Month: March 2016

Our March 2016 Animation Company Update

Leave a reply

Another month, and another animation company update!  These months are flying by, and it feels like the year will be over in a blink!  Here is what we have been working since my last update.

Bink:
I get excited at every stage of the animation process, but lighting is one of my favorites.  It is like putting the final puzzle piece revealing the complete picture.  You start to see how beautiful everything you have been working on is when it all comes together.  We have started to light the shots, and will soon start seeing final renders.  Up to this point we have only seen work in progress renders of still images, but soon we will be seeing fully lite animation.  On top of that we now have fur working on bink, so getting to see him in his final form is very exciting.

MMM-Project:
This is our client project we have been working on in addition to the “Bink” short.  This project has had a lot of challenges, but I have been learning a great deal from the experience.  Even more then what I learned from working on Bink.  Working on our own short we don’t have the added pressure of a deadline, but with a client project there are milestones, and a deadline I need to make sure I hit.  This means when you have a setback there is a lot more stress to make sure you get back on schedule.  This short has a very different look and feel then what Bink has, but it is really starting to come together.  I can’t wait until we finish the first episode, and can share it with you in July.

LA Society of Creative Professionals:
Last night we had our 9th society mixer at the Riverside Restaurant in Toluca Lake.  We have been getting a really great turn out for the last few mixers.  We have had a nice mix of regulars, and new people coming.

There are always great conversations, but last night I had a conversation with a few people which highlights a lot of the concerns artists in Los Angeles have.  We were discussing how an artist used to make much more money then what they make now for the same kind of work.  There is so much more competition then what there used to be, and people are willing to work for less to get the work.  It was mentioned how anytime someone takes a job for less then what it normally goes for then it drops the price industry wide.  Really this is simply basic economics of supply and demand, but it is having a real impact on these artists.

My experience is that often a client has a fixed budget, and are trying to get a project made.  It is a situation of you wither find a way to make their budget work, or you pass.  While a lot of senior artists want you to pass on the work forcing the client to raise their budget, but the reality is they will most likely find someone to do the work for what they have to offer.  These clients tell their friends and next thing you know no one wants to pay $1 for a service when they know it can be done for $0.90.

These are all valid concerns, but unfortunately this is the way things are going.  While it might seem to only be about money if what you have to offer is a higher quality you can still charge more for your service.  If communication is easier, or you provide better customer service you might also be able to ask for more.  As technology makes it easier to work with anyone anywhere the supply is increased.  As long as there are people willing and able to meet the demand at a lower price it is going to lower the rates industry wide.  There will always be a breaking point.  People can’t provide work without enough pay to cover their bills for to long.  They will either find a way to make it work, or go out of business.

I’m kind of stuck in the middle.  I have clients who want to get their project made, but have extremely low budgets.  If I want to try and make it work, then I need to find artists who are willing to work for less then their rate.  This often means looking for talent outside the US.  It really comes down to who can offer the best service at the most competitive price.  The hope is as I grow my company I can offer a higher quality, outstanding communication, and the best customer service, so I can ask for higher rates.

Business:
While running my own business has been challenging I’m still happy I made the decision to follow my dream.  I have learned something new every day, and I’m always working to improve the business. I spend a lot of my time in the evenings reading a lot of business related posts and articles.  If any of you have any suggestions for great business reading material I would love to hear about it. I enjoy reading Entrepreneur Magazine, and other similar publications.

I think it is fair to call EMAS an international company, since we have clients and artists outside the United States.  While most of our artists our in the US we do have a decent amount of artists outside the country.  Mostly in Southeast Asia as you can see on the map below.  It is interesting to think we have work being done on projects 24 hours a day.  This is also why I’m often responding to emails late into the evening, and as soon as I wake up in the morning.

EMAS-International

 

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

The Challenges In Starting An Animation Company

2 Replies

In my blog posts I often give updates on what my company is working on, and things I’m doing to try and grow it.  It might seem like starting an animation company is easy, so I wanted to share with you the challenges I face.

