[Figure 12] A comfortable and efficient work area will help ensure a high level of artistry and productivity.

Production Cost 3: Office and Studio Supplies
A quiet and organized place to work will help to maintain your productivity and sanity (see Figure 12).

A desk can be as simple as an old door propped up on a few cinderblocks or as sophisticated as an ergonomic workstation with keyboard drawers and footrests.

Either way, make sure your work surface is solid and you have enough room to work comfortably. If you need room for printers and scanners and perhaps a bit of surface space for writing and drawing, you might need to get creative and build extensions or additional shelving on which to place your digital tools. Wide monitor risers are helpful because they allow your keyboard to be pushed underneath and out of the way when you need to use pencil and paper.

Take measures to avoid conditions such as repetitive stress injury. You will potentially be spending long uninterrupted hours on your film, so make sure you don’t sacrifice your physical health for the sake of your art. If any part of your arm, hand or back aches or tingles after working for a couple of hours or so, investigate the causes and solutions of these conditions immediately. If the symptoms are ignored for too long, serious and permanent damage can result.

Get a chair that is comfortable enough to sit in for hours at a time, but not so comfortable that you melt away into blissful slumber in the middle of your work sessions.

Other necessary office equipment might include bookshelves, lights, a mirror for motion study, surge protectors, tripods for your cameras or camcorders, a digital voice recorder, art supplies and file cabinets. If you need to purchase such items, be sure to include them in your budget estimates.

Production Cost 4: Purchased Digital Assets and Other Computer Expenses
It might be possible and appropriate for you to purchase certain digital assets that you don’t have the time, desire or skills to build yourself. These include the following:

• Character, prop and environment models can be purchased and sometimes even downloaded for free from various Internet sites, such as www.digimation.com, www.turbosquid.com, www.3dcafe.com and www.its-ming.com.

• Character puppets are not as easy to find as models, but you can locate a few good ones at websites such as Turbosquid and www.vfs.com/~m07goosh/freestuff.htm. Software plug-ins, such as The Setup Machine from www.anzovin.com, can provide interactive solutions for creating custom character rigs without requiring extensive knowledge in that particular discipline.

• Texture maps are also available from sites such as www.3dcafe.com, www.realworldimagery.com and www.amazing3d.com.

• Image filters for programs such as Photoshop are also available for creating a wider variety of styles and effects for your final images.

• You can purchase sound effects on CDs at your local music store or download them from a variety of websites.

• You can purchase royalty-free songs and scores in CD form as well as from various Internet sites. You can also license copyrighted songs. This can sometimes be a formidable expense, but if your film absolutely relies on a specific piece of music, you will need to add corresponding licensing fees into your budget calculations.

• You can also find and purchase photographs that might be used as reference material, background imagery or texture maps from stock photography books. A quick Internet search will also result in a very large number of sites on which you can buy and download photographs and copyright-free illustrations from agencies as well as individuals. Try www.clipart.com, for example.

• Program scripts and various material shaders and rendering algorithms can also be downloaded from various websites, such as www.highend3d.com, to expand the functionality of your software packages.

See Appendix C for more information on where you can acquire some of the above digital assets.

Other computer expenses you might run into include Internet fees, website hosting fees, customer support fees and, of course, repairs.