An enlightening interview with the heads of the Indian animation studio Padmalaya Telefilms can be found HERE. The execs discuss various topics like how the studio has its own training school, ZICA (Zed Institute of Creative Animation), which offers its graduating students a 100% job placement guarantee. They also say that to produce a half-hour of quality animation in India would cost $3 million rupees, or approximately $66,000 US.

I WANT YOU to join me and Disney producer Dave Bossert at a special screening, tonight, of 35mm restored prints of Walt Disney World War II cartoons.Asifa-Hollywood is celebrating the release of the landmark Disney Treasures DVD On The Front Lines at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.
We will be raffling off an advance copy of the DVD. Dave and I will discuss the restorations, how this dvd came to be, and the cartoons themselves.
The special screening will take place tonight, Tuesday, May 11, 2004, at 8:00 P.M.
Alex Theatre
216 North Brand Boulevard
Glendale, CA
General Admission Tickets: $10
Members of ASIFA-Hollywood - $7.00
Members of the Alex Film Society - $7.00
Purchase tickets online or call the Alex Theatre box office at 818-243-ALEX (2539).
More Info: www.alextheatre.org or www.asifa-hollywood.org

Animation voice actor Greg Burson, best known for Yogi Bear and Bugs Bunny (”Carrotblanca”) was arrested at his home in Tujunga. Early details of this story were reported by NBC. Police surrounded his residence for several hours this morning, in a locally televised standoff which included a SWAT team standing by. Burson later surrendered to police and has been charged with misdemeanor battery.

How Companies Keep Their Costs Down: Co-production

Imagine this scenario. You live in the United States, but when you turn on your TV, 95% of the shows come from Mexico. Yes, they’ve been dubbed into English, but the people, the stories and the locations are clearly not local to the U.S.

That is the scenario that faces people in other parts of the world. When they turn on their TV’s, they’re often seeing American programming. In order to keep local programming alive and to nurture a local industry, countries have instituted quota systems. They demand that channels broadcast a certain percentage of shows that are made locally.

The problem is that the local market is often too small to support local programming. Canada’s population is only 30 million people and when you divide them up into audiences for each channel, those audiences are pretty small. You can’t charge a high enough subscription fee or charge advertisers enough to pay for programming.

Countries sign co-production treaties with each other specifying that a show co-produced by two treaty countries will be considered local content in each country. A Canada-Britain co-production is considered local programming in both Canada and Britain.

The benefit for producers is that they don’t have to raise all the money for a show locally, only a part of it. This makes it easier to finance shows. Governments like this because it keeps people working locally and the government can claim that they’re protecting local culture.

There are two downsides to co-production. One is that while a producer only has to raise a portion of the budget, the total budget of a co-production is higher than if a single producer was raising all the money. That’s because you’re paying overhead in two countries instead of one.

The other downside is that co-producers are investors, not subcontractors. As a result, any profit has to be split. In addition, investors have creative input where subcontractors don’t. Each co-producer probably has a local broadcaster signed on, which means that all creative decisions have to be approved by a large number of people who are trying to tailor the show to their own agendas. This inevitably leads to creative compromises that weaken a show. I can say from personal experience that the creator of a show is sometimes ignored when those compromises are being made.

If the point of local programming is to reflect the lives of the audience, co-productions themselves are a compromise. However, from a producer and government standpoint, half a loaf of local culture is better than none.

This wraps up my simplified explanation of the TV animation business. There are more wrinkles than can be covered here. However, this is some of what a producer or creator face when trying to get a show financed and made. If you want to know why certain shows turn up on your TV or why other shows don’t, the answer is most likely based on economics.

Tipped by a reader, I made a trip to a local Best Buy in search of a intriguing DVD set of BLONDIE movies. I luckily found one copy and purchased it.
This is an officially licensed (by Hearst Entertainment) set of the first ten Blondie features, produced by Columbia Pictures, starring Penny Singleton (”Jane Jetson”) and Arthur Lake (”Seaman Hook”). The video company, Platinum Disc Corp. of La Crosse, Wisconsin, obviously thinks these are TV episodes, but you are getting ten full length features compressed onto two discs - for $9.99!These are the King Features TV versions, with 3 minutes of the middle of the movie preceeding the corny theme song and TV title sequence before the full feature (no original Columbia titles), and the prints are in good condition. It’s a helluva deal for ten bucks… almost as good as the sets of eight Abbott & Costello features Universal is selling for $24.99.While I was there I found another set of two DVDs sold together for $5.99 - SCI-FI: The Greatest Sci-Fi Cartoons of All Time has a large image of DO-DO THE KID FROM OUTER SPACE on the cover. Heck, I had to have that! Despite the cover claims of “Digital Restorations”, the DVD contains crappy 16mm transfers of P.D. cartoons such as DUCK & COVER, Colonel Bleep in The LUNAR LUGER, Harryhausen’s KING MIDAS, Pal’s Puppetoon JASPER IN A JAM, Hubley’s THE HOLE, Pintoff’s THE HUFFLESS PUFFLESS DRAGON, a couple of Fleischer SUPERMAN cartoons and a horrifying print of the “Stone-Age” cartoon GRANITE HOTEL. This was bundled with EXTREME FAIRY TALES (featuring Jiri Trinka’s EMPEROR’S NIGHTINGALE, Harryhausen’s RAPUNZEL, and Iwerk’s ComiColor shorts TOM THUMB, BREMENTOWN MUSICIANS and MARY’S LITTLE LAMB).For six bucks, that’s a heck of a lot of animation. I don’t reccommend these latter DVDs - but the price is right.

