New Free Web Tutorial: Breakdowns Can Be Such a Drag

Hey Kids,

I have released a new web tutorial relating to the troubling topic of how to build in proper overlap and drag in your animation. Here’s some excerpts:

A number of years ago I wrote my Pose to Pose- Organized Keyframe tutorial. In it I advocate a method of acheiving overlap and drag on objects that- at the time- I thought yielded decent results in a quick and easy fashion. In the ensuing years I have come to change my opinion about the merits of such a workflow. In this follow up article I hope to point out the problems with my earlier ideas and propose a better solution to the challenge of creating great overlapping action and drag in your animation. So think of this as a self repudiation of my earlier ideas. As I grow as an animator I feel it’s my responsibility to correct my own mistakes. So follow along as I trash my own theories!…

… One last caveat. This way of working does require a little something extra. Namely, it requires that we actually know what we’re doing. I can already hear the cries of lament: “Hey, no fair! You suck, Lango!” Yes, sad as it may be, we have to grow up and learn how to animate if we want to work this way. But that’s a good thing. I mean, think about it. This is the only way you could do this for over 80 years. The only way. Generations of animators have come before us. They learned this. They eventually learned to animate. Let’s not be content to be merely talented discoverers of happy accidents, but really, truly know how to animate.

Anyhow check it out. Hopefully you find it helpful and you learn some old school ninja tricks that make your animation better. You VTS19 viewers can rest happy knowing that this is the new free web tutorial that i mentioned in this month’s video. Huzzah!

VTS19 coming later today…

I still have 18 hours before the day officially ends here. I’m not late until then. ;o)

Update: Well, my part was done on time. But Brasil Telecom is doing their best to keep this from you with their rather spotty connection status. But we shall not be deterred! ‘Ere before dawn’s pure light lands softly upon the land we shall gain victory! (even if we don’t gain any sleep.)

Principles for Lipsync Animation: Ahora en Español!

Thanks are in order for Victor Escardo and his efforts to bring my article on lipsync animation into Spanish. Check it out. In his email to me Victor states….

The spanish language is the second language most speak in the world, but is not in the Internet. And this is because Spanish speakers are in the third world (Specially central and South America). Now is the second language in USA. So I hope with this and other future translation of your materials we are helping to end the digital gap to spanish speaking people.

Right on, brother! So better lipsync power to the spanish speaking people. :)

Viral marketing study

This 28 page study of the effectiveness of online recommendation based viral marketing strategies is a pretty dry and technical read. Yet it is illuminating in a sort of hypnotic fashion. Here are what I found to be the highlights of the study’s findings…

1. Viral marketing via the internet recommendation system is not as effective as originally imagined.
2. Smaller, tighter niche groups are better fits for viral marketing than broad general market consumer groups.
3. Received recommendations have a personal saturation point after which the probability of success declines. (too many rec’s result in a resistance behavior)
4. The vast majority of recommendation networks are extremely shallow (those who bought on a rec rarely ever then reccommended the item to another third party).
5. The more two people exchanged recommendations, the less effective those recommendations were at initiating a buying action. (this breaks several conventional wisdom models. oops.)
6. If you had an anime DVD that caught on in the recommendation game you pretty much printed money.
Here is the final sentence of the study authors…

Finally, we presented a model which shows that smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive to viral marketing. So despite the relative ineffectiveness of the viral marketing program in general, we found a number of new insights which we hope will have general applicability to marketing strategies and to future models of viral information spread.

What does this mean to the ever hopeful independent animator? I have my opinions, but I figure why not open it up for discussion in the comments? So, fire away!

Animation Arcs Tutorial now in Korean

A big thanks to Korean choi Kyu-bo for taking the time to translate my Arcs D’ Triumph tutorial about animating good arcs. You can find his fine translation here. So all you kids on the peninsula go check it out. You know, if we’re not careful soon we’ll have the whole library in korean.

Korea, hmm? Do you think I have what it takes to be the Korean David Hasselhoff? The world wants to know.

On a somewhat related note: I do have another free animation tutorial almost ready for the site. It’s been a while since I’ve made a freebie, so I figured I was due. I hope to have it ready by the end of next week. Who says I don’t love you?

Because toucans ROCK!

My new favorite bird, the toco toucan. Give way, over-hyped penguins. You have met your match!

There is a park/zoo about a quarter of a mile from my house here. They have cool animals and stuff. Kinda like most zoos, I suppose. But the thing about this zoo is that even though they have these animals here, they didn’t have to go very far to get them. They’re all local animals, which at first thought would be kinda dull. A local animal zoo for someplace like Cleveland, Ohio would have rabbits, squirrels, pheasants, hawks, white tail deer, racoons, opossums and such. OK, but not much to write home about. But a local animal zoo here in the Pantanal? Jaguars, oncelots, anacondas, capybaras, alligators, giant anteaters, iguanas, emu’s, tuiuiu’s, giant river otters, tapirs, monkeys, macaws and of course- toucans! These things are like living cartoons. They’re even proportioned like a cartoon. And they look absolutely hysterical when they fly with those huge beaks. You half expect them to fall out of the sky when you watch them. Their preferred way to get about is to hop and I can see why. Their beaks are so big they have to constantly tip their head to look at anything. They’re chatty and very sociable birds, too. What’s not to like? I’ve seen a bunch of these flopping about in the wild already and I couldn’t help but smile each time. They’re like God’s little jesters.

Little tweaks…

I’ve decided to license my stuff on this site under the Creative Commons license. Non-commercial, non-editable category, thank-you. It’s just formalizing the way things have been for years anyway.

I’ve also decided to make getting my RSS feed a little simpler by getting a FeedBurner SmartFeed. If you don’t know what a feed reader is just click on my little RSS Subscribe linky-doo over on the right and see more info. The rest of you kids who know what’s going on can carry on. Oh, and I also added a nifty little plug in that does groovy things with the images that I upload here. Click on this one and check it out….

Kinda cool, huh? Yeah, I thought so, too. But one little thing eludes me. This theme isn’t Wordpress Widget friendly and so I can’t find a way to do short asides posts in my sidebar that works. I’ve tried a few different plug-ins for WP but none of them do the trick (or even function for that matter). So the search continues for this one final piece of my website puzzle.

Aw, who am I kidding? You know I’ll keep tinkering with this thing.

Rain

Rainy season seems to have arrived a little bit early here in Cuiaba’. Oh, and the roof leaks. A lot. Looks like I’ll have to move the computers to higher ground.

Online It’s a Short, Short World

Check out this Reuters article…
Poll:Online Viewers Shun Lenghty Videos

An excerpt:

The new survey found that relatively few — 7 percent of video users — have paid to watch any video online. Nearly three-quarters of online video users prefer free videos with ads.

You won’t find Vanita Butler sitting in front of her computer watching a full-length movie or television show, even though she’s an avid viewer of video on the Internet.

The 43-year-old saleswoman from Newark, Ohio, said she sees the Internet as more of a tool — for catching a news story or highlights from a

NASCAR race. When she has time for entertainment, she and her husband prefer the television set.

“It’s a little bit more of an intimate environment,” Butler said of watching television. “We can sit and do it together.”

Cheryl Landers, 50, a retail manager in Dedham, Mass., said she finds amateur clips funny and entertaining, but with two foster kids, she can never spare more than five minutes at a time, let alone a whole hour to watch an entire television episode. She said she usually has the TV on as background noise.

“I’m pretty much against paying for stuff on the Internet,” said P.J. Park, 25, of Mount Rainier, Md.

The gist is simple: online viewers of video content don’t like to watch long form media there (movies or full length TV shows). Oh, and they don’t like to pay for it either. (7% paid, while 75% think it should be free). Shorts, news clips, YouTube diet coke stunts, music videos, short funny clips from longer media they already know- yes. All these and more are the stock and trade of the online video media soup. Watching a 100 minute feature film… not so much. It would appear that when it comes to our big movie experience we prefer big movie platforms. But this only verifies the notion that the online world is the place to put out your short films and build some manner of a following. But that following, unless it is in the order of millions & millions of people, will not put butter on your bread. Not with such a large proportion of online users thinking this stuff ought to be free.

Pose to Pose Tutorial: Now in Italian!

