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Why aren't animators using the internet effectively?

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Why aren't animators using the internet effectively?

Hi, I'm new, but this is something I'd really like to talk about. I don't consider myself an animator -- I've dabbled in it before but I fell I just don't have the artistic talent or patience necessary -- but I'm very interested in the field. I consider myself much more a writer, and I'm really interested in creating/designing a cartoon series.

So here is my question/topic for discussion: Why aren't animators using the internet? To give you an analogy, my main occupation is as a musician. Since the internet sprung up, there's been a huge surge of interest and activity in the field of independent music. The internet has been the greatest aid in breaking free of the old system of major labels: music has become decentralized and democratic. Bands can do what they do for less money and more effectively get themselves spread around and known without relying on Sony or Virgin to basically hand them out a music career.

Why hasn't this happened with animation yet? The means are all there for someone to create content and distribute it over the web while supporting themselves financially with ads, merchandise, etc. It's almost a perfect analogy to the music industry: Television (and movie distributors) are the same as major labels, programs like Macromedia Flash make producing animation cheap and effective just like music programs such as Garageband or Reaper. Yet I still see most animators clinging to the idea that they need to break into "the industry" and have someone hand them a job.

If you don't believe it can be done, there's at least one good example. Homestarrunner has been going strong for years and the animators are supporting themselves through merchandise alone. Yet I can't think of another single example. So I'd say not only is it possible, but this is perhaps the best time to get in on it. It's like there's this vaccuum that's waiting to be filled. People love youtube; there's no reason a cartoon show (with competent writing) couldn't be produced cheaply and efficiently enough to regularly put out content that would generate a huge fanbase.

Okay, and for the sake of full disclosure: yes I am looking to write such a cartoon series and I'm looking for interested animators. I encourage you to PM me if you're interested, but even if you're not I thought it would make a good discussion. I'm not trying to say the current system should be torn down, but I just feel like there's an opportunity here that isn't being taken advantage of. What do you guys think?

People love youtube; there's no reason a cartoon show (with competent writing) couldn't be produced cheaply and efficiently enough to regularly put out content that would generate a huge fanbase.

The problem is that animation of any measurable quality is NOT cheap to produce.
Given the man-power required, even a 1 minute short would take a couple of months to make properly--using FLASH or what-have-you.
If there is no revenue generated on the first couple of spots produced, then that's asking the creators/facilitators to starve for a couple of months or until the thing gets its legs.

There ARE quite a few people producing animation for the Internet already, even in a serialized format--but how good is the stuff?

If its cheap-looking and slapdash, then the reason for that is it was probably produced cheaply and made quickly--and probably by people who were not working professionally as animators at the time.
The effort required is so great that anyone trying it would probably be better served setting up a studio and producing service work instead--and it would be more lucrative as well.
Even studios like Spumco tried the 'Net----for a while. Are they doing it now?
Not that I have heard or seen. They have arguably some great talent in their stable and they were unable to sustain production.
Music requires quantitatively less effort to bring to realization that animation, which is why its bound to be more prevalent on the 'Net.
Youtube gives anyone the chance to put a video camera in their hands and tell a story.......but what kind of production values like sets and elaborate effects will they have? Probably not a lot, because of the costs and lead times involved.
Part of the appeal of Youtube is the spontanaeity, which animation does not have, and never really will. Porn works perfectly for the 'Net because it provides something intriguing facilitated by being really cheap--whichis why there is so much of it.
Even if your idea is one-shots or periodic (say once a year) shorts/featurettes, its still asking a lot of effort to realize and the pay-offs are not going to be great--mostly because the public is fickle and always looking for the next, shiny new thing, and the wait for the next dose frustrates audiences.

There's my two cents.

"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)

Homestarrunner is produced entirely by two people and produces much more than a minute of material per month. And it still looks passable to me, and 99% of the internet at least. I mean, to me it doesn't even look like cheap or crummy animation.

For a highschool project I produced 3 minutes of animation in Flash with somewhere from 5 to 10 (I can't recall exactly) manhours of work. It didn't look pretty by any means but it did look passable. And that was my first attempt to use flash seriously for animation. No experience with the program or animation in general and I certainly wasn't working as efficiently as possible. Somebody who is familiar with flash, and actually knows what they're doing could probably get work done at a more efficient rate and at a higher quality.

