The Animation Production Problem
You know, I wanted to talk a bit about the animation industry as a whole. You see for the past years, for those who watch the Japanese animation industry, we’ve been hearing that “Anime is dying.” and we’ve seen a lot of rough patches. Well I thought that the animation industry as a whole maybe suffering this fate, it’s just lesser known. I decided to do a bit of research and this is what found in terms of costs:
For the record, unless you’re getting someone right out of school that’s desperate to get work on their reel a seven minute cartoon will cost anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 depending on the level of detail.
To me that seemed a bit expensive, but to me not that bad. That was, until I remember this recent article that Mark Suster was talking about called The Amazing Power of Deflationary Economics for Start-ups:
Network television costs $50,000–100,000 per minute to produce. Reality shows can be cheaper, with the lowest-end costing $6,000–8,000 per minute.
Maker Studios is an Internet producer of content relying on deflationary economics. It produces shows for $500–1,000 per minute.
And it got to me: Damn, for animation fans, we really are a niche. For anime fans, we’re a niche within a niche. The costs of producing animation in general is hard to swallow unless you can really sell the animation and it’s derivative products (like figures, CDs, ect). Sure we have Flash animation which has helped reduce down cost for many productions, but nothing close to Youtube — style money. Heck for animation, we haven’t gotten to Reality TV type of cheapness yet.
So then I ask myself, how come we haven’t done anything to combat the true animation problems of 2D? Granted its a niche, but if anything needs the Computer Science love, entertainment wise, this arena seems to be the big one.
Originally published at www.theverge.com on January 15, 2012.