Special thanks to Gianmichele Mariani for taking the time to translate my original animation workflow tutorial about working pose to pose with organized keyframes. Now you can read about how to use the dope sheet in that classy, groovy continental flow that all the ladies love- Italian! So go check it out.

Interesting times for indys, indeed…

This might be interesting if it works. I just read that MySpace is setting up a system where their users can directly sell original music to their fans right on their MySpace pages- without any gatekeepers. Distributor free distribution? As with all things like this the dreck will pile high, but there will be success stories to come from this. I don’t think it will displace the current big media comglomerate driven market system, but it’s a window for a different way to function. And alternatives are good to have, even if small and limited compared to the larger systems in place. I still think the need for indy’s is to give away their content in some form to generate a demand for a personalized copy in a higher quality format. But it’s good to know that should the demand be sufficiently created for purchasable copies that demand can be met outside of the current gatekeeper system. This isn’t too far from the current independent path of setting up your own site and driving traffic to it to create a following. A daunting task indeed- one that takes years. But the thing that makes the MySpace idea intriguing is that the whole MySpace system has an inherent referencing and recommendation infrastructure built right into the portal. So instead of using Google to find your music, now you see what your “friends” have linked in their profiles. It’s a much more powerful referencing system for finding independent content because it has the inferred approval and value assignment of a human being with whom you ostensibly share common interests. This is always going to end up being more effective than asking the Google Robot what it thinks you will like.
Read this Reuters article and think for yourselves what this might mean if the format were expanded to include selling of other downloadable content. Say, oh, I dunno. Animated films? Hmmm.

And while we’re talking about gatekeepers and animation, this little news item came and went without much discussion by the animation crowd. It appears that Apple’s iTunes is partnering with distributor Shorts International to expand its animated short film offerings to include more thann just the Pixar & Disney vaults and TV shows. Now award winning independent short animated films will find some distribution on iTunes Store. It will be interesting to see which of these two distribution paradigms ends up being more useful to the independent content creator- the MySpace solution or the iTunes solution? Perhaps neither? Perhaps both? Like all things for the independent I believe that the mosaic approach is going to be the winner, not the “all your eggs in one basket” approach.

Update: after just a little bit of clicking around I see that Shorts International is promoting their iTunes hosted animated film offerings on… yup, you guessed it- MySpace.

This stuff never gets old for me….

Thanks to Brecht Debaene for reminding me of this today. I swear I could watch pencil roughs all day. Seriously. This is pure magic. It’ll be nice when the day arrives when people are doing stuff like this again….

Don Hahn narrates the wonder of hand-drawn animation in The Beauty & the Beast.

Free Character Rigs

I am getting a alot of emails these days about where to find good, free character animation rigs for folks to mess around with. Well, I finally took some time to look for some. And I found a lot - all in one place.

Here!

There are rigs for Maya, Max, Lightwave, Xsi, Houdini, Motion Builder, etc. So go get your free rigs for the program of your choosing and enjoy a life of happy animating on the computer.

PS: Thanks goes out to the StrutYourReel forum for having this and making my life easier.

Clean up time!

OK, anybody who dropped in during the weekend probably got an eyefull as thy watched me restructure this site from the ground up. Heh. As you may (or may not) have noticed I updated my page a little. The site just got massively UGLY recently. Like awkward adolescence the site was gangling between two phases of life. It was a noodle soup of mixing color schemes, half HTML, half CSS/XML, frames that RSS inspired visitors couldn’t see, etc. Plus those big honking store banners annoyed me- and I made them! This is a little better. When I switched to Wordpress earlier this year this is more the kind of site I had in mind. Lots of cool things you can do with WP. So what’s new?

• Random page headers. Now everytime you come back you have the chance of seeing a new header. I have just 4 now and two of them aren’t going to last very long, but more will be coming. I plan on mixing in some stills of environments from my short film as well as some Myopia vistas. What can I say? I like stuff to look nice.
• I got rid of the frames around the blog. My stats were telling me that more and more people were coming to this site through feedreaders and RSS links. Which is cool, but when you click on a post in a feeder you don’t see all those other HTML frames around the blog page. So now everything is in the blog/site itself. No lost and wandering images or words. They’re all safe and warm here.
• Got me a nice fading slideshow of various images of characters and stuff I’ve made over the years. I’ll be adding to that show as time goes by with sketches, maybe some stills from my past work projects and other fun stuff.
• The links to my tutorials, animation clips, short films & contact were all out in frames before. I thought I should bring them in out of the rain. The launch pages are all handy Wordpress pages now.
• Of course a (more tasteful) link to the kLango Online Store for those who want to get their VTS groove on. The FAQ buttons for the VTS as well as the Animation: Personal Trainer program are now in WP world.
• A countdown meter so folks will know when the next VTS is due. I get about 25-30 emails a month from subscribers wondering when the VTS is coming out. Heh. Of course I tell everybody in an email the first week of the month, but email is sooooo 1996 and nobody really reads it anymore. So if you wanna know when to expect the next VTS, just come here and have a look.
• I figured since I have so many different translations of my tutorials, why not make it so you can translate any blog page on my site? But if you speak some obscure language like Welsh or Tibetan chant, well, first- you’re really cool and I wish I could take you to parties. And second, you’re on your own when it comes to figuring this thing out.
• The archives are now all searchable and the post categories are in a drop down list. This is mainly a screen real estate solution.
• Ditto for the links. My blog roll and link list was HUGE! I am blessed to know so many cool folks, that’s all. Anyhow, those links are all still there. Just click to expand the list you’re interested in.
• Of course a unified color and design theme that doesn’t immediately induce convulsions when looked at.

I still have stuff I want/need to do. I need to make each of the movie files pop up in a sized window with a player. I have a Wordpress plug in to do this, but it’s just going to take some time to get it working and I’m out of time for this round of improvements. Doing the same with the tutorials should be pretty easy as well. Then I want to get something set up for an asides (side bar mini-blog) where I can toss up some of my little stories about living here in Brazil without cluttering up the space for the animation stuff. Anyhow, I hope you kids like the new digs. The site was a mess and it was bugging me for months. I’m finally able to sleep a little better now that it’s been cleaned up some.

Bio-Sand Water Filters

I was down near the city of Corumba’ Brazil the last couple of weeks. This is the base of our work with the extremely poor folks who live along the Paraguay River basin and Pantanal wetlands. As I noted in other posts my wife and I are involved in a medical boat work there that brings healthcare services to these remote and forgotten folks. One of the primary causes for their many health issues is that they have no access to clean drinking water at all. So all manner of preventable diseases cause no end of suffering for these unfortunate folks. A primary cause of childhood death is simple diarrhea. One of the first goals we had in coming down here to live and work in Brazil was to find a way to solve this problem. Amazingly, we found an answer to our prayers by being introduced to the great folks at Living Water International, based in Houston TX. So last week we took the time to learn from two of their experts on how to make simple water filters for these folks. You can click the video clip above to see how it turned out. If you want to know more, follow me after the jump. I have some more pictures, too.

It’s all very simple and amazingly inexpensive- around $40-50 per filter and a single filter can serve an entire family. First you make a concrete box with a PVC pipe that runs back up the side of it. You fill this box with clean gravel, clean medium sized pebbles and clean fractured sand. Then you pour water in. That’s it. The sand/pebble/gravel mix percolates out the solid contaminants like metals, suspended solids, etc. Because the sand in the box stays submerged (this is due to the PVC pipe running back up above the interior sand level and the water in the box stays at that level) a layer of bio-mass grows out of the ambient bacteria. This bio layer survives by eating the bacteria, viri, amoebas and parasites that exist in the dirty water. So in goes yucky water, good bio stuff in the sand eats the unwanted bio stuff in the water, the sand and gravel filter out the rest and -ding!- clean water. 99.9% clean as confirmed by tests. It’s an amazingly simple, easy, low maintenance, very low cost clean water solution. It can filter about 1 litre of water every 1-2 minutes. Our goal is to get one of these in every home along the 200 mile stretch of river we serve. And, Lord willing, we’d like to see the program expand to meet the need in other areas in Brazil. Often there’s plenty of water, but it’s not fit to drink without treatment.
Anyhow, we’re excited to see this implemented here. We’re starting by installing around 10 of these in homes pn he river in mid September. After we see how that goes and make any adjustments we’re off to try and get more done. Here’s some pix, just for fun!