I think either you underestimate the amount flash helps with speeding up the animation process, or you have a ridiculously high standard of quality for animation. In fact there are a lot of things I want to bring up so I'll kind of go through them point by point: (And please don't think of this as a "you're wrong, I'm right" kind of debate, I appreciate both of your responses)

-I wanted to respond to the notion that animators would have to starve waiting for a project to generate revenue. I was able to work on my animation and get 3 minutes produced in about a week while attending school full time. I have a full class load at my university (even over the summer) but I still balance it out with having a job, being in (more than one) band, which means rehearsing, writing, and for right now, working on recording music. I've even been working on screen plays in my spare time, which I know is WAY less work intensive than animation, but still. I think most college students would be able to devote the proper amount of work to a certain kind of project without having to drop all other activities and sources of income.
-It wouldn't necessarily take that long to make money. For one thing, thanks to sites like youtube and blogspot you can pay $0 overhead (free hosting) and still collect ad revenue. Hell, I have a job right now and would be able to compensate an animator willing to work with me (or potentially voice actors, which I might need) until the is some profit I can share with them. Potentially the only thing you'd have to make up money for would be Flash itself, and there are ways to get it for free (without stealing) such as from your school. You could at least get a nice discount on it, I'm sure.
-It may hurt animators to hear this (and it does me too, just a bit) but sometimes, cheap, slapdash looking production is enough to appease viewers. It's sad to say but shows like Futurama that have an incredibly talented animation staff that consistently does top-of-the-line work is kind of lost on people who are only in it for the jokes. For a production that people are getting on the internet for free, most viewers are not likely to care at all about the quality of animation. There are plenty of things on Adult Swim that look terrible but still make fans because of the writing.

That's my two cents for now, anyway. Thank you for your responses.

I think the idea of a web-based click-through comic strip is much more feasible. But these can have some animation in them. Some gags just require motion. Quality of writing and impact of images are more important to the average viewer than full animation. And, as stated above, animation is either expensive, incredibly time-consuming, or bad. I'm veering away from trying to animate my own stuff and getting back into doing comics. I'll do some Flash for money, but these days, animation's getting to feel too much like data entry.

I think the idea of a web-based click-through comic strip is much more feasible. But these can have some animation in them. Some gags just require motion. Quality of writing and impact of images are more important to the average viewer than full animation. And, as stated above, animation is either expensive, incredibly time-consuming, or bad. I'm veering away from trying to animate my own stuff and getting back into doing comics. I'll do some Flash for money, but these days, animation's getting to feel too much like data entry.

In 1995/96, I worked on one of the early internet web-cartoons/comic strips: Cyber-chicken.
It was a clickable FLASH-function web-comic, with sound--had some psuedo "animation" ( not a lot). We were drawing the strips on paper, hand-inked, scanned into the machine and then coloured and imported into FLASH for the animation elements.
It took a team of about 6 people about 5 months produce a single years worth of material ( produced around our other work at the time, one ep a week) , on a deferred pay system.
I never saw about 50% of what I was due because the enterprise never saw enough income. Again, this was what could be considered the "early years" of the 'Net, but the strip was getting 100K+ hits a month at its peak.
It was too involved ( we were putting some work into it for sure--to make an appealing product at least) for what it should have been, took too many people to do it to be cost-effective....and.....well, it didn't last.
Not a great recipe for my mind.

As a craftsman, I'm not interested in producing passable stuff--because then my work is just like everyone else's. I don't like to cheapen a medium because of a consensus.

"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)

I don't think that the industry has developed the proper business plan for animation to be lucrative online.

I think it can be done, but not by thinking about the traditional ways that animators make money.

Not that I've figured it out... I'm simply saying that it just doesn't exist yet. As the technology changes... i'm sure an opportunity will present itself.

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In 1995/96, I worked on one of the early internet web-cartoons/comic strips: Cyber-chicken.
It was a clickable FLASH-function web-comic, with sound--had some psuedo "animation" ( not a lot). We were drawing the strips on paper, hand-inked, scanned into the machine and then coloured and imported into FLASH for the animation elements.
It took a team of about 6 people about 5 months produce a single years worth of material ( produced around our other work at the time, one ep a week) , on a deferred pay system.
I never saw about 50% of what I was due because the enterprise never saw enough income. Again, this was what could be considered the "early years" of the 'Net, but the strip was getting 100K+ hits a month at its peak.
It was too involved ( we were putting some work into it for sure--to make an appealing product at least) for what it should have been, took too many people to do it to be cost-effective....and.....well, it didn't last.
Not a great recipe for my mind.

As a craftsman, I'm not interested in producing passable stuff--because then my work is just like everyone else's. I don't like to cheapen a medium because of a consensus.

It sounds like comics by committee was the real problem. All of the best comic strips and many comic books were and are created by one writer and one artist, if not by one person doing both jobs. And they're done on tight deadlines. The whole 'if it isn't done by at least a dozen people who take up months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, then it's crap by definition,' may be passable in animation, but history disproves it in almost every case when you start trying to use it on cartooning in general.

