Why Do Animated Movies Have $180 Million Budgets?

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 4:13 PM on February 24, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/KFE

Perhaps I’m uneducated in the ancient Hollywood art of Unit Production Management, but it’s baffling to me that WALL-E had a budget of $180 million. Yes, it was a gigantic Hollywood production, but consider the fact that all of its visuals were made by pressing buttons and waiting for the images to appear. Well, it was more complicated than that sounds, but that’s basically what they did.

So what exactly cost so much money? Without access to Pixar’s financial records, I’ll take a few guesses. But the short answer is that they’re spending way more money than they need to.

I’d imagine, from my experience, that some of the the biggest expenses in filmmaking are film stock, set construction, stunt coordination, and other tangible materials. Pixar requires none of that. The only materials they really need to buy are computer parts, which are relatively cheap on their own and downright bargains when bought in bulk. Yes, their concept artists need clay and paint and such, but that hardly seems like it would cost more than a couple thousand, even for a gigantic team of the kind of overzealous madmen who spend more than a week in an art school (i.e. me).

So that brings us to visual effects, which is essentially 100% of what you see on the screen. Yes, WALL-E and Happy Feet had live action bits superimposed, but anyone with access to a green screen and a DVX can imitate those. The actual CGI, though, is achieved by making a bunch of 3D models, texturing them, arranging them in a world, moving them around, and then pointing a virtual “camera” at various parts of the world to get the images you need.

It may sound simple (save for the whole “talent” part in terms of modeling, texturing, and animating), but to create the impressive visuals, Pixar needed a very large amount of polygons. Add to that the calculations necessary for lighting, post-processing (focus, motion blur, etc.), and spitting that out into 24 images per second at 4000 pixels wide, and you have something that requires a lot of very expensive computers to eat a lot of expensive electricity for a very long time.

Except it actually is as simple as I made it sound in the paragraph before that. Take a look at this video:

Impressive visuals. If you had never heard of Team Fortress 2, and that video cut off after the first 30 seconds, wouldn’t you imagine that perhaps this was an upcoming Pixar film (albeit more violent than their previous efforts)?

Now, obviously, this is actually a promotional video for a game. Let’s take a look at the game’s graphics…

Obviously not quite as impressive, but you’d be hard pressed to say that the Scout model in the game isn’t the same one in the Pixar-quality promo video. In fact, the line between the two is very blurry — specifically the fact that the promo video has more blur effects based on motion and focus. Well, that’s because it’s absolutely true.

Meet the Scout, rendered in Team Fortress 2, contains a significantly smaller amount of polygons on screen at a time than a Pixar movie like, say, The Incredibles. Can you tell?

inc-tf2

On close inspection, you can see that the Team Fortress 2 models are slightly more jagged than Mr. Incredible. However, it’s unlikely that you’d notice this unless you were looking for it in a freeze frame. In addition, Team Fortress 2′s models are actually far less complicated than those from many other video games. Take, for example, BioWare’s Mass Effect:


(Image from Gamespot)

There, slightly more complex models and the jaggedness is solved, but still significantly less intense than what Pixar does. And most blockbuster video games cost things that are considered “indie budgets” to Hollywood: Gears of War cost $10 million, $5 million less than the pretty much indie-produced film Slumdog Millionaire. And as you can see in that article, many games cost “crazy figures” like $30 million, which is still pocket change to Hollywood. Off-season movies like Taken cost somewhere around $25 million, for god’s sake. Now, if you were to take all the work on Gears of War related to getting the thing to run smoothly on an Xbox 360, and channel all that into putting the camera in the right places, pressing “render,” and letting three laptops run for 10 hours to give you a 2 hour movie, I’d imagine it would cost even less.

So now we’ve thoroughly debunked the myth that CGI is inherently expensive. What’s left? A-list voice talent? Yeah, I can see that being up there. And marketing costs a lot. Indie filmmakers would probably replace those two strategies “five of my friends” and “Twitter,” respectively, but I understand Hollywood’s obsession with such luxuries. That can’t account for all $180 million, though, can it?

