animation and film projects created in New Mexico.
Conti's own post set-up revolves around NewTek LightWave software (and some Eyeon Digital Fusion and Photoshop) on several 1 gigahertz Athlons, which he purchases for less than $1,000, and which render huge amounts of animation. "I look at films like Titan AE; they spent $100 million and Fox had to write the whole film off as a loss, and I think ‘How did they spend so much money?' I don't get it," he says.
Currently, in between commercial work, Conti has written, directed and produced a three-and-a-half-minute film trailer with 75 effects shots for First Flight, which he says looks like Armageddon crossed with Apollo 13. The film has been optioned, and funding is currently being raised to produce it. He has spent $35,000 on what many studios have estimated would cost $1 million. His efficient production philosophy includes using a local crew and being creative with the tools. He bought props, such as a space helmet and a fighter jet ejection seat, off eBay. He estimates the seat would have cost $20,000 to build; he paid $1,000. A local air force base gave him access to its F-16 fighter jets.
Excerpted from: http://postmagazine.com/
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