The whole point of the internet is that the product can be put directly in front of the audience. There's no committee worrying about their resume and whether a corporation would think an eight-year-old child might be offended by anything in the work.

It's hard to come up with a good business plan for web comics, but blaming the medium for low quality work is nonsensical.

It sounds like comics by committee was the real problem. All of the best comic strips and many comic books were and are created by one writer and one artist, if not by one person doing both jobs.

In the case of Cyber-chicken--each person was doing a week's worth on their own. We'd get a outline/short script and away we'd draw. Essentially is was just "two" people working on the thing--the creator of the idea who did the colouring and flash work, as well as the script-writing, and the rest of us "wrists".

The whole 'if it isn't done by at least a dozen people who take up months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, then it's crap by definition,' may be passable in animation, but history disproves it in almost every case when you start trying to use it on cartooning in general.

Animation is what we are talking about here though.

Dilbert was done by one guy too, but I don't consider that internet strip to have any kind of heavy artistic skill behind it.
Cyber-chicken arguably wasn't any better, although the art was much more involved.
The Spumco George Liquor web-cartoons are what I was thinking of--well done material, well designed and funny.
But they were labour instensive even for what you got, and it sure as heck wasn't a one-man job to make those things--which is why they were not sustainable and Spumco abandoned them.
Sure, a couple of kids can produce their own cartoon for some yuks.....even a student in college.....but what kind of staying power is the material going to have? If it looks "amateurish", is the audience going to stay around for long?

To my mine, the answer is "no".
I believe that audiences will consistently flock to the newest appealing thing, but appeal takes effort and time to realize and maintain and that's a tall order for a single person or a duo. It explains why a lot of modern strips are so simply designed--and more than a few are not terribly appealing.

I think if the supposition is that it was easy to do, we'd have seen a LOT more animation broadcast on the 'Net by now--but we haven't, and that I think says something more than people are not doing it because they are unaware of it's "potential".

"We all grow older, we do not have to grow up"--Archie Goodwin ( 1937-1998)

The problem is that animation of any measurable quality is NOT cheap to produce.
Given the man-power required, even a 1 minute short would take a couple of months to make properly--using FLASH or what-have-you.

I guess this is what I was referring to.

In fact, it looks like a prestige project to me and the people involved have a background in the animation and/or film business. I don't know how it's possible to make a full-length feature film drawn entirely by-hand by two artists. Even assuming it is, I don't suppose it's practicable to produce animation for the "ordinary" commercial markets that way. If it is, then that's bad news for animators.

I'm not sure what you mean by "prestige project," but Paul Fierlinger is certainly a professional animator and has been for longer than I've been alive. I don't understand why you think that a team like this producing quality animation is bad news for animators.

Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, they're films won't be competing with Pixar or anything. More like art house fair. This is more a boutique operation--though in this case they do have financial backing.

My point is just that it's possible for a one man operation to churn out some quality animation at a low enough cost to make the internet model a feasible one.

I've been the sole animator on a few shorts that I produced on my own time, and have been able to sell around three thousand copies of a couple short DVD's featuring a character I created. I've made a few more bucks merchandising him. I'm certainly in no danger of making a living from the endeavor, though...I've only made a few grand for what must've been months and months of work (never kept track), and I owe a lot of that to being lucky enough to find a small distributor who was interested in my work. (He probably has made more than I have...gotta love middlemen) Lord only knows how many more hours I've spent trying to get my ridiculously narrow niche audience to know I exist.

Can't really see a career in it from where I sit, but I have had fun and learned a lot. I think one artist CAN tell a good story, and make an entertaining cartoon short, but I can't imagine making a feature. In order for animation of that length to be watchable, it really has to be smooth, and that's just an inconceivable number of man hours for one warm body. (at least, if you want to see sunlight and eventually marry)

I think companies like JibJib use their animation to attract clients, who are their real bread and butter, and that may be the only real way to merchandise a cartoon into a living wage: Use the toons to sell yourself.

If you are curious you can see a snippet or two of my stuff at http://www.fritzthefox.com

The short answer is "they are, although (just like with every other emerging web media platform) not always lucratively."

There are lots of sites that are attempting to do this. Most are not series based. Newgrounds has been around for over a decade now. Sites such as Jib Jab, Ninjai, and a multitude of others have seen some success. Then there are those like Icebox that attempted exactly what you are discussing years ago and failed. People are still feeling it out and trying to figure out how to balance the cost and make a profit. Software such as Flash and AE have helped soften the blow to the wallet, but it is still much cheaper and easier to shoot a live-action web series than create a good animated one. That's why we are seeing multitudes of those, but less from the animated community. They are there and the numbers are growing.