Well, in addition to Pixar’s overkill in terms of hardware and technical complexity, they employ a gigantic amount of people, paying them salaries and such. That’s probably necessary because of the technical complexity of their animation.

In theory, a team of four passionate geeks who already have MacBook Pros and copies of Maya, Photoshop, and Final Cut could probably make a Pixar-quality film in their spare time. Perhaps it’s the massive, daunting complexity of Pixar films that discourage budding independent filmmakers from trying to compete using more efficient methods.

Or maybe they’re all developing video games instead.

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  • Bgurrl
    Mostly budgets are inflated for marketing. It gets people in the seats. People want to see what 180mill looks like. There are films that are inflated that couldn't possibly cost that much. This is especially the case when movies have limted locations, non-A list talent, payment of crew isn't a whole lot or at least average, but we are to believe some of the movies cost millions to make. Another thing if CG is making sfx so cheap then whey are we still paying 10 or more for tickets?
  • kendwebber
    The reason you see big $$$ attached to movies is in the way the finances are structured. They are produced to conform to ZERO PROFIT. Whatever comes in is how much the movie cost to make because everything is nickle and dimed out by using percentages. They do this because IF you have a profit then you pay taxes but if you have ZERO profit then you pay ZERO in taxes. This is why big actors will earn a cut, a percentage of the profits, so that in the end there is no profit left on the books. This is where all your millions go, divided up among the players and actors and the studio heads. The workers get paid chicken feed.
  • That makes sense on the level that I wouldn't put it past Hollywood to pull that crap, but didn't The Dark Knight bring in over $1 billion on a $185 million budget? If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean a $1 billion gross is a bad thing for the movie studio?
  • kendwebber
    Their budget for producing the movie may have been 185 but that one billion you mention is not GROSS profit because the big players are paid on percentages. All the major movie studios make ZERO profit once the books are figured. They pay the big talent in percents, the lesser talents get chickenfeed. Most of the money goes to studio heads who use it like their own private reserve to fund new movies, reinvestment and maintenance, and as a hedge against bad times, and when bad times come they can last for years sometimes bankrupting the studios themselves.
  • stephenconnell
    Pixar are successful because they seek perfection in their scripts as well as their animation. Pixar spend a long time developing their scripts because without a great storyline at this level of entertainment all you are left with are pretty pictures and nothing else. A well developed powerful storyline will pull people in even if the production isn't cutting edge because its the story not the window dressing that people are interested in.
  • alexanderpas
    Here is your awnser:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_film

    Check out Big Buck Bunny for example, for an animated short, and we have Valkaama and The Last Drug as real-life Full feature movies in development!

    I still think, the hardest thing to find is creativity.
  • frank111
    actors are expensive... software licences are expensive... see autodesk maya website how much that software cost per computer, to render 3d image using tons of computers, you need alot of licences.. that mean you need a lot amount of money, and that's just one software. thank god now there's open source software that can cut production budget..
  • And when open source software is used by a small independent team that happens to be composed of or be friends with people who are pretty good actors, amazing things can happen for no money.
  • stephenconnell
    I want to make an animated film based on a story I have written but following this discussion has educated me in the huge task involved in making an animated movie of reasonable standard. I love the story i want to
    animate any tips on getting going?
  • Work with what you have and think creatively. One option is to go with a cartoony art style that's not necessarily realistic but visually striking and interesting. Whatever you do, approach the story in a way you know you're capable of telling it.

    But a nice touch, even if you work in cartoony squigglevision, is to simulate depth of field. I do this by digitally blurring different parts of the image which I don't want to be "in focus"; you'll notice I do that a lot in Goliath. Focus is a filmmaking tool just like camera angle and framing, so it's nice to have in animation too.

    But the best thing you can do is know yourself, what you're capable of, and how you can make that awesome.
  • Sarah
    You are trying to make the point that it is unnecessary to spend that kind of money on an animated movie. Now, I need to ask you...what is the point of spending money on ANY movie? Why should people bother spending money on nicer clothing or cars? Why bother spending money on anything but the bare necessities?