How Companies Keep Their Costs Down: Outsourcing

Because the number of channels is growing proportionally faster than the number of viewers, each channel gets a smaller piece of the audience. As channels earn income from subscriptions or the size of the audience they can sell to advertisers, it means that their income goes down. That leaves them with less money to pay for programming.

Producers get paid less for animated TV shows than they used to. If you’re not a multinational corporation that can put your show on many channels internationally to make up the difference, you have no choice but to try and reduce how much you spend to make a show. The two ways animation producers do this are to outsource or co-produce.

Outsourcing means sending parts of the production to countries with lower wages. In animation, this has been going on at least since the 1960’s. The producers of Rocky and Bullwinkle sent work to Mexico at that time.

The upside to outsourcing is that the production saves money. However, there are many downsides. Usually, a producer will invite several subcontractors to bid on the job. This will force down the price, as the subcontractors know they have to bid low in order to win the work. It doesn’t matter if the show becomes a hit, the subcontractor only gets paid once for the work. Therefore, it’s in the subcontractor’s best interest to spend as little as possible on the work in order to maximize the profit. The producer wants the best possible show for the money; the subcontractor wants the cheapest possible show for the money. Usually, neither party ends up satisfied.

Another problem is that the subcontractor is usually 10 or more time zones away from the producer. If the subcontractor asks a question, the answer usually doesn’t arrive until a day later. Often, it’s easier to do the work wrong and fix it in retakes than to slow down production to wait for an answer.

Subcontractors often take on more work than they can handle and end up subcontracting the work yet again. This leaves even less money available to do the job and lengthens the lines of communications even more.

Cheap work and poor communications sometimes threaten delivery dates. In order to hit a delivery, quality is often compromised. If a delivery is missed, it costs the producers money.

Because the point of subcontracting is to save the producer money, the producer is always looking for a cheaper supplier. As the world economy changes, it means that animation work migrates from country to country in search of cheaper labor. Animation has moved from Japan to South Korea to Taiwan to the Philippines and now is being done in India and China. Each country gets 10-15 years before its economic growth makes it too expensive to do animation. Then the work goes somewhere cheaper, where the artists are not as experienced and so quality initially goes down.

It’s not long after a country trains its workforce and starts turning out good work that the work disappears. There are Chinese and Indian artists who are being born as you read this who will grow up hoping to work in animation and who will find that the jobs are gone by the time they finish school. Artists, no matter what country they live in, always end up the victims of outsourcing animation.

Next installment: Co-production

Continuing our coverage of the Indian animation scene, here is an article from THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS that reports while India is expected to receive $2 billion worth of animation business in the next two years, there aren’t enough trained animation artists to execute that amount of work. The country currently employs 5000-6000 animation artists, and demand is expected to grow to 30,000 artists by next year. The talent shortage is so great that some studios have begun hiring billboard painters and having them retrained as animators. The article says that Ants Animation Training School will be setting up 50 training centers around the country by the end of this year, but Ashish Kapoor, CEO of animation studio JadooWorks, tells the newspaper: “The trained talent pool in India is not large enough to meet the potential demand. Animation requires very specialised training even for practising artists… India is not fully geared to take up this kind of work on a massive scale.”

(Article link via Deneroff.com)

The LA WEEKLY’s Nikki Finke writes a fascinating account of the childish behind-the-scenes maneuvering that went on during the recently concluded SIMPSONS voice actor negotiations. The six voice actors didn’t get the $360,00 per episode that they were asking for, but did get a raise from $135,000 to $250,000 per episode. They also received a signing bonus. Bart’s voice Nancy Cartwright sent an email to her fellow voice actors: “Although we didn’t get everything we were going for, we certainly made HUGE strides, not only for ourselves personally, but for the entire voice-acting facet of the industry.” Another interesting bit is that during the course of negotiations, the agents for SIMPSONS producer James L. Brooks demanded the actors send Brooks a letter of apology for putting their interests ahead of the SIMPSONS “community,” which meant the writers and animators.

Also I recently had a chance to speak with one of the artists on the show, and indeed the voice actor’s contract dispute has forced the Film Roman artists to take an extended and unpaid “vacation.” They were scheduled to receive a one-month hiatus in March/April, their typical break period in between seasons, but they’ve now been out of work for two months and counting as the show slowly finds its way back into production. On the bright side, Fox can use the money they saved from not paying the artists to make up for the increased salaries of the voice actors. As always, the only losers in this case are the artists working in the trenches.