We made a steel mold for making the concrete filters. The fellow in the hat is Pr. Carlos. He’s in charge of running the Pantavida medical boat work. The fellow next to him is the boat captain Giovino. He was born along the river and has a huge heart to help his people. The fellow standing is Rene from Living Water of El Salvador. He oversees their bio-sand filter program, which installed over 1000 of these things in rural El Salvador last year. His boss, Paul (another Yank like us) came along to help us with the larger stategic planning initiatives for our program. We also had a pastor from our local church with us - a fun guy named Belmiro. He’s studying water treatment and has ideas for doing this in our part of Brazil here. And none of this would have been understandable without our great interpreter, Marcy. She made the whole Portugues-English-Spanish thing work so we knew what was going on!

Anyhow, after the mold is assembled, then you mix up some concrete the old fashioned way.

Pour it in and let it set overnight.

The next day the filter is ready to be extracted from the mold.

Belmiro washing sand for the filter. His favorite job.

After the concrete cures for another day or so you fill it with the clean sand & gravel in layers. It’s now ready to start putting water in.

Here is a before and after. The dirty water on the left is right out of the Paraguay River. People just walk up to the river with a cup, scoop that brown stuff up and drink it. Nasty! But it’s the only thing that have. Until now.

The water that comes out is clean enough for me to let my little boy play with it. He came along to keep us all entertained.

Principles for Lipsync: Now in Korean!

Oh yeah, the K-kids are representin’ HUGE today! Not to be outdone by the fine work of our french friends, (which would be different than the fine taste of french fries, but I digress)- Lee Jong Pil has taken the time to translate the Principles for Lipync Animation article into Korean. That’s right. When it comes to translating animation tutorials those Koreans are hard core. Heh.

Anyhow, read, enjoy and sync well!

Principles for LipSync Animation- Now In French!

I’m back after a week down on the Paraguay River. I’m terribly behind on all my work, but it was a great trip. I’ll post more on it in a little bit.

But first, I need to say a big Thank You to VTS Subscriber and nice fellow Guy Wallart for taking the time to translate my Principles for Lipsync Animation article into the lovely sounding language of French! So all you suave’ sounding Parisians can now read all about animating lips in your mother tongue. So check it out! Principes de la synchronisation labiale
All that talk of tongues and lips, I think I’ll leave the french kissing jokes to the kids in the back seat. Heh.

Exploring Power Centers for Personality: Now in Korean!

Big Thanks goes out to Hong Joong Kim for yet another translation! He previously translated Life After Poses to Pose in Korean, and now he’s back with another fine translation. This time he’s taken the Power Centers study and made a very nice Korean version. So all you cool Korean cats can check it out and enjoy!

Animation: Personal Trainer Program

UPDATE**: There’s just one spot left open for this session. Just in case you were on the fence or anything.

UPDATE #2** Uhm.. never mind. that lasted all of 15 minutes. Heh. All the spots for this session are taken! If you were interested keep an eye out for the next session which will be taking enrollment in January.

I’m happy to announce a new training program for animators, the Animation: Personal Trainer program. Ever since successfully launching the Video Tutorial Service I have been thinking of ways to provide even better animation teaching and training. The best way by far is personal, hands on, in-the-same-room working on real production scenes kind of training. This was the usual way you learned to be an animator for over 70 years. Sadly this doesn’t much exist in the animation business of the 21st century. So I decided to do the next best thing: offer a program where I can take my years of experience training and teaching animators as an animation supervisor and apply that experience to be your personal trainer for animation. The idea was simple: provide a completely customized, personalized, unique animation curriculum for each student based on their current skills to address their areas of greatest weakness. What if I could be like an exercise personal trainer where I can help you target specific goals for improvement? Thus the idea for the Animation: Personal Trainer program was born.

Using proven methods for online training in animation I want to provide folks the opportunity to have completely customized training for their goals and needs. Rather than a one size fits all approach, the Animation: Personal Trainer seeks to create specific assignments, milestones, teaching moments and feedback sessions for every student. Are you already a professional animator and you just want to improve your lipsync animation in an effort to break into film? Or what if you really want to master walk & run cycles for games? What if you just want to take your acting to a higher level? What if you struggle with process? What if you want to better understand how to polish your animation? What if you don’t have the time to be involved with an animation training program for a long time? Or what if you’ve completed other schooling in animation but you still feel you have areas of weakness that need some personalized training to improve upon? Basically, sometimes we just need to work out those problem areas that give us trouble, or we want to focus and improve in specific ways to get over the hump in our work. Often nothing short of a highly personalized approach can help us do that. That’s what the APT was designed to do.
The APT program is an 8 week online course. Students meet with their trainer (me- there are no other trainers) at least once a week via webcam, are given uniquely designed assignments to help their area of focus, are given video and face to face feedback, enjoy personalized video lectures and email support. And it’s all designed around each student. By necessity this means that classes will be VERY small. In order to provide the best training for each student enrollment will be capped for every session. The first APT session will begin the first first week of September and run through the end of October and I’m taking enrollment now.

Want to know more about the APT? Want to sign up? There’s no reel review or admissions screening- I believe that anyone can benefit from personal attention and help. Anyhow, if you’re interested then follow the store link or the promo banner link on the left side of this page for more info on how to order. There’s also a handy dandy FAQ ready for you to check out. And as always, VTS subscribers will get a tasty 10% discount when they enroll.

I’ve been cooking this idea up for a good long while and I’m really excited to be able to offer this to folks. I hope that it meets a need in the animation training universe. I desire to fill in the gaps where folks often get lost. I hope that for some the APT is exactly what they have been waiting for and I hope that their wait will be rewarded with a rich and fantastic exprience. I’m pretty jazzed about this, so let’s get learning!

Life After Pose-to-Pose: Now in Korean!

A special thanks to Hong Joong Kim for taking the time to translate my article about polishing out your animation from it’s old stuffy English into new, flashy and uber hip Korean. So you folks of Korean persuasion- or those who want to show off at cocktail parties by reading animation articles in a foreign tongue (it’s all the rage at chic nightclubs in SoHo), head on over for a peek!

The Ant Bully: My Take (part 2)

cont'd from part 1...

And it seems that Warner Brothers’ marketing wasn’t at it’s usual incompetent worst. They weren’t great, but there were a lot of ads and promotions. It wasn’t an all out media blitz, but it wasn’t a repeat of The Iron Giant fiasco, either. Yes they still failed the single most important task in film marketing: delineating a clear and concise message about the opening date. Good grief, if some clod with a blog (ie: “me”) knows that you can project a film’s financial success or failure based off of a single weekend’s numbers, then what in the world are all those MBA’s in Sherman Oaks doing? But you can’t pin the whole thing on WB’s marketing or a crowded market. These weren’t optimal conditions for success, but I’m not sure they are absolute arbiters of failure, either. In other words, given these two things remaining the same I think you can still have a successful launch to an animated film. So why did TAB not succeed?

There are two kinds of animated movies. Both can end up like a pile of poo, but in my opinion only one can end up being something audiences get excited about. The first is the director driven story. A person (or two, no more) has a burning story idea in his mind and heart. He has the passion to bring it to life. Often these poor sods are chewed up by the Hollywood system and their movies are turned into derivative piles of crap, but somewhere way, way back in the beginning there was something fun going on. If they’re lucky some remainder of this sense of fun and passion ends up on screen. Great examples of this kind of movie that survived the creation process fairly well intact would be The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Toy Story. And as much as some people might be offended at this, I get the sense that Hoodwinked was this kind of a film. You got the sense that audiences enjoyed the thing, and from reading about it I got the idea that it was a few guys who wanted to make a film and made it for what money they could. You can’t fault them for agreeing to let Weinstein distribute it in all of it’s low production glory. You’d have done the same exact thing. By contrast an example of one of these kinds of director driven movies that got ridden roughshod by execs would be Chicken Little. Yet even through all of Mikey Eisner’s meddling I still felt some of the original fun of that story on screen.

The second kind of family feature films are the cynical corporate creations. They’re merely products and they are assembled at the behest of a variety of business minds. The core driving principle is their market value and potential profit returns. There is no one person who has the passion or personal investment to fight back against the snarky efforts of those who would rather productize the film because no one person thought this thing up in the first place. And I believe that no matter how slick or well done that lack of a soul shows up on screen. The director is a hired gun, the story is usually borrowed from some book or other successful property. Examples of these kinds of films would be Garfield, Scooby Doo, Quest for Camelot, The Cat in the Hat and… The Ant Bully.