Building a Brand:
You might ask why building a brand is important, but as a service company it is very important.  Making animation is extremely expensive, and for my clients is a huge investment.  They want to make sure they can trust the company they are investing in to create their commercial, web series, or other animated video.  This has been a huge challenge for me, because I don’t have much of a reputation yet.  I have talked to a lot of other owners of animation or VFX companies, and many of them said it took awhile(around 10 years) before they started getting steady work.  I’m sure some of this had to do with them figuring out their business and target market, but they tell me a huge part was simply building their brand’s reputation. Sure they might have had enough smaller projects to keep the lights on, but it took awhile until the bigger opportunities started to reveal themselves.

Competition:
As you might have guessed there is a lot of competition in this space.  I’m competing against well established companies who are in a much better position to win jobs.  They already have their feet firmly through the doors of the bigger clients.

The other competition is from companies outside the US.  First, there is Canada with their amazing tax credits, and then you have areas like India, Korea, China, and South America to name a few with much less expensive labor costs.  The talent there is also getting better and better all the time.  I often get emails from foreign companies offering their animation and VFX services if I want to outsource any of my work to them.  I always ask them for what their rates are to see how they compare to US rates.  If I tried to match their rates with US workers I would not only not be able to pay the artists what they are asking for, but also not be making any kind of a profit.

Rendering:
This might seem odd to anyone who is not in animation, but this is a big hurdle for me.  For those of you who don’t know what rendering is it is the process of the computer figuring out what each pixel will look like to create an image based on the settings you put into the software.  It calculates the models, where the camera is, what kind of lens, how many lights, where they are coming from, their color, intensity, how they interact with the different materials on the objects in frame, and many other things.  For a more detailed explanation go here.

This requires very powerful processors to figure all of this out.  I remember when I was in college, and working on my animation project ChessMate(see image below).  I would work on the project late at night, and before I left I would setup 5 or more computers to work on rendering my project.  I would leave signs begging people not to touch the computers.  After rendering all night I would come back in the morning to check on them.   I did this every night for months until I finally finished.  It would take over 16 hours to render one 2 second shot, and often there would be errors requiring me to start the whole process over again.  Computers are now faster, but the graphics are much more intense.  We also now render in HD at resolutions of 1920 x 1080 if not much higher, and ChessMate was only 728 x 414.

ChessMate Scene 1

 

I’m getting a little off topic, but my point is it takes a lot of computer power and/or time to render animation. So far what I have been doing is having the lighting artist handle the rendering.  This should work for small projects, but as I get more clients I will need to figure out other options.

There are online render services, but they can get very expensive.  The other challenging part is you don’t know how long something will take to render until you can do test renders.  This makes it extremely difficult to bid out a project for a client when there is a big unknown of how much your render costs are going to be.  One frame might take a few hours to render, or it might take a few weeks to render.  Your 5 minute animation will have 9,000 frames, so you can see how those costs could add up very quickly.

If you want to try and control those costs a bit more then you are going to have to build your own render farm.  Now you are buying thousands of dollars worth of hardware which will be outdated, lets be honest, as soon as you buy it.  Not to mention you are going to have to have enough space to keep all this hardware. Have you seen pictures of Pixar’s render farm?  Here is an image I found online.

Data Storage and Transferring:
Now you know all about the rendering challenges, so what will you do with all these images these computers are creating?  One of the 3 second shots for the client project I’m working on is 12GB, and this could have been a lot larger.  Not to mention all the files needed to create these projects.  Anything from photoshop documents, Maya files, Final Cut files, and all the other files needed to make these projects before we even start rendering.

With a remote team I also have to have a way to transfer these files between the different people on the team.  I have been using Dropbox, but I’m quickly outgrowing this.  I had to get a Dropbox Pro which gives me 1TB(1,000 GB) of storage, but found each member of the team who is synced to the project folder also has to have this much storage space.  I need to find a better option, but regardless of what option I go with it is going to be another costly expense.

Staff vs Freelance:
Currently I’m the only full time staff at the company, and everyone else is freelance who is hired based on the work we have.  This works well to keep costs down, but it makes it difficult to build a company.  It is challenging to line up project schedules with freelancers.  You might have a great artist for a project, but you might have to find someone else for your next project because the last one is unavailable.

Freelancers also provide their own workstations and software which can be a good thing, but can also cause issues.  For example one of your artists might be using Maya 2014, and another is using Maya 2016.  Now you have the issue where they can’t open each others files.  Software version incompatibility has been a huge challenge for me. On the Toys’R’Us project we had to have extra versions of After Effects to open and save the files in order for another artist to be able to open the file on a different version of the same software.

