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0 pointsfroo17y ago0 comments

Except that I'm not talking about producing films. Yes, Pixar films are expensive because they are swinging for the fences.

That means they have many, many models, sets, textures etc that go into the production of any film, which of course increase your cost of production considerably. That's just a matter of fact.

What I have been saying is that if you take a different view, don't start out by trying to swing for the fences (you can always scale up later), essentially limit some of these choices you could probably get away with a smaller team in the beginning.

For example, lets move away from films for a second and talk about sitcoms. One of my favourite is Frasier.

Frasier has (for the most part) a very limited series of sets and characters. You have your 5 main characters, your 6 occasional supporting characters and for the most part these back and forths take place in 4 locations...

That's about 6 seasons of entertainment there for a sitcom, or about < 1 minute of Pixar animation.

That's really the kind of difference we're talking about in terms of cost of production.

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shiranaihito17y ago· 1 in thread

That's about 6 seasons of entertainment there for a sitcom, or about < 1 minute of Pixar animation.

Are you saying that you can produce 6 seasons of Frasier with the cost of 1 minute of Pixar animation? Sounds doubtful.

You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.

Everything has to start somewhere, but the kind of content you could put out with minimal costs might not attract many viewers, which would make it difficult to grow.

frooOP17y ago

Are you saying that you can produce 6 seasons of Frasier with the cost of 1 minute of Pixar animation? Sounds doubtful.

Not cost - number of artifacts within a that timeframe over several shots.

Then again, Let's run some numbers to talk about cost.

WALL-E cost $120 million for 98 minutes, Ratatouille cost $150 million for 111 minutes, so you could infer that Pixar animation costs about $1.3 million per minute (roughly) and each production takes around 3-4 years to make.

The Blender "peach" team produced 10 minutes of animation (Big Buck Bunny) in 3 months with 9 people from concept to delivery using all open source software. (There were only 6 people primarily involved in the production of the animation itself, 2 were actively developing Blender as software and 1 did the music)

Big Buck Bunny - http://www.vimeo.com/1084537

Once all the meshes, sets etc are initially created, it all boils down to production of scripts, storyboarding and then animating more content based off artifacts you've already produced.

Remember, I'm talking a sitcom format, that is you artificially limit yourself with numbers of characters and locations (which includes lighting etc) which allows you to spend more time on animation instead of producing more sets/figures.

In fact, once everything is set up, animation is one of the shortest segments of any film animation project (dont believe me? check Dreamworks Animation's general timeline breakdown from their most recent annual report, page 21, link follows)

http://ir.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/export/system/modules/...

So while no, you might not get a full 6 seasons, you could probably do several seasons for the cost of 1 minute of Pixar production.

You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.

Thats exactly what I'm talking about.

The model I've been more or less discussing throughout this thread is for a startup I'll be working on soon, maybe even applying to YC with in the next round of funding.

PG says, make something people want - this year is turning out to be the biggest year on record for Hollywood in terms of ticket sales, people spend more time in front of their TV's now than 5 years ago and now they also spend more time online (and TV/film piracy is on the rise)

Fact is - people want to be entertained...

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