I think John Davis and the DNA team did a very fine job with the film. However in the end it was a fine job of dressing up the bride of Frankenstein. The original screenplay for TAB had some heart, but the rewrites traded heart for slap-dash fart jokes. Crude humor is always the ready friend of execs looking to ‘punch up’ a film for test viewing scores, and the rewrites for TAB were pretty heavy toward the end of production. In its primary form it wasn’t the funniest movie and the market demands that animated films be funny. So out goes the character motivations and some more serious ideas, in come the cynical sarcastic asides. And since everybody in charge was a hired hand nobody had a really strong personal investment to fight that. This all started because Tom Hanks noticed this little kid’s book and thought it would make a good movie. But Tom Hanks didn’t write the story, he didn’t direct it, he didn’t voice it. In short, it would appear that he had no real passion for it. He just thought it would do well as a movie in the market. A product made by hired help. And hired help - even the best and most competent of hired help (and by all rights they hired some of the most competent and qualified help)- isn’t the same as somebody who gave birth to the story. Somehow this too ends up coming through on screen. I don’t know how, but I think it’s true.

My friends who worked with me on The Ant Bully probably aren’t gonna like what I have to say here- but I’ve always felt that we were making a big stinking pile of average corporate mush. Honest. We did. We worked hard, we did our best to bring passion and life to it, we put a lot into it, there’s a TON of talent on screen and folks have a right to be proud of their work- but in the end, in the cruel indifferent world of the marketplace it’s just kinda bleh.

It had all the ingredients. By the spreadsheet and by the focus group feedback scores in test screenings The Ant Bully should have been a success. It should have been the perfect product. Yet in the end this is the ultimate corporate movie. It’s a product devised according to formulas and ingredients, preened and pruned from the very beginning to be a pop-culture product in the mass market to force feed the kiddo’s another round of pixels in exchange for their parent’s disposable income. And despite the valiant efforts of the artists and technicians hired to make this thing look good people aren’t usually going to get excited about such things. We can’t forget that this is still entertainment. Within the audience there’s still some shred of a desire remaining for something to come from someone’s heart, not a spreadsheet. For some reason I think audiences can sniff out a film that’s just too corporate. I don’t have much of an empirical reason to believe this, but anecdotally I think it holds water. The declining interest in sequels and derivative films has been a steady parade downward. I am convinced that other similarly corporate concoctions, regardless of the level of excellence in their execution- are doomed to the same fate of audience apathy. If there’s no initial soul behind the idea then you can forget about it. Sure executives can screw up a good movie idea from a director- Disney did it for years! But if all you start with is a pile of successful ingredients stitched together then I think you’re going to be in trouble more often than not regardless of how good it looks or how well it scores on rottentomatoes.com.
But if you do go see The Ant Bully in a theater, see it in Imax3d. It really is amazingly freakin’ cool there.

I’ve spoken my bit. If you disagree then by all means, fire away!

The Ant Bully: My Take

Wheew! It’s been an absolutely insane week here. I have so much stuff going on and I’ve been busier than a one legged man in a butt kicking contest. However I did want to take a moment to get in some trouble and express an honest opinion. So I’m here to spill my guts on The Ant Bully film, which came out in the U.S. last weekend to rather tepid results (a mere $8.4mil opening weekend, failing to unseat a wavering Monster House even in its second weekend). When it’s all said and done if TAB follows formula it will end up pulling a rather anemic $25-29mil in US box office. Not exactly a real winner there. Maybe it will grow some legs, but I’m too pragmatic to think that’s very likely.

Most folks know that I worked on this film, but unlike many others I don’t tie my own personal success to that of the projects I work on. I guess that makes me a rotten artist or something, but I just don’t. I had a great time working on the film, made some good friends and I had a chance to do some really nice work, and to me that’s where the success is. I measure my success by the experience, not the box office. That’s for other people to take credit (or in this case blame) for. The film can flop for all I care, it doesn’t affect me much at all. Yet I do allow that for other artists who worked on it it’s very important for TAB to do well. That’s cool and I hope my friends don’t hate me for anything I say here. But TAB does present us with a bit of a curious case. It had so many earmarks of what should have made it a successful film. It had all the right ingedients. And in the end, that’s why I think it is a failure. It’s just a wee bit too calculated to succeed.

In animation circles lots of folks have been panning the film. Many in the biz have been describing it as a kinda of Pixarn’t effort. I guess you could say it’s the Anastasia of 2006. For some reason folks just knew this one wasn’t ’special’. We don’t know how, we don’t know exactly why- but the feeling out there was a collective yawn. Why? Well, let’s take a closer look at all the reasons why The Ant Bully (at least in the minds of its masters) should have been a success.
First, TAB was not a “cheap” movie by any stretch. The end budget was well north of $60mil, probably closer to $70mil if you add in the Imax conversion. That’s more than Ice Age cost to make. It’s not far from Shrek 2’s numbers. It’s also not far from Pixar’s lower numbers. So the problem wasn’t somebody’s tight wallet in production. And it didn’t wallow much in development churning through tens of millions of dollars with no footage to show for it. It’s not a repeat of the Kingdom of the Sun/Emperor’s New Groove scenario. Most of that money ended up on screen.

You also really can’t point too much at the actual execution of the thing for its failure. There was no shortage of experience and talent working on the project. There are some scenes that are just gobstoppingly fabulous to look at- some real fantastic demo reel pieces in there. And all the top studios agreed. When DNA had other studios in for recruiting (since DNA had to let everybody go after TAB production) there was a noticeable scooping up of talent. Pixar, Sony, ILM, Dreamworks, PDI, Blue Sky, Digital Domain, Laika- they all nabbed people as fast as they could.

Additionally we’re not dealing with an inexperienced director, either. John Davis had great success with Jimmy Neutron. He knows animation, he’s not an outsider to animation. So it’s difficult to dismiss TAB on the grounds of inexperienced hubris. Plus with Tom Hanks behind it you’d think he knew a thing or two about what works in Hollywood and what doesn’t.

Another plus- outside of animation circles TAB is not viewed universally as a stinker of a film. Aside from the reviews that dismiss it as a sort of Marxist manifesto for kiddies, most of the reviews for it on Rotten Tomatoes are positive. In fact it’s got a rather healthy “Fresh” rating of 65% from critics and 83% from users. That’s a better rating than other more successful Cg animated films like Robots, Sharktale, Madagascar, Ice Age 2. This is not “The Wild” (19% rotten) or “Doogal” (5% rotten) or “Valiant” (28% rotten). All of whom tanked rather badly and all of whom had convincingly poor “Rotten” score on the tomato site. So it didn’t flop because the critics overwhelmingly panned the film because, in general, they didn’t.

There was no shortage of wattage in the star power of the voice cast, either. Nick Cage, Julia Roberts, Paul Giamotti, Bruce Campbell, Glenne Close- those are some good names to ride behind for public awareness.

Yes, it’s crowded out there. It’s been a busy year for animated films. The busiest ever. And we’re in a 3 week stretch where 3 of them open back-to-back-to-back. That’s historic, it’s never happened before (and I wager will never happen again). So there’s a diffusion of family film dollars. To a large extent that is a zero sum game. Still, give people a reason to go to the movies and they will. Pirates of the Carribean 2 is proving that.

cont'd in part 2...

kLango Store is now Live!

OK, finally! After months of trying I’ve finally got an online store that works! Those of you on a feedreader can’t see the new snazzy sidebar graphic, but you’ll like it when you see it. So now you fine folks who have wanted to subscribe to the VTS but couldn’t because of PayPal problems or what-not can now do so using a major credit card. I’ve also added a nice handy FAQ about the VTS. So if you’ve had a nagging question about the VTS, check out the FAQ. You’ll probably find your answer there.

Another new thing is that select back issue videos are now available to the non-subscribing general public. So if you’ve wondered if the VTS would be something you could use but you didn’t want to subscribe to find out, well now you can get some videos to take a look and you don’t have to be a subscriber to get them.

