On making a short film...

On the surface, this blog post from Software by Rob on surviving the 'danger points' in running a startup business have absolutely nothing to do with making a personal short film. But if you replace a few key words ("startup" for "film" for example) I think there's a lot of solid advice involved. I say this because from my experience I've found that making a short film is in many respects very much like starting up a new company. Some good excerpts. First, on choosing an idea...

But if you tend to over-think your decisions, then choosing a product idea is going to take months…nay, years. That’s right – odds are high that by the time you figure out what you want to build you could have built and launched multiple products in the same time frame.

I'm definitely guilty of this. The goal is to get something done. I often get bogged down doubting if what I want to do is even worth doing. Classic over-thinking.
And on budgeting your workload...

The first way to combat this [problem] is to have a detailed feature list and an estimate for every task on that list. This list should include marketing tasks and anything else you need to get through your launch date. This list will be large; likely 80-120 lines long. With an estimate for each item you should be looking at 400-600 hourstotal. For everything. If you’re over 600 hours you need to cut something.

Anyhow, check it out. Might be handy.

The Impending Death of Complexity?

Very interesting read from Clay Shirky. He explores how the systemic complexity in how current visual media is made may end up being a huge roadblock that will prevent old-guard media systems from adapting to new formats and audiences. For additional commentary, read the TechDirt summary, too.

The take away for us animators? Our pre-conceived idea about what constitutes "good animation" may need to seriously shift if we want to be nimble enough to find a niche for ourselves in the coming media landscape. As horrible and unfathomable as it sounds, "good" animation production values are not a pre-requisite for successfully finding an audience. Being entertaining and appealing are. All that said, if you can still afford to make "good" animation, then I think you owe it to yourself (and your audience) to try and do so.

UPDATE:  Mark Mayerson just posted some thoughts on the same article. His insightful analysis is always a favorite of mine to read. Check it out, too.

The Economics of Abundance

Watch it a few times if it doesn't make sense at first. It's not an idealistic outlook, merely a realistic one. It's actually pretty optimistic, but realistically so. Which is a good thing because we don't live in a world washed with unicorn tears.

Mayerson on pitching TV shows (via David Levy book review)

Mark Mayerson has walked the road, so I value very much his imput on the folloy of pitching an animated TV show to the animation networks these days. His review of David Levy's book on the topic is a good read- as is David's book. They come at the same topic from two sides. Levy takes a more optimistic view of the process. Mayerson, not so much. I have been involved in the pitch process a time or two and I found it bemusingly messed up. I had good talks with the development execs, and they didn't reject my idea but invited me to press on with the development. I never seriously pursued it because early on I could tell the system was rigged to maximize my pain and minimize my remuneration. No thanks.

This is a perfect example of "stupid"

A bunch of college students has been told they can't gather together as a Disney fan group to watch Disney films- of which (as noted) they are big fans. Why? Because allegedly any showing of a DVD (bought at a store with money that went back to Disney, mind you) to a "large" group of people is copyright infringement. To show to a "large" group of people you need to secure a "display license", which is not what you get when you "buy" a DVD. What number of people in a gathering is the tipping point? 10? 20? 50? If you have 49 it's OK, but that 50th person gets you nasty letters from the legal department of a giant multinational conglomerate receiving tax dollars as subsidies? What if that 50th person sits in the hallway? The sheer stupidity of this is mind boggling. It's intellectually bankrupt and it's business suicide.

This is why the old models of the entertainment business are dying and will die. Like a slow lingering illness that eats away from the inside it may take a while, but it's a done deal. The death rattle can be heard down the hall. The only way to keep the old business model alive in a world where people can get content pretty much for free is to punish your fans. And those fans are your customers. I wonder how many thousands of dollars in Disney merchandise those college kids have bought collectively? How many trips to a Disney theme park have they taken- or planned to take? No, they may not be paying the proper license fee to watch a DVD as a group, but they're Disney fans. Logically who else would gather as a group to watch? So this action by Disney has no intended target other than the very people they should be catering to. Instead they're bullying them. There's no doubt Disney has made tons of cash from these kids over the years. This, my friends, is terrible customer service. As a businessman there's one thing I learned and it's this: the very air of life for your business is your customer service. You can even have an inferior product or product at a lower price point and still thrive if you have amazing customer service. Old media systems must rely on lawsuits, coercion, threats and cease & desist orders in order to survive. Not a one of those methods gives the fan (who in one way or another is a paying customer) the warm fuzzies about your company or its products.