    In other words...we do it because we can and we want to!
  • That Team Fortress 2 promo is NOT close to Pixar quality. Even with your comparison of stills you can see a huge difference in lighting. Not to mention you're comparing a full featured film to shorts from a video game... it takes a lot more to animate an entire film than a few seconds of fast paced animation... it's not really an apple to apples comparison.
  • The difference in lighting is caused by the use of hard light in the Incredibles still and soft light in the Meet the Scout still. Repositioning the key light (or, in animation terms, playing with the sliders) would likely bring them closer in aesthetic terms.

    Of course, I'd imagine something similar could be achieved with color correction. I'm on my phone at the moment, so I can't show you an example, but once I get back to Photoshop I'll see what I can demonstate with the input levels and contrast.

    I don't think you're correct that it takes much more to animate a feature-length film, at least in terms of technique. Time, definitely, would increase, but for an animated film focusing more on style than tehchnical innovation, video game models with post-processing would definitely work well. Pixar just does stuff because they can.
  • I disagree that it's just a matter of the type of lighting. There's a lot more depth in the incredibles shot--I'd say more light sources and a stronger knowledge of how to make those light sources work together. Anyone can stick a few lights in a scene and call it a day but to create realistic lighting and set a mood takes a lot of know how and finesse.
  • In this particular case, you're correct. I did open up the image in Photoshop to try and get the color balance in the Meet the Scout still closer to that of the Incredibles still. As you can see from the result, the depth issue wasn't fixed entirely.

    That's not to say more light sources and a stronger knowledge of how they work together is impossible unless you work at Pixar. If Valve had commissioned a trained cinematographer, he or she probably would have clicked the "Add Light" button a couple more times. Personally, I think bouncing a light off of the front-facing side of the crate, then turning down the exposure would make the background deeper. That's certainly within the capabilities of the software.
  • Joe
    Companies like Valve may be able to crank out a 5-minute animation relatively easily, but if you want to scale it up for an 80-minute feature film, they're going to have some exponential costs associated with it.

    Companies like Pixar aren't merely making movies. They are inventing new technologies as they go along. They didn't have realistic hair until Toy Story 2. Human skin didn't have subsurface scattering technology until the Incredibles. They used reflection occlusion heavily in Cars. Developing all these new techniques cost a chunk of money in R&D. Rendering a frame of Wall-E is probably more time consuming than rendering a frame back in the Toy Story days. Every year processors double in power, but the level of complexity of the scene triples.

    I should also note that Pixar writes a lot of the software themselves, because the off-the-shelf software that is available to you and me simply won't work when you scale it up. I can do a batch render on my desktop before I go to sleep and look at the results in the morning, but that software is not going to work when you're talking about 200 artists and thousands of processors.

    Pixar's render farm (as of The Incredibles) was probably around 2400 cpus . I read somewhere that one of the benchmarks they had consider was not how much rendering power it costs per dollar, but how much power they could cram into a cubic foot of precious render farm real estate. It's fortunate that Pixar doesn't have to pay a hefty software license to use its own RenderMan... or else that'll be another large chunk of change.

    The marketing and distribution costs is probably huge too. Think of all the TV airtime, billboards, bus stations, print ads that Disney unleashes prior to the release of a movie. That's also included in the $180 mil.

    The largest chunk I'm guessing, consists of the salaries of the crew. In the third and fourth year of a typical Pixar production cycle the crew swells to about 200 people (I checked the credits for Wall-E). These are the animators, the modelers, the texture artists, cg painters, layout, set dressing, shader writers and lighting artists. You need all of these steps to create a CG movie. Really.

    You can farm out some of the work to places like India to cut some costs, but in practice this rarely works out, because you can't farm out the knowledge and talent to meet the exacting standards that is required. Pixar only accepts the best animators, turning away many. They're an elite (sometimes cocky) bunch, and deservedly so. If the average American animator doesn't have the level of training that's going to make John Lasseter happy, what are the chances of one working from Bangalore? Maybe one day. But for now, not yet.

