The Business of Animation
Budgets and Schedules
Welcome to the entertainment business where art meets high finance. You can create a film yourself but it is a time-consuming and expensive hobby.
The entertainment business is a mix of art and business so it is necessary to understand organizational procedures. It is important not to let them interfere with the creative process. The reverse is also true in that the creative process should not interfere with the telling of a good story. The audience is buying tickets for the experience of seeing a good story. During the "second golden age of Disney animation", Jeffrey Katzenberg told the crew that he wanted to win the "fill-in name of big bank" award. I remember many of the crew were upset at hearing this. My thought was that if he wins the "fill-in name of big bank" award, then we get to keep our jobs and have fun making more movies. Never forget, show business is art AND business and can't exist without both. If you want to make movies for yourself and you’ve won the lottery, then go have fun.
The job of the producer is to hire all of the talent and create a schedule and budget for the production. He or she uses this to run the production and satisfy the investors that they're getting their money's worth. You'll need to create a sequence and shot breakdown of all your scenes and track your progress with a weekly pipeline and budget schedule if you're in a production environment.
Work out your problems at the storyboard stage where it doesn't cost much time, energy, or money to make changes. Even before you storyboard, you should thumbnail first as a planning tool. The script stage is too early to make changes. Even a perfect script (if there is such a thing) is going to involve changes because it's a different medium—words versus imagery. It's like translating from a different language. Unfortunately, many people don't acknowledge this fact.
During my years at Disney I watched Jeffrey Katzenberg's progression from this mindset to the realization that animation writing really starts when the writers meet the storyboard artists on the boards. The films where I've witnessed this collaboration between writers and storyboard artists have all been very successful. I know this to be true of Piglet's Big Movie, which I directed. Writer Brian Hohlfeld was in the trenches with our story crew and it really helped create something bigger than all of us could have done working individually. Piglet would have been proud.
Budgeting is the process of estimating what a film will cost. I'd just like to give an overview of this process so you're aware of some of the basics. In a large production costs are broken down into many areas:
- Overhead of the actual facility where production is housed, including utilities.
- Licensing costs for music.
- Legal fees for contracts, insurance.
- Talent costs for voice actors.
- Computer facility setup costs and maintenance of the pipeline.
- Above-the-line talent, including directors and producers.
- Below-the-line artistic talent and managerial support.
- Marketing and distribution costs (surprisingly, large studios spend almost as much on this area as they do on the actual production).
I'm sure there's many items I've probably forgotten but I just wanted to give you an overview of how much is involved with budgeting and scheduling an animated production. Let's consider a simplified production schedule.
This takes the form of a spreadsheet which shows how the production is supposed to go. Each column represents a week of production. Each phase of production is listed sequentially along each row. The production elements flow from one department to the next. So as the production progresses the boxes move toward the right. Different studios will have different variations of this chart according to their own needs. For example, the production section might be broken down into its component stages—animation, cleanup, inking etc.
The budget then comprises the fixed costs plus the weekly production costs. Figure out how many feet of animation are in the project and divide that by the number of weeks in your production schedule. Now you have to divide that number by how much an average animator can animate in a week. Next you have to multiply the weekly salary of the artists by the number of weeks. Using similar math, each department will have its own number of employee costs. There will be many more animators than checkers or editors. Then you simply add up all the subtotals.
- (Total footage/weeks in schedule) = Footage per week.
- (Footage per week/Average per animator) = Number of animators needed.
- (Number of animators) x (animator weekly salary) = Total animators’ weekly salary.
- (Combined total for each department) x (number of weeks) = Talent production costs.
Problems arise when one department falls behind schedule because it means people downline of that department will have nothing to do. This will cause extra costs above the anticipated costs. These delays can be very expensive when the overruns involve overtime pay.
Luckily, if you're making your own film this process is a lot simpler. Or if you're working for a studio, you don't need to worry about it. You just need to do a great job so that the film will be wonderful and make lots of money.