There's an old, old law in the Bible. It's not followed in today's society at all, but there's a principle of fairness behind it. It's the law of gleanings. Basically God said to the people : Don't go back over your fields a second or third time to gather every last bit of grain that you may have missed or dropped. Leave it for the poor, the hungry, the downtrodden. Don't be a greedy jerk and squeeze people for pennies. Be gracious and generous and things will go well for you.

Disney's squeezing people for pennies after they've already milked them for countless hundreds or thousands. My prediction: things will not go well for them.

What is content and what is its value? -- Part 2

First, a big thumbs up thanks to my friend, the brilliant Hamish McKenzie (if you're a Maya animator/rigger and you're not using Hamish's fantastic ZooTools then you are living a life of needless pain and woe) for sending me some links to TechDirt, a blog that covers a lot of things about content, copyright, new age and social media based business models, etc. 

In my last post I noted that I have drawn the conclusion that content (music, photographs, art, film, video, stories, etc.) is of no direct economic value outside of it's physical storage/delivery mechanism or the exclusive group experience of it (concerts, cinema, plays, etc.). This is a conclusion that a brief inspection of history itself seems to support. And as if that weren't enough, now in the digital internet age that limited value has become even less valuable- the point of direct economic worthlessness. The reason is simple- in the digital era there is no scarcity of digital files. The copy of a file does not diminish the existence of the source file. It is, literally, an infinite element. And anything that is (practically) infinite in availability is by nature economically worthless in a direct sense. Fair value for labor and all other "moral" constructs have no bearing. It's not a moral issue, it's a simple gravitational one. Let go of something, it falls. Whether that's right or wrong is irrelevant. Make an infinite supply of something, its value drops to zero. Scarcity is what creates value. Any efforts to impose scarcity on digital content in today's world is a Quixotic quest, doomed to only increase the sales of Maalox to those who tip at these infinite windmills. Kids, the genie's out of the bottle and we cannot put it back in. Reality dictates we learn to function in this new paradigm. (for a much more thorough dissertation on the impact of infinite supply on the economic value of a work of content, read this excellent TechDirt post. Read the linked posts that preceded it as well. For some this will be old hat, but many of us are still arriving at this dinner party.)

Commenter Ian asked a good question on my previous post: Is this depressing or liberating? (and by "this" he means the understanding that digital content is without inherent direct economic value)

The answer, I suppose, lies in how you see the world. I've been in both camps- depressed and liberated. For the last 4+ years I've been fortunate enough to be able to make a living as an independent content creator with my VTS animation tutorial videos. There have been good times, but for the last 2 years or so there's been a steady erosion as unauthorized copies of my videos have become more available on the internet. I won't lie:  unauthorized file sharing has put a sizable dent in my business, forcing me to consider alternative ways to feed la familia. However this is NOT a post whining about how people are stealing from my kids, etc. etc. etc. I knew 4 years ago when I started the VTS that file sharing would ultimately result. It's why I never bothered with copy protection or any of that stuff from the very start. I knew it was a waste of my most precious & limited resource- my time.  While I'd certainly prefer that people pay for the valuable (I think) info on how to be a better animator contained in my VTS videos, I won't waste energy complaining about those who don't. Nor will I waste energy trying to stop them, either. Instead I'd rather focus my energy on adapting and moving forward.