    But anyway, back to your original point.

    Do you have to do all that to make a successful animated movie? Probably not. As long as your story is solid, you can have a great feature film be it the South Park Movie or Wall-E. You might be able to do a 3-hour feature a la Don Hertzfeld stick figures, maybe.

    Pixar movies cost a lot because they're a bunch of perfectionists. You may not care if Bolt has a thousand bristlebrush hairs or a million smooth hairs, or whether the characters are smoothly subdivided or are made up of jaggy polygons, or if the animation is snappy and grounded as opposed to loose and floaty. But they do. You might not notice that 1/24th of a second flicker over on the top left corner of the screen, but these guys obsess over little details that seasoned CG artists may not even notice after the tenth viewing.

    If you have the money enough to buy perfection, wouldn't you spend it?
  • I guess I didn't make my intention for writing this very clear, given that most of the comments have been explaining to me exactly how many people are using how many yottaflops to make these movies. That's my fault, I suppose. I'm well aware of why Pixar spends $180 million on a single movie. What I meant to ask, though, is something more like "Is it really necessary?"

    It's probably better for me to make a follow-up post than to keep making this page approach 1747958261956 pixels in height (I can't find any plugins for collapsable comments that work with K2), so look for that later tonight. It'll be less focused on "why are they doing it?" and more on "why aren't you starving independent artists doing it?"

    (EDIT 3/4/09: Okay, make that later today. Been lazy.)
  • Brian
    One of the software engineers from Walt Disney, which works pretty closely with Pixar, actually came to MIT and gave a seminar somewhat related to this discussion. Mark was correct in assuming that the majority of the money is in salary. They hire artists, who draw up initial character and scenery designs, software engineers, to write programs to control certain aspects like herding in Lion King (simultaneously controlling hundreds of random objects) or wind blowing hair in Bolt (millions of independent hairs that have to move within a certain parameter), and managers, who act as mediums for the two. While old programs can be reused, like the herding or hair program, each character is unique in its facial and body structure and will have unique characteristics. If you look closely many of the random background people will have the same facial structure, with slight changes because it is so difficult to create new characters. Overall, they work with at least 20+ terrabytes of information they have to process. When they begin to reach a certain cap, they start deleting unessential information. They don't even bother to render scenes because it would take days just to render a scene that might be a few minutes long.

    The only way that indie film makers will ever have the ability to try to get on par with these guys would to have access to terrabytes of storage, a ridiculous amount of panel drawing, character, and scenery design, just as much time for coding, and an ungodly amount of processing time. Either you have to be a zealous nut and be willing to waste your life recreating wall-e or you can wait just as much time for the technology to come out.

    I'm pretty sure I left out more but I'm getting tired of typing. Sorry if that was kind of long. Just thought I should give my two cents on it.
  • Yes, terabytes of data are manipulated for having wind blow millions of different hairs. But why? Bolt is already very stylized, and having to simulate millions of individual hairs seems like overkill. If it were to simulate even just thousands of hairs, the amount of data and calculations would be reduced dramatically, and audiences wouldn't notice the difference with sufficient post-processing.

    Because major studios have the money to do all that, they don't feel it's necessary to "cheat" to produce a perfectly fine result for less. The entire reason for this post, though, is because Valve seems to have proved that such cheating is possible and effective, even if that wasn't their primary intention.

    By the way, entering "asdf@asdf.com" in the email field triggers my spam filter, and you also won't get notified that I'm replying to you. Just letting you know, if you come back to read this.
  • Markus Koivisto
    You completely disregard the price of labour, which is a fatal flaw in your judgment. $180 Million or even $30 million sounds like a lot of money, but you need to realize that the lion's share of all of this goes to pay the salaries of all involved. Consider a team of animators and programmers who each make $5000 a month. A gross understatement, but we'll let it stand. Well estimate a headcount of fifty people involved. How much does this talent cost? 3 Million in salary costs alone, each and every year.

