{"id":5103,"date":"2020-11-22T19:03:44","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T01:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=5103"},"modified":"2020-11-22T19:03:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T01:03:44","slug":"viability-of-crowdfunded-animation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=5103","title":{"rendered":"Viability of Crowdfunded Animation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0Cw7aAFS5oc\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This short recently popped up in my youtube feed, as well as the subsequent crowdfunded series that followed. The team is currently working on a second season and a board game based on the characters.<\/p>\n<p>The animation world has been struggling to find a reliable way to fund ideas outside of the studio system with the help of modern platform tools. You see stories of record breaking crowd funding campaigns for shows like Bee and Puppycat, or the unreal 11 million raised for Critical Roll. But in reality, the amount raised for a show like Bee and Puppycat ($800,000 to make 10 episodes I believe) barely holds a candle to budgets for shows like say Adventure Time which in my memory averaged around $300,000 per 11 minute episode. 10 Adventure Time episodes would amount to around 3 million, close to 4 times the budget for Bee and Puppycat. Not to mention that probably around 30% of Bee and Puppycat&#8217;s money went to backer rewards and paying Kickstarter.<\/p>\n<p>Cartoons like Tales of Alethrion and Bee and Puppycat (and the Manly pilot) can pull off these lower budgets with passionate skeleton crews on the art and production\/management end, which seems like a great idea at first, until you start to see how difficult sustaining the series becomes without the safety net of a large corporate machine. The bloated staffing on Adventure Time is what helped us pump out something like 30 episodes a season, with hardly any breaks in-between seasons. Sometimes the breaks were seamless because we had the infrastructure to just keep pumping them out. On a smaller crew this kind of relentless production seems impossible and is reflected in the multi-year breaks between episodes that we saw for Bee and Puppycat. Now I hear they got picked up by Netflix which has set up a fairly sturdy animation program which I think Frederator can rely on to keep their production up to speed with fickle and forgetful audiences.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5105\" src=\"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Screen-Shot-2020-11-22-at-4.49.05-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"679\" height=\"430\" srcset=\"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Screen-Shot-2020-11-22-at-4.49.05-PM.png 679w, http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Screen-Shot-2020-11-22-at-4.49.05-PM-300x190.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 679px) 100vw, 679px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Looking into Tales of Alethrion&#8217;s productions schedule (their production house is called Skjald, they&#8217;re based in Denmark): their pilot came out in June 2014. They raised funds for a second 22 minute short called &#8220;The First Hero&#8221; in the same world which debuted in April 2015. They then produced several more shorts with backing from Kickstarter over the next 4 years resulting in a total of an hour of material (including the first two shorts). So that amounts to about 12 minutes of animation a year. Each short was made for $80,000 I think, which is insanely low budget for the level of production value. 5 years to produce essentially 3\/4 of a feature length film isn&#8217;t bad at all, if that&#8217;s what they were shooting for. But 5 years to mimic a television production schedule to me seems terrible. It&#8217;s not a business model I would personally want to pursue, especially considering the insane effort put into their multiple <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/alethrionboardgame\/tales-of-alethrion-season-one\">Kickstarter campaigns<\/a>. The level of hustle makes me want to blow my brains out.<\/p>\n<p>Their latest goal for season 2 is to produce six 10 minute shorts for $500,000 approximately. I think it averages out to $75,000 per episode (1\/4 the budget of an Adv Time ep but then eliminate 30% of that money to kickstarter rewards) and they expect to deliver the first episode by June of 2021 which is a lot shorter of a timeline than previously. I&#8217;m not sure how long between releases of new episodes.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been tossing around the idea of starting an animation studio with some friends of mine but there really doesn&#8217;t seem to be a good argument being made for current working models of independent production, if I wanted to try making a series. These creators definitely have their sights set on mainstream breakthrough. The stories are direct and fit within the mold of tried and true television structure; it&#8217;s not like they&#8217;re innovating or pushing on the avant-garde doorbell. They&#8217;ve managed to build a pretty loyal fanbase of comic-con style pop-culture animation enthusiasts, but I&#8217;m just wondering how long a production company like Skjald can keep up without the help of a large commercial corporation? If their cartoons were more visionary would it help or hurt them? I guess it would probably hurt, sadly. So then what is the lasting value of making a basic genre series of 12 or so episodes? In 5 years will anyone care that so much effort and hustle was put into a well animated adventure yarn featuring love, friendship, loss and some occasional European-style titty action?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This short recently popped up in my youtube feed, as well as the subsequent crowdfunded series that followed. The team is currently working on a second season and a board game based on the characters. The animation world has been struggling to find a reliable way to fund ideas outside of the studio system with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5103"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5103"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5107,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5103\/revisions\/5107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}