A big “Thanks!” to the willing beta testers for helping me get the big kinks worked out of this thing. If any of you use the store and find something kinda wonky just send me an email and we’ll see what we can do to shore things up. And thanks for your patience while I worked on getting this store up and running. I’m hoping more people can get to have the VTS as a result of this now.

48 hr Beta Testing My Online Store

** Update: We have our 5 guinea pigs! Thanks for playing along. The rest of us will need to wait a couple of days for the official public launch of the online store.

Groovy! I’m 95% finished in implementing my online store/shopping cart system. It’s got a few minor cosmetic things to get wrapped up, but I’m really liking how it works so far. I’ve tested it and it’s processing credit card orders just dandy. However before I go wide with a public release I’d like to have a few folks (like 5 people for now) try it out first. So if you’ve ever wanted to get my VTS videos a la carte or wanted to subscribe but couldn’t do it before because of PayPal problems or whatever, send me an email. The first 5 people who email me will get access to the in-progress store and will get to buy stuff. Plus I’ll give the beta testers a nice discount for helping me out. This way we can run the store through it’s paces before it goes fully public in the next day or so. So email me if you have money burning a hole in your pocket and the only cure is the heretofore ever so elusive VTS.

I’ll update this post when the beta testing roster is full. Thanks!

The Slow Road to Success

I have recently had a nice email exhange with a student who’s facing graduation from an animation/art school. Naturally the young fellow is looking out at the world and wondering where he fits in relative to his dreams and his current abilities. So he asked me

How long did it take you to land into the feature film business after schooling and where did you find yourself directly after college?

After I replied to him it struck me that his question is not unique. I’ve answered it many times in different ways. So it must be something on the minds of many students about to embark upon the big wide world of reality. So I figured I’d take my reply and turn it into a post here. Here’s my response…

Well, I never had any schooling in animation. No official schooling anyhow. Just learned it the hard way. I only have 1 semester of college to my name and that was 18 years ago. Heh. It’s not like I was some talented golden child my first day in animating. My early stuff sucked so bad you could actually feel the pull from the monitor like a giant vaccuum. From the time I decided that character animation would be my thing until my first feature film job offer was about 4 or 5 years (I say ‘offer’ because I turned it down for another opportunity that was not in feature film, but just as much fun). And those were 4 or 5 years of hammering hard on getting better- I was very focused. I didn’t do a lot of tinkering around. Any spare moment I had was spent animating something. The standards back then weren’t as high as they are now, either. My reel that got me my first film offer back then most likely wouldn’t get me much of an offer today. At least I don’t think it would. I haven’t seen it in a while. Heh. In the meantime I worked many different jobs in the CG field, mainly as a generalist for many years. It’s not a bad thing. Paid the bills, helped me grow as an animator, gave me motivation to keep pushing through, broadened my understanding of the entire pipeline, etc. There’s no crime in the slower road to success. Not many of us can be Cameron Miyasaki and land the Pixar gig right out of school. (and his road wasn’t as easy as some would think). The rest of us mere mortals need to work out way up through the minor leagues first. And there are far worse ways to make a living. So don’t lose heart. Just keep working, keep learning, keep growing, keep pushing to be better and know more. Natural, latent talent is an overrated myth. The consistent effort of hard work yields results. I’m living proof of that if anybody is.

Bryan Ballinger Rocks My World!

I present to you Breadwig: The Blog!

One of my most favoritest human beings on the planet and one of my best friends to boot, Bryan Ballinger is just awesome! We first met when working together at Big Idea. Bryan is the fella that I teamed up with to write our children’s book, The Great Cheese Squeeze.

Buy it. We won’t get anything from it anymore I’m sure, but you’ll dig it. We’d just be happy to know that you to read it out loud to your kids, dog, cat, goldfish, old neighbor, mechanic, parole officer- Whoever. We’re easy like that. Anyhow, in meetings we’d fill pad after pad of Post-It-Notes with insane drawings of highly questionable quality and repute (the original Pictures for Patrick). And we’d have a blast doing it. Long before the whole Diet Coke/Mentos craze we managed to create a food bomb out of a half consumed bottle of Yoo-hoo chocolate drink, half a cream filled donut, 3 twizzlers and an old piece of candy apple bubblegum. Let it cook for 7 days behind a hot monitor and watch it blow. The sound was so loud that people from all over the studio thought something bad had happened and came for a look. Little did they expect to see fermented brown foam dripping from the ceiling tiles 14 feet overhead. That’s how far up the Yoo-hoo geyser went. It was AWESOME!!!! The smell, ehh… not so much. When we moved our desks some 6 months later we found half a twizzler fragment all dried like jerky behind a bookshelf. How can that NOT be the coolest thing? Heh. Even lo these many years after we were both gone from Big Idea it’s manifestly evident that Bryan’s fascination with odd food, his eclectic taste in music, his ever present fanny pack and his taste for plaid flannel shorts all combine to kick a serious groove in the artistic world. Don’t believe me? Check out his new blog Breadwig. It’s filled with some of his doodles and stuff, as well as some t-shirt designs he’s been doing for Pantelope (groovy t-shirt designs and stuff you can buy. So buy some.)
Breadwig was a name Bryan and I came up with one day while riding the METRA train to work in Chicago. It came from some odd thing we had read (whether true or not was not of major concern) about the way that colonial men had for making those swank powdered wigs they kicked with back then. Seems (allegedly) that you’d take human or horse hair, put it into the shape you wanted with curlers, stick it in a lump of bread dough and bake that sucker to get it all set and shaped. Think of it as an edible curling iron that’s great with jam. Anyhow, funny name, silly logo and groovilicious funny drawings blog. Bryan’s regular portfolio site is bryanballinger.com. Check out his 3d and 2d illos there, all with his torqued twist on life. And for some real insight into the dark mind of a master, check out his love child Suxco.com. It is humor so dry that you need a glass of water to survive it. However it’s so on the mark in its commentry about the corporate speak of the 21st century that you just have to admit that it’s pure genious. I bought this shirt and wear it proudly….

Yeah, I’m a fan. Bryan rocks.

Questions & Answers

As noted in my previous post, this week I’m in the hot seat over on the Cg-Char forum’s Ask The Pro. Here are some really good questions asked of me by forum member Virgil Mihailescu- along with my answers. I felt they’d make a really good blog post, so here they are.

What makes a great pose? It’s vibrant, alive, it feels like it’s moving even when it’s by itself, it has great kinetic energy, even if the character isn’t moving much in the scene. It communicates immediately, clearly, precisely and with such a sense of life. A great pose just jumps out at you. It breathes just in how it feels. Everything feels right, nothing feels forced or awkward.

How much time do you spend on your poses? As much as I need. If it takes me more than an hour to get something right, then I take that time. I’ve spent hours on a single pose before. And then the next day I’ll come back and tweak and improve and plus it for another hour. And why not? If I find it then it’s done, I’ll never have to touch it again. So why not take the time? And sometimes the pose just jumps out and it’s there in 5 minutes. I take as long as I need until the things that I describe above about great poses apply to what I have just made on screen.

How much detail is in your thumbnails? Not much. Just the basics, really. Body, head angle, eyes, basic facial expression, maybe fingers now and then. But my thumbs are literally fleshed out stick figures. I save the detail work for the Cg puppet, since that’s where the detail will eventually be rendered for production. In thumbnail stage it’s about capturing the larger strokes and ideas.

What parts do you spend more time on? I spend a lot of time working facial expressions and hand positions that sell the emotion. That and head angles. Again, if I find it and communicate it I am able to move on and have great confidence with the thing. Another thing I like to work on a lot is the internal weight of a character- the sense that their body parts have meat and muscle and substance- that things are settled and lying where they like to lie down, that a character feels comfortable in their own skin when they move, stand, talk, gesture. It’s hard to describe, but it’s something I take a lot of time trying to capture.

What’s the hardest for you to nail down? All of it. Heh. I tend to spend a lot time trying to get the face to feel right. So much emotion can be expressed so powerfully there that it’s super important for me to nail that and communicate the thought immediately and clearly- but without going cliche’.

Swing on by Cg-Char for more if you like.

Odds & Ends…

Here’s some miscellaneous stuff that I’d like to pass along…

Today is VTS delivery day! Namely today is the day that I need to deliver VTS17 for July. It should be ready for you faithful subscribers late tonight or first thing in the morning. As in my night and morning here. If you’re in India then it’s already night and morning will be night again… or something like that. Anyhow, within 24 hrs.

