Hello everyone
Good morning/evening,
There is a challenge that I have been facing recently regarding animation business.
For me, I have been interested in animation since childhood and I have always dreamt about making animation and short films on my own. I've been working on that dream since then. For like, almost 20 years or so.
I'm developing slowly but I'm doing the best I can with what I have. Step by step I reached now to a point that I have all the tools. I bought the programs, attended many courses online, and bought the cintiq to make animating and drawing easier. I have experience in TvPaint, Photoshop, Moho/anime studio 12, adobe premiere, adobe illustrator, adobe after effects , zbrush.. etc
I have many ideas and I can work on them on my own. I mean, I know how to animate and color and edit ..etc. And I have friends who know about my passion and I have told them previously, "who knows, maybe one day we can make a film together" meaning they also have ideas but no animation skill. They want to partner with me and make their ideas come to life in an animation film or short.
All this time it was only words about a future meaning someday we will do it together. Now I believe that I am ready for making my first short films but it opened my eyes to a whole new challenge that I didn't think about before.
Working on my own is not a problem with me. But when working with a friend who doesn't animate and know nothing about computer programs related to animation and editing, that creates a huge gap in the efforts we're doing for this project.
For example, now one of my friends wrote me a piece for a short episode to work on. With all the excitement that we both have for working together, I thought about telling her about the pricing and profits from the beginning before even starting to make anything in the project. I told her that animation is not an easy job and that will make the profits that might come from this project be divided unequally. Meaning the writer does not take the same as the animator. I thought about telling her that early on so it does not create a huge problem later on when we do succeed in it.
she disagreed with me and said that we are partners so the profits should be divided 50% each and no one take more than the other. I explained to her that the first writing that she gave me took her only 10-15 minutes to write. This small writing will not take me the same time to make it into animation. First I have to design the characters and the environment. Then choose the colors. I'll be doing the storyboard , the animatic , the editing , the directing , the backgrounds , and most importantly the animation and the inbetweening especially that the plan is for it to be in traditional , frame by frame animation ..etc while her part is the writing and voice acting. I'll be also editing the voice after I record it and some voices I'll change to make it sound suitable for the characters. And the music part is on me also. I'll take care of the music and sound effects.
I told her that it's not an equal effort. This 10-15 piece of writing and 1 hour of recording her voice will take me months of daily hard work to reach the desired result. How come then we divide it like this? I don't see that it's fair.
She's insisting on what she want which is 50% and I'm insisting that this will not be fair for me especially that I don't need writing material. I can work on pieces on my own and I've been writing my ideas for years.
So, my question is, how do we divide profits when working as a team of 2 only? One does the writing and voice acting and the other does all the rest. What's the fair share for both? And am I correct about what I said to her?
