Here is a message from Treat Studios co-founder Matt Layzell:

Thanks very much for the attention but we’re not actually connected to the film director Danny Boyle. We are a new animation studio based in London although Daniel Boyle, who works in our team, is a talented animator and illustrator from Kingston University, where we all met. Its easy to see where the mistake has been made and we’re not sure how this rumor got started but just wanted to clear it up. Thanks again for posting us on the site as I am a regular reader of cartoon brew and hope your readers will still want to check out our films.

Danny Boyle, director 28 Days Later, Trainspotting and this year’s early Oscar frontrunner Slumdog Millionaire, has started an independent animation studio with five young and talented British animators: Julia Pott, Robin Bushell, Will Crook, Matt Layzell and Alex Robinson. It’s a little unclear as to why he’s chosen to align himself with these particular artists or what they’re planning to do, but they recently posted a Halloween viral (see below) to promote themselves. Their website TreatStudios.com offers nothing at the moment except a playful bit of animation about trees and paper.

According to /film, Boyle had previously tried to create an animated project but gave up, telling the Hollywood Reporter: “You talk about indie financing being troublesome — animation is so expensive because you can’t estimate how long its going to take. On most films, if you haven’t stopped after 12 weeks, they’re going to stop you anyway, whereas an animated film can go on for years and years.”

Also interesting is this comment from Boyle to ComingSoon.net in which he talks about how animation is a “weird different discipline” because it means he has to give up some of his control to the process:

“It’s a weird different discipline, it’s very strange. You’re more like a ringmaster, kind of organizing this huge army of illustrators who can change the movie. It’s really weird. They often do scripts and they have no gags in them at all, but then you see the finished film and it’s full of funny gags, and they say that it’s not in the script, that all comes through the process of the animators. It’s like learning the skill of letting certain ones of them off their leash to do the gags.”

(Thanks, Rohit Iyer)

Not enough people talk about animation budgets and salaries and I think that’s a shame. It’s hard to produce good work without knowing what it costs to make something. Brad Graeber, creator of Captain Capitalism, was faced with this situation recently and decided to actually do something about it. For the past year, he’s been researching animation budgets and has created this unbelievably useful interactive animation budget chart that shows animation budgets from the 1920s through today. The graph allows you to view production costs by minute, second, foot and frame. Brad writes a lot more about the project on his blog. Hopefully this spurs even greater discussion in the industry, especially about music video, commercial and Flash animation budgets, which seems to be where a lot of people underprice themselves nowadays. Brad has provided a super-valuable service for professionals and students alike and we should all thank him.

The new blog Market Saw keeps readers updated about the latest 3D craze sweeping the feature animation biz (and movie industry as a whole). The site also has a list of upcoming 3D features including major studio films like Bolt, Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, Frankenweenie and Ice Age 3, as well as some animated features I hadn’t heard of such as Gaumont’s Boat and New Line’s Planet 51. This Wall Street Journal piece gives more background on the growth of 3D movies, and this page offers the perspective of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is one of the technology’s biggest proponents and has announced that all of DreamWorks’s animated features from 2009 onward will be produced in 3D.