Secondly I am finalizing the construction of my online store/shopping cart. This will allow non-PayPal using folks to get involved with the VTS and other goodies as time goes by. That should be done by the end of this week if all goes as planned. Keep an eye here for more info later this week or this weekend on that.
Thirdly, I found this neat post on some skyscraper rating website with tons of very nice pictures of Cuiaba’, the town I’m currently living in Brazil. Check it out for lots of cool photos and such to get an idea of the place.

Lastly, this week I am enjoying the honor of being featured on Cg-Char in their Ask a Pro section. I’ve been involved with Cg-Char since pretty much it’s inception over 11 years ago, so it’s fun and nice to be able to keep giving back to the community in that way. Plus Rick May (founder of Cg-Char) is a super swell guy and I’m always glad to lend him any support I can. So go on over and ask me a question and I’ll answer it. I hope.

VTS Freebie!

I’m almost done with my fourth installment of the Great White Hope of Indy Animators. While I’m mulling over and tightening down those few logical loops I wanted to take a moment and drop a note here letting folks know what’s happening with my Video Tutorial Service (VTS) this month.

July is customer appreciation month! Or something like it. In addition to the normal video tutorial I will be making an extra free VTS video this month for my subscribers. So anyone who is a subscriber to the VTS in July 2006 (even if you join anytime in July) will get two videos this month instead of just the usual one. So that will be like, what- An hour and a half of animation training for $14.95? What’s not to like? What will the videos be about this month, you ask? The topics for July are a continuation of the acting/scene blocking process (using a production scene as practice), as well as an indepth discussion of open vs. closed facial posing for emotional impact and then moving into second phase blocking with breakdowns and such. The extra video will be a comprehensive primer on how to easily pose-test and time your scenes (even CG scenes) in a fast, flexible and practical way that should speed up your workflow a lot. This extra free video won’t be free in the future. If folks want to get it after July they’ll need to pay for it. So if you’ve been thinking about checking out my VTS but have been waiting for a decent reason to subscribe, well, in July you’ll have two of them.

OK, that’s enough shameless plugging for now. I hope you’ll forgive me for trying to make a living. Next post: Part 4 of TGWHFIA.

The Great White Hope for Indy Animators: Part 4b

cont'd from part 4a...

All creative folks have this dualism going on:

The Desire to Do My Own Stuff vs. Needing to Do What Others Want

This battle is absolutely unavoidable. Nobody gets to just do their own thing all the time and nothing else. Ever. To expect that is to be childish. So why should we think that such a business model is even reasonable? I’ve known exactly one guy who was able to succeed at doing only his own thing, make a living from it and it only. Yet by the 6th year of doing that the fanbase was so large the very thing that was his was no longer his- it belonged to the fans. And whenever he tried to veer from formula the sales dropped, the letters came in asking ‘Where’s the Silly Song?” In the end even he couldn’t do what he really wanted all the time- and this was his own stuff! This is a universal condition. You cannot escape it. You will always have this battle. You try to have one side winning, but no side ever really defeats the other. To ignore this is peril. Or at the very least massive frustration and probably the consumption of huge quantities of tequila.

So we need to be able to expand the horizons of our ideas, to look for different ways to make a living while still being able to devote a goodly portion of our time doing “our own thing” and hopefully that “thing” can be another feeder stream into our revenue flow. That’s the primary force behind my discussion: let’s get the compensation systems at least to a point where making our own films is a revenue generating business activity. Sure, making a short film may not be the most profitable aspect of my business, but the very least it ought to have the ability to break even or make me a little money to justify me spending my time on it. That way if I take 4 months out of my year and spend it making a film I won’t go absolutely bankrupt from it in the end. It may not be super profitable, but I have to expect that the investment will at least not lose me a ton of money (allowing that I’m any good at this stuff. The “good” factor is an unspoken assumption in all of this.). If I can be assured that making my film is at least not a total wash then I can make up for lost ground the other 8 months of the year with the other pieces of my income mosaic. As it is right now if I make a short film I pretty much have to relegate it to an “extra hours” status- there’s no reasonable revenue stream for it. Meaning it’s not a viable business activity, except as a promotional or advertising piece. Sure, that advertising aspect is valid, but if that’s all I can hope to get from a short film then it still falls in the “left over time” bin. After all I can make a perfectly good advertising reel using my client work. In other words, from a business sense there’s a better, cheaper, faster, easier solution than the short film to meet the marketing need. To not go that path would be irresponsible. That’s why I think it’s important that we be able to at last make some money in real, measurable and direct terms from the actual short film content itself. Elsewise I have to put it on the back burner out a sense of being a responsible businessman if nothing else. Then I need to spend all my time working on “stuff other folks want” to pay the bills. And that is too similar to sitting in a big studio somewhere, one of hundreds of worker drones slogging through the latest Hollywood executive fart product to be worth the bother of trying to be indy in the first place. At least for me it is.

So yes, I’ve said it. The Great White Hope for Indy Animators is not in a single magic bullet income or distribution solution that will allow us to pour all of our energies soley into our animation and nothing else. Instead it’s in a pragmatic understanding of the realities of the business world and being willing to “nut up” and deal with them head on, without apologies and with vigor. Sooner or later we have to poke our heads up and realize this is a business and we’d better well be ready to get serious about that. There are no easy rides here. Nobody will give us a free pass out of charity. If we want to survive as independent animators then we must come to peace with the idea of being independent businessmen, first and last. It is possible to be a decent person and be a businessman. We don’t have to play like Hollywood executives to succeed. It can be done.

Does this admission make me a dirty, unartistic bourgousie sellout? Heck if I know, I was never from the french beret/black turtleneck/art school crowd. But I do know that my kids like to eat and I like not having to sit in a car for 90 minutes each day driving to and from a job that doesn’t exactly thrill me. And I like having the freedom to take myself anywhere in the world I can and live and do and be and have an opportunity to do something to help another person. So if I gotta do some boring, uncreative, unchallenging and cheesy commercial work now and then to have that freedom, why not? It’s a small price to pay for a very fun adventure.

Before I wrap up this discussion, go ahead and check out this essay on being creative over on the GapingVoid blog. It’s a couple years old, but on re-reading it I found it just as inspiring, sobering and liberating as the first time.

Thanks once again to everybody for jumping in and participating. And thanks for your patience as I ramble and think out loud on the world wide stage of the internet. Hopefully I haven’t made a total fool of myself here. But if I have I’d be very glad to hear you all telling me how full of it I am.

The Great White Hope for Indy Animators: Part 4a

I’ve been blah, blah, blah… part 1, part 2, part 3. Read, sing, laugh, make a burrito- Enjoy! Now for part 4! The burning question that brought us here is: How can an indy animator make a living from their animation?

Regardless of distribution paradigms, we’ve shown in previous installments of this conversation that the numbers game is pretty well stacked against the indy from the start. The end user value, while it exists, doesn’t give a lot of room for low volume content- which typifies the independent product. When the value is pennies per minute you need a LOT of minutes, or a LOT of buyers (preferably both) in order to survive. Either one is typically very expensive to produce and has a fine way of killing an independent whose typical cash reserves wouldn’t buy a decent used car. Some distribution models have very difficult ports of entry but substantial compensation (TV, feature film, etc.). Yet others have very easy ports of entry but with laughingly crappy compensation (YouTube, GoogleVideo, AtomFilms, etc.). And we have proposed a possible distribution model that has less difficult - yet still existant- port of entry with compensation patterns that, while not terribly substantial, are not total crap, either. So whether it’s the big compensation lottery or the death of a thousand cuts freebie system or something in between, either way there are challenges and difficulties. Yet we have hope that if we can find the right paradigm, the right business model, the right combination of luck, talent, skill and content- we can carve out a living here just animating our own thing and appealing to our audience with nothing else. Is this a reasonable hope?

Personally, no, I don’t believe it is. It’s an idealistic hope, a naive’ hope, a hope of youth- but I don’t think it’s terribly realistic. Sure you hear stories of the lucky few who stumble upon fame and fortune when the gatekeepers “discover” them. But if that’s your tack just buy a lottery ticket. They’re cheaper.

