Would building an online service that allows people to mail in hd tapes, and then edit online via a flex app help? You could use AWS clusters to handle the rendering compute load.

1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand).

2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper).

3. Equipment (camera, dollies, lights etc.): 40k

4. Crew: 70k for a 2 week shoot with a cheap crew, including catering

5. Post production: 40-60k

This sort of money will get you a surprisingly professional looking 90 minute film. However, production costs on film are always eclipsed by marketing costs. It can cost thousands of dollars just to market a film to the distributors, no matter to consumers.

Obviously, you can make a film for much less than this, but only if you want to make a film like Clerks or In The Company Of Men (i.e. one location, shot in a weekend).

The way I figure it, the minimum number of people you need in any traditional production is essentially the cast and base operators (which could also be cast members if multi-skilled)

However if you go into 3D animation, this number can actually go down - to the point where you have a content production team around the size of a small startup.

The model I'm looking at could be described as a digital aniation studio, a "mini pixar" if you will, that uses open source software (Blender, Cinelerra) and homebrew motion capture (both facial and performance) to get performance across in a quick manner and using a significantly smaller team. I'm also looking at leveraging EC2 for rendering instead of investing in purchasing multiple servers for a render farm.

The model isn't scalable across the entire film/tv industry of course, but I figure it could work for a couple studios and this is what I'm working on trying to prove right now.

If you could tag your contributions with CC-Attribution licenses and have your name appear in the credits, that might be enough incentive for a lot of people to bring down production prices even more.

And if you're shooting a web show you don't need the high quality film because the ultimate medium is digital anyways.

To take over TV, you need to at least match the picture quality of made-for-TV movies, and probably match 1080i resolution.

Then again, if anyone has more experience in the industry please correct me.

Edit: Also, the reason for the poor quality is probably not due to the quality of the original film. I would think it's more of a compression/bandwidth issue.

I still believe in film as an art form but for a commercial production webshow it may be overkill, especially as HD cameras get better.

I think that for content to be produced for online (not just as a novelty webisode but as an actual artform) people need to start thinking outside the 22 minute content 8 minute ad format for half hour blocks of television.

For example, a standard sitcom format goes like this.

  Credits
  Story (teaser / cold open)
  Commercial
  Story
  Commercial
  End of Story
  Commercial
  Tag
  Credits

It would be interesting to see some A/B testing with recutting lengths of commercials for the exact same episodes with a randomised set of people and see if the net effect of how "funny" a show is is noticeable or negligible.

(sorry, just late night stream of conciousness rambling)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay

You're probably thinking of a deblocking filter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deblocking_filter_(video)

which is typically used in the decoder for the relevant video CODEC; recent video drivers do have hardware support for this, but it's not a fundamental connection. Moreover, deblocking only helps so much.

But I bet you can lower many of the technology costs. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's an extraordinary amount of inefficiency there.

And/or talent would be payed with equity.

Take Pixar, It's the highest profile of the 3D animation studios and can you name any of the voice talent for WALL-E? There was no "top talent" there in any notable role, in fact, apart from one of Pixar's 4 main directors (Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo fame) I'm pretty sure anyone would be hard pressed to name anyone of note in a major role.

Now lets look at Dreamworks Animation, Arguably number 2 (even though they are more profitable than Pixar and also have the highest grossing animation film of all time in Shrek 2...)

Apart from voice talent in their films, can you name any of the talent in the films? Its a difficult task. The talent is shared among the many people that work there.

The reality is that voice talent is the "draw card" for 3D animation and is one of the minor expenditures for any 3D film.

So let's go back to Pixar, when Pixar was first producing their films, their distribution deals with Disney had them giving up 50% of the profits for the film.... They do all the hard work and only get back 50% of the money.

On that same business model, If you figure out a way to only monetise your film 50% of the the time and not care about it being pirated (even welcoming the filesharers as pseudo distribution/marketing) - you're off to a good start.

If you start reducing the workload on your animators/modellers (using limited cast/sets, animating more with mocap, scripting "extras"... essentially adopting a sitcom format) you can get away with doing episodic content with a significantly smaller team. Keep voice acting internal (even Pixar directors do voices on their films occasionally)... you're reducing costs further.

This I think is one of the ways out to cheaper productions and since online video has been notoriously hard to monetise - its a start.

I've also got a couple other ideas on ways to continue monetising off the model I'm proposing, but yeah, there is potential there.

Cars: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech, George Carlin

Incredibles: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson

Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney,

Monsters, Inc.: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi

I don't know why you think animation means you don't need actors.

And your 'argument' on WALL-E is HUGELY flawed: Ben Burtt (who 'voiced' WALL-E) is literally the go-to guy when you need incredible sound effects. Not only would that movie have failed without him, he got the job because he's THE best sound fx guy in the business. For something like WALL-E, you need even more exacting quality, not less. And the few voices they did have went to John Ratzenberger (of "Cheers" fame: he has 95 acing credits on IMDB), Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver.

Making good content requires good content producers. I'm not trying to discourage you: there are good people out there. But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thats exactly what I'm talking about.

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

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

Fact is - people want to be entertained...

I'm not saying it doesn't - it obviously does.. what I'm saying is that not all animation has to be film scale, nor does it have to have proper actors as draw cards for voice talent.

My argument was that WALL-E was a smash hit and the use of big name actors as voice talent to sell the film wasn't part of the equation.

You completely missed the point.

But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.

No, I'm not saying that at all - Going up against a studio like Pixar/Disney or Dreamworks Animations thats entirely the case, but there are plenty of films out there that you don't even hear about that are plenty profitable - if you were to target the film industry that is.

You just don't need to scale it up (in terms of budget) for it to work, that's my whole argument