Physical Studio Location:
Having an actual studio location would help in many respects.  For starters it would speed up the production of our projects.  Being able to lean over to the person sitting next to you and ask a question or get approval is much more efficient then sending an email, and waiting for a response.  It would also solve some of the other issues I mentioned above.  We could control the workstations, and make sure they are all using the same versions of the software.  There would be less data transferring, and we could actually store the data on our own servers instead of online storage options. This would all be great, but it would be an additional overhead cost.  I would need to make sure the business was bringing in enough projects, and enough income to cover the monthly office expense. Add to this having to buy all the workstations and software licenses, and you can see how quickly it would all add up.

The Unknown:
It is easy to plan for the challenges you are aware of, but what really scares me are the things I’m not aware of.  Running your own company you have to wear many hats, but in no way am I an expert in all these different areas.  I try and reach out to others for help when I can, but you know some things will slip through the cracks.  Anyone of these unknowns could be what brings down the company.

 

As you can see there is plenty to keep me awake at night, and you might think I’m crazy for taking on all these challenges.  Well, I might agree with you, but I also see a lot of opportunities in these challenges.  I have to be creative, and look for other ways to overcome the challenges.  I’m glad it is not easy, because otherwise everyone would be starting their own animation company.  The challenges take out all the people who are not really passionate about this industry.  I only hope the challenges do not also take me out.

 

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

The Sounds of Bink

Leave a reply

This will be a short post, since my time has been extremely limited lately.  I wanted to take a moment to talk about my experience with creating the sounds of Bink.

While I love music I have never really had a lot of experience with it in regards to production.  Which made these recent experiences very interesting to me.  I was very lucky to get to work with some extremely talented people who could make beautiful sounds from my unclear thoughts.

Carl Johnson is a composer and did the underscore for this episode of Bink.  I met him at the Animation and VFX World Summit at the end of last year.  He has worked on some really great projects over his career, and you can check out what he has done on his website.

I wanted the music to have themes which would hint at Bink’s backstory of him being from a seafaring species who travel around the oceans and deserted islands.  So I was imagining more tropical type of music themes, but at the same time the short take place in a colder dark environment.  I was worried tropical music might not work for the shorts environment, but I wanted to give it a try.  The other challenge is the short is only 30 seconds, so it does not give much time for the music to build up.  The different themes for each character had to come and go very quickly.

I tried to express to Carl the feelings and the different themes as best as I could, and then I had to trust in his talent to make it work.  I sent him 3 Youtube videos to give him an idea of the type of music I thought might work.

At the same time we started on the underscore we also started on the sound effects. Early last year I found Kate Finan on LinkedIn, and reached out to her about working together on future projects.  Her and her business partner Jeff Shiffman also recently started their own company, Boom Box Post.  A boutique post-production sound studio.  We setup a meeting between the three of us to discuss how we might help each other, and I was so impressed with what they had going on.  I started to look for opportunities for us to work together on, and Bink turned out to be a perfect project for a collaboration between our two companies.

A few weeks ago I met with Jeff to do a spotting session for the first episode of Bink.  I thought I had a pretty good idea of the sound effects I wanted, but Jeff asked a lot of great questions to really get me thinking deeper about what I wanted.  He also brought up suggestions of things to add I did not even think of, but I felt would really add to the short. After the session it was left in Jeff’s hands to craft the sound effects for the world Bink was in.

The timing worked out perfectly because in a few days Carl finished the underscore which allowed Jeff to mix it in for the first preview.  It was great to finally start to hear everything come together.  Once I gave my final approval of the preview we were ready for the final meeting to review the mix, and this meeting took place this last Monday.  Jared White, the editor working on Bink, and I met at Boom Box Post to give our feedback while Jeff played with the audio levels to make everything perfect.

This process really gave me a better understanding and appreciation of how music and sound come together. I’m really excited for what the team was able to do with my unclear thoughts and hopes.  I’m looking forward to hear what all of you think of it when I release the first episode(aiming for end of March or early April).

Bink Mixing Session at Boom Box Post

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog.  Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.