    Now, the team for WALL-E was even bigger, and commanded even higher salaries. A brief look at IMDB[1] gives a cast of 300 characters involved in the making of the movie during a period of 4 years. This gives me a back-of-the-envelope figure of 72 000 000 dollars right there, using the same underinflated salary of 5000/month i used above.

    Using game engines for independent movie development is done. There's a whole genre of these movies out there, known as Machinima. These movies are however limited. You can choose to use the existing characters and settings, but you are thereby limited to said characters or settings and the somewhat limited animation tools provided by the game. You can of course develop new characters and settings, but that takes even more time and effort.

    How much time and effort? Recenly, Clear Skies was released as a particularly impressive bit of machinima. It was a macbook and four friends -type of project, that took two years of part-time work to develop for forty minutes of work, and this was with existing character animation simply repurposed for the task. The creator of this piece of work told in an interview that he'd be able to cut down the production time to 8 months in subsequent episodes, but that still leaves us with a daunting 5 minutes/month schedule for a dedicated amateur.[2]

    Animation is, simply put, hard and above all time-consuming work. A professional animator can churn out about 30-120 seconds per day, depending on the complexity of the task. There is no easy way around this. Even for a video game using special lip-synch software, the facial animation usually takes on the order of 90-150 seconds per day.[3]

    The same math applies to making movies in general. The set pieces etc. cost nowhere near as much as the labour and the talent needed to get things done in short order. Post-production is one of the biggest time- and money sinks in the production chain, and here again it's due to the vide variety of companies and people involved in the making of the movie that contribute to the budget.

    The old adage "cheap, quick, high quality - pick any two" certainly applies here. Getting high quality in a reasonable timeframe takes a hell of a lot of talented effort which doesn't come cheap.


    [1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910970/fullcredits#cast
    [2]http://www.warpdriveactive.com/2008/06/02/38-not-a-cloud-in-sight/
    [3]http://www.thirdwishsoftware.com/magpiepro_gallery.html
  • Actually, I didn't disregard the price of labor. I mentioned in the last couple of paragraphs that it was probably the reason why the budget was so enormous.

    The issue with machinima is that it's often quite literally done in the game. A video game isn't exactly friendly to someone who wants complete control over their images. That Clear Skies film you linked to was done in EVE Online, which has a user interface that's difficult to use even for playing the actual game. It's not surprising that it was no easy task.

    Valve's Source engine, by contrast, is open to anyone who buys a Source game and downloads the SDK. New animations can be created for all of the in-game characters, using a combination of external 3D programs or Source's own facial animation system. Or they can create their own models and drop them in. Mod-makers do this on a daily basis; a filmmaker using the same tools could create something rivaling Pixar, as Valve's promotional videos demonstrate.

    Most modern video game engines also have a lot of procedural animation functionality built in, so that can shave off quite a bit of work on all the nuances and variations that occur.

    Any independent filmmaker trying to finance their own production is going to find creative ways to imitate Hollywood without spending nearly as much money. It's something I'm working on right now, and hopefully by mid-April I'll have a final cut to demonstrate the results. Why limit that to live-action films, though?
  • Creative ways to imitate? How is imitation creative? The biggest fault you can make as an independent filmmaker is trying to imitate Hollywood! Why would you do that? Use your creative ways to create your own style, not imitate the faceless Hollywood style. Put your greatest effort into reducing your design, step away from realistic humanoids, how boring are they anyways?! Hell, you can make a movie containing only cubes as characters ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hddYiSixKGQ ). Learn some good storytelling, thats a filmmakers tool.
    And by the way, no animator can ouput 90 - 120 seconds per day of full animation! At least no quality animation. Limited animation like Southpark can output this kind of figure, but not the Pixar kind of thing. I don't think you really need the Pixar animation style to create great films, in fact it might even be hinderly. Just to give you an idea: a Disney or Pixar animator outputs between 3 and 10 seconds of animation per day! More rough animation, like the stuff done for series, takes a day to finish 10 