Remember that word I ended the last post with? Mosaic.

What is a mosaic? Well you artsy fartsy types know that a mosaic is a picture made up of many small pieces of stone or glass that are different colors. None of the pieces in themselves constitutes a major part of the whole, but when properly arranged a larger picture emerges, best viewed from a distance. And that’s really what I think it will take to succeed as an independent animator. Not even the guys who have somehow managed to have notable success as independents have had the luxury of doing nothing but their own content and nothing else. It’s just not feasible. Indy luminaries like Don Hertzfeld, Bill Plympton and Michael Sporn have all made a go by mixing in many different business pursuits. Their income patterns are a mosaic of different pieces. A film here, a teaching gig there, a book, a speaking engagement, a commercial, another commercial, some merchandise, a film festival, some DVD sales. Each piece is not enough to live off of on it’s own. But if you arrange them all together you have a nice picture of sustainable income for a clever, hardworking and pragmatic independent animator. There is really so little chance of being able to “just do my own content” and make a go of it just from the content. Yes, the content has value, yes we should try and maximize that value, but for all but the most extaraordinary of circumstances that value isn’t going to be enough to pay all our bills. In the right distribution model it can pay some, but not all. You need more. And this isn’t such a bad thing, really.

cont'd in part 4b...

The Great White Hope of Indy Animators: Part 3b

picked up from 3a...

Do you think Warner Brothers releases those Looney Tunes DVD collections as a service to mankind? Or that Disney’s Treasure series is a humanitarian effort spearheaded by a revered and kindly old Roy Disney? Please. They do it because there are people out there who LOVE this stuff and who gladly buy it by the truckload. Some may say “Well those are time worn classics. That’s different.” OK, so what about Pixar’s shorts on iTunes? Who here grew up blowing out their eyesight as they sat perched 10 inches from the TV screen, munching on hyper-sugared cereal every Saturday morning watching “Red’s Dream” or “Tin Toy“? Nobody. Yet those things are still selling. Additionally, you can get a 44 minute episode of ABC’s hottest TV show LOST on iTunes for $1.99, but Disney’s seven minute film from 1938, The Brave Little Tailor, sells for the same $1.99. What? People will gladly pay more per minute for animation? Why? Because there a lot of people who highly value top quality animated content. Thus I propose that there is a definable, sizeable and eager audience market for animated content. I just think that market is under-targeted and underserved. Yes, iTunes is serving and has targeted that market, but within a very narrow band of content. What if a smart online gatekeeper took the time to learn and understand a given audience sector and aimed directly at them with skill and precision? What would their thought equation look like? How about this:

Content does have value to end user audience members. There are definable, quantifiable and existing ‘taste niches’ that do exist. The best way to maximize the harvesting of the inherent value is to focus on a high-percentage target with content suited to that niche’s proven tastes.

Who is thinking like this? What gatekeeper has their business model built on this thought equation? Is it an invalid equation? Is this all just fairy dust in Trebuchet 10 point? I don’t think so. So far we’ve proven that yes, end users do value content. And we have given good reason to presume that a definable market for animated content exists. The thing that remains is to meet the needs of that market. Instead of trying to make an online content delivery system that appeals to all tastes in order to make a profit and subsidize the sizeable infrastructure of such a system, why not niche target an audience, focus in on their tastes, find a way to advertise to them, draw them to your site and see if you can’t get a higher percentage of paid downloads as a result? The server load per dollar spent is far more profitable on a 7-minute short film than a 44-minute TV show. For the same dollar revenue you can cut your infrastructure costs by 80%! True it’s not as simple as all this, but it does make some sense, no? It is possible to think smaller and end up getting higher margins in the process. Thus my statement above that a big part of the problem is the tendency toward a global approach. It’s a kind of disease and it’s seeped into every area of our commercial lives it seems.
Why is a business today not valid or viable if it doesn’t try to conquer the world? Why is it a bad thing to serve a target niche of customers and meet their needs in a highly pro-active and meaningful way? It’s a much kinder, less ‘corporate’ way to do things. There’s no need to have every gatekeeper try and be some Genghis Kahn of the media business landscape. Why not have a few smaller sovereigns? What’s so bad with being a Luxembourg in this whole thing? There’s an old saw that says “All politics is local.” I think the same is true here. “All taste is personal”. But there are people who share these tastes. So meet them in a more personal way and let them know you’re here and give them something they’re highly inclined to buy. In a metaphorical sense, let’s do away with the ‘hair salon’ in the cold, faceless cinder-block hell we call Walmart. Bring back the corner barber shop where all the guys know each other and watch baseball together. So to speak.
So now I’ve laid out a possible business plan for a kinder, gentler, more targeted gatekeeper (there still remains a number of side issues with this, but I can get into them later). But that still doesn’t address the initial problem- how does an independent animator hope to make a living from their work?

One word: Mosaic. Huh? You guessed it, part 4 coming right up!

Til then all feedback, death threats, attacks on my sanity and words of glowing support are all welcome in the comments section of the bar & grill.

The Great White Hope of Indy Animators: Part 3a

First off I want to take moment to thank everybody for their great, insightful comments so far. It’s great to see a dialog like this going on in our little corner of the media/entertainment universe. And I also want to thank Mark Mayerson of Mayerson on Animation and Amid Amidi at the Cartoon Brew for plugging this discussion on their blogs. As a result of their mentioning me I imagine I have some new visitors to my humble site, so feel free to make yourself at home while you’re here. Chime in with a comment, watch some of my crappy animation, read a tutorial, click on a link, have some fried cheese. Whatever makes you smile, we’re cool with it. We’re cool.

Now with all those pleasantries taken care of, let’s get back to our topic. In part one of this little series I made (or should I say re-iterated) the case that putting your hope in ad-revenue sharing sites as a viable means of earning decent money for your short films was a fool’s dream (I think the same is true of mobile phone content, but that’s another post). In part 2 I talk about the value that end user audiences put on visual media, making a case that even though the numbers may not be big, there is a track record for individual viewers assigning some kind of monetary value to this stuff we make. The problem has come around to gatekeepers and what to do with them. Let’s discuss…

First up, in the comments on my last post Gary made a very good point…

Getting around the current gatekeepers means starting your own direct sales web site. Yes? To make that viable, you’d have to draw together a stable of short producers to create a line of shorts that would attract and maintain a sufficient audience. And you’d need quality control. Otherwise, you’d get a flood of newbie crap. Thus, you’d need a content submissions procedure, and that means that you would become a new gatekeeper.

We avoid the gatekeeper only to become a gatekeeper.

Indeed. The problem isn’t so much with all gatekeepers as a species. They are a somewhat necessary evil in this game for reasons Gary notes. However, the way they go about it has some problems. The problem I see in gatekeepers is in their overtly global approach. Their actions are a product of basic equations that are based upon some faulty assumptions. Here’s the most common equation:

Content has no value except to draw eyeballs to advertise to. Thus, the more eyeballs the better because I can charge higher ad rates for a bigger crowd. The best way to get as many eyeballs as possible is to offer something that everybody can like. Thus anything that anybody could find issue with is out the door. Controversy is a money loser. Additionally, anything that has no track record of prior success is out. Innovation is for adventurers.

This equation-think has brought us to the current landscape. Nothing new there. However the faulty assumption that underpins this whole think is that content has no value except to draw a crowd to advertise to. But we just saw in Part 2 that in some way content does have value- to end consumers. A few gatekeepers out there are indeed thinking along these lines. Their thought equation looks a bit like this:

Content does hold value for individual end users. So the way to make money is to get these end users to express this value monetarily. Since tastes vary so widely the best way to harvest the greatest potential inherent end user value is to offer as many content choices as possible and let the customer decide.

This is the Amazon/iTunes/”long-tail” equation. Not many others are thinking along these lines yet, but they will. The longer iTunes chugs along and makes cash for Apple the more others will want to play in this new thought equation. Yet I think there is still yet a flaw in the ‘long-tail’ mentality. Namely the sheer size of the infrastructure needed to reach such a vast audience demands a wide, global approach to gather in a critical mass of profitability. As stated above- Since tastes vary so widely the best way to harvest the greatest potential inherent end user value is to offer as many content choices as possible. This assumes that you can’t possibly target any potential audience profitably (and thus deliver value content with less infrastructure overhead), so don’t target any audience at all- which I believe is a kind of intellectual laziness. It requires less forethought and patience (but a lot of money and technology) to construct a machine to throw a hundred-thousand darts at the board in the hope that you score a few bulls-eyes by caprice. But what if you could find that there are markets for distinct types of media? And if so, can these people can be reached with an economically feasible delivery strategy while still remaining profitable? Does such an easily targeted audience exist?

The Great White Hope of Indy Animators: Part 2b

picked up from part 2b....

OK, so those numbers don’t seem like much to write home about. Still, there is value there. The iTunes numbers seem to be the most encouraging. And guess what? People are buying video content off of iTunes- and lots of it, too. And mind you- this is all content they could have for free if they knew how to run a VCR. But they’re willing to pay for it to have it on their time, their iPod, their computer- to make it “theirs”.

So let’s go back to my online viewings and apply the numbers. One thing that I think would be wise to do is to offer two versions of my films. The first would be a low quality compressed streaming version that would be free in order to win fans. I don’t have the ability to slap a name like Pixar or Disney on things, so the viewership would have to be earned. Then I could offer a high quality version that people could purchase to keep for their own collection. Let’s assume that of the 80,000 or so online viewings I’ve had for Lunch that I do a very good job of entertaining my audience and that maybe 10,000 of those viewers would end up paying for a keeper version. Apple charges about a 28% distribution fee for stuff they sell on iTunes. So with a selling price of $1.99 per film, that would leave a decent $1.43 passed on to the content creator/producer- in this hypothetical case, me. Quick math type stuff shows that if I could get 10,000 people to buy a higher quality version of a short film that I’d stand to make a little over $14,000. Not enough to live off of, but dang, that’s not too bad for a part time effort. What if I made 3 or 4 shorts per year, instead of one every 3 or 4 years? While not a full living in itself, it might be a viable portion of a collage of money earning activities.

My buddy Tim Hodge opines in the comments on the previous post…

After all, even if you could find a way to market it effectively, what’s to keep one person from paying a buck for your film then emailing it around the world? …. Even if there was a secure way to sell your work on the web, you’ve got a lot of stiff competition, like Strongbad podcasts…. for FREE… and really funny! If you want to sell something, you have to make sure it’s even better than that, or else have lots of merchandise to sell.

Good questions. But I think it might be overlooking something innate in human nature, namely the desire to be involved in an exchange of value. For reasons that are not entirely machiavellian people actually do want to buy things, even if they could have the same thing for free. We find this in the very poor river people here in Brazil. We roll up on a big medical boat and if we give them the medicines for their health, they have a laid back attitude about actually taking the medicines. But if we make them buy the medicine- even if the value exchanged is massively out of alignment with their true value (trade a strip of beef jerky in exchange for a full course of anti-parasitic medicines worth $100) - then we find they take the pills religiously. For some reason we’re wired to want to be involved in this value exchange.

The basic question here is: Does what I have to offer have enough latent value to cause people to download and have their own copy for $1.99, even if they could watch it for free? Well, I don’t know. But people do pay that kind of money for video online. So while copies of these things can easily be had for free- and in my own imaginary business model a copy of my own stuff would be free in streamed format- if the stuff is any good it’s not unreasonable to assume that somebody would pay to have a copy of their own in higher quality. Piracy does take a dent out of all media businesses, but record companies and movies studios aren’t exactly starving for sales, either. People still want to buy things- it’s the transaction, the exchange of value for value that they want. It’s a social thing. So maybe the question isn’t “If Homestar Runner is free, then shouldn’t yours be free, too?” Rather maybe the question should be “If people are willing to pay to have a copy of free things they really like, shouldn’t Homestar Runner be offering people the chance to own their own copy?“. Maybe the looking glass is pointed the wrong way?
But all this is rather moot at the moment. The problem is I’m not on iTunes. And the liklihood that I could get my own little spot on their Short Films page is next to nil. I’m just not worth their trouble, not at a measley 10,000 total paid downloads per title. And while it is true that in cyberspace there is no limiting physical shelf space like Walmart or Virgin Megastore, there is still limited screen space. Why take up precious promotion pixels with a product that doesn’t promise to move hundreds of thousands of downloads? This is another flaw in a lot of “long-tail” talk- the argument that digital distribution has no shelf space battles. Hogwash. Those 1280×1024 pixels are darn precious! Nobody wants to waste them. Sure you can search for the content you want, but you can do that with Google already. Most of the long-tail discussion centers around how distributors can cash in on the diffusion of media tastes. Next to none of it really applies to the little guy actually making the content- at least not if he wants to make a living from it. So really, instead of doing away with the gatekeeper system, iTunes has just made Apple the new gatekeeper. Always with these gatekeepers! So in my next post I address what I think is needed to get around this.

In the meantime you guys tell me if I’m smoking crack here. Heh.

The Great White Hope of Indy Animators: Part 2a

In my first post on this topic I covered why the ad-revenue sharing system online isn’t much to put your hopes in as an indy animator. The reason being that in they eyes of businessmen content has no direct value- thus the need to share any revenues with content creators is next to none. So the conversational logic drifted to the idea of having direct consumers of the media pay for it since they must value it if they watch it.

I’ve been a person who has made some animated shorts and has been blessed to have them seen by tens of thousands of people over the years. My latest short “Lunch” has been viewed online about 80,000 times when you combine all the various places it’s been hosted, with who knows how many viral viewings. Not great by Hollywood numbers, but not shabby for some schmuck in a spare bedroom. Imagine if there was a system whereby I could expect some money for each of those online viewings? Or maybe even just a portion of them? Maybe it’s not enough to make a decent living from, but it’d be enough to get me seriously thinking about making more films to show, not less. The question that remains is: Will end customers pay? They obviously value the content- they watch it. Can we measure this value in dollars and cents?
When thinking of these things we mustn’t ignore a fundamental aspect of the world of business: ultimately it is the buyer who sets the price. The same holds true for media content. Suppliers can try to elevate prices, but sooner or later things settle into a price point where people feel there is real value. There are several major areas of content, so let’s try to find some end user value trends for each of the following: TV live action, TV animation, feature film (live action & animated) and music.

Ever since its inception as a medium TV content has been 100% free- if you’re willing to watch it on the network’s schedule that is. TV content has had no end audience defined monetary value. Cable TV has a cost, but when you’re paying your cable bill you’re paying for open gateways to choices, not specific shows usually. However recently there has been a measurable revenue stream for TV content- DVD sales. Let’s get some numbers:
The Simpsons is arguably the most successful animated TV franchise in all of history. It’s content is widely available (for free) to end user audiences via vast syndication all across the world. Yet it still sells like hotcakes in DVD format. A typical season of The Simpsons on DVD has a street price of about $35.00. That’s $35.00 (3500 cents) for 550 minutes of content. That comes out to an end user audience value of roughly $0.06 per minute of content. (3500 cents divided by 550 minutes equals 6.36 cents per minute).
In the U.S. right now there isn’t a hotter TV show than LOST. The DVD cost for the first season of LOST is about $60.00. Let’s assume we’re paying for just the show content (not counting extras, commentary and other ‘value adds’). That would be 26 episodes at 44 minutes each. (A season of shows in the U.S. is 26 weeks, an hour long program is 44 minutes with 16 minutes for commercial breaks). That’s 1144 minutes for 6000 cents, or roughly $0.05 per minute of content. So the average market value to end user consumers of top rated TV content (ie: what they’re willing to pay to own it and watch it at their leisure) is about 5.5 cents per minute of content.
Now let’s look at feature films. A feature film has a typical in-theater cost of $9.00 per ticket. An average runtime for a film is 110 minutes (more or less). So for the big surround sound, big screen, buttered popcorn version of the experience the end consumer audience member is willing to pay about $0.08 per minute of content, but it’s fleeting- you can’t take a copy of it with you out of the theater.
That same film in DVD sells for $17.00, resulting in an end user value of $0.15 per minute, the highest value given so far for content. That is until we get to online short films. A short film bought on iTunes for $1.99 that is 6 minutes long yields a nice consumer value of about 33 cents per minute. Many of these shorts are available in other venues in higher resolution, yet they still sell well. Pixar had sold 250,000 copies of their shorts within the first month or two of putting them on iTunes.

cont'd in part 2b....