In the spirit of embracing things as they are and not as I wish them to be, I've begun to make some new animation tutorial videos and putting them up on my YouTube channel for free. (some direct links here, here, here and here). A few folks have stumbled across them, but I haven't promoted or mentioned them here on my blog yet. I figured this is a good time to introduce them. I think they offer some good info- and they're free. Share 'em as you see fit. I hope they help folks out. I'm still producing new VTS videos each month for those who want something more (we're currently working on a very complex James Brown inspired dance sequence utilizing video reference). And you can still purchase over four years' worth of back issue VTS videos for even more in depth info on being a better animator. But I'm going to mix in more of these free videos, too. I'll make more as I get the time- but my time is going to become even more scarce in the coming days and weeks.

More on that in a bit.

What is content and what is its value?

Friend and colleague Thom Falter (see his site here) sent me this article lately and I've been mulling it over. It's written by a software developer turned venture capitalist named Paul Graham. It's on the nature of publishing, content and physical delivery media. It's really a great read and his logical assessment of the history of publishing and content strikes a true note to me. A few excerpts...

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

People will pay for information they think they can make money from. That's why they paid for those stock tip newsletters, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. But will people pay for information otherwise? History offers little encouragement.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content.

Those are just a few highlights. Go read the whole post- it's an extremely lucid read. My take away from this is pretty clear- content has little to no inherent monetary value. The monetary value is in any delivery mechanism that allows people to distract themselves in a manner that fits their personal experiential tastes and preferences. What they actually distract themselves with is, as the author puts it, "undifferentiated slurry".

"9" = not a bad little money maker

Shane Acker's "9" had its brief stand as the only animated feature in theaters last week. This week Sony's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs lands at your local cine-plex. "9" opened on an odd day (a Wednesday), but take away the few extra days and it's first weekend did a tidy little $10mil. So the film will probably yield in the $35-40mil range domestically, probably another $30-40 over seas. Add in home video and such and I think the producers have a nice little return on investment brewing. It's not an empire making block buster like Shrek or Ice Age, but it'll be a decent little money maker. Which is not a bad thing. "9" is not your typical animated film. Whether you like the film or not (and it has had some mixed reviews) the fact that it hasn't been an absolute bomb like Delgo or Battle for Terra is a good thing. Like those other films, "9" veers from some pretty well established patterns for success in animated fare. This will hopefully embolden other producers to be willing to green light projects that stretch the boundaries of the animated feature film market. The world will always make room for the big boys' stuff (well, until they don't), but I think as time goes by the broad viability of the feature marketplace will rest more and more with the second and third tier offerings.

Facebook is.... profitable??!

This is actually kinda big news. It's been the very (very) rare online social networking site that has actually made money from it's core business (as opposed to getting bought out by a larger firm). Maybe YouTube won't be far behind? I wouldn't hold my breath- the capital infrastructure costs for serving up all that video is orders of magnitude larger than FB's bandwidth needs. Still, if the independent content creator is to have any shot at making a serious go of it they'll need these online communities to actually make money-- for themselves first, then share the love with the content creators.
Baby steps.

Monetizing online media

There's a good read over on the CinemaTech blog if you're geeky about how the business will remain viable in 20 years. A snippet observation....

Picking up the theme of targeting, Miller suggested that advertisers will pay more for online ads as behavioral targeting increases (targeting ads based on what you do online and interests you express), though he admitted that online ads may never achieve the same prices that network television commands.

Miller touched on the idea that the costs of content creation may need to go down in this new world, if advertisers aren't paying the prices they once did. (That's a point we discuss pretty frequently here at CinemaTech.)

Mind you TV ad revenues have been dropping steadily in recent years. This budget squeeze on content creation has been one of the big driving factors behind the rise of the reality show. They're cheap to make. Aside from privacy concerns, the notion that even targeted ad revenues online won't fetch the same bid that TV spots go for should be troubling for mid-sized (or smaller) content creators. TV animation has seen production budgets for 22 minute shows drop to less than half what they were 10 years ago. If the online world won't even pay that much for ad space, then the reality is that as a whole (with some notable giant exceptions) this industry is going to have to learn how to make stuff for a lot less money than they currently spend. I'll let the intellectually intrepid among you deduce what that means for the hoi polloi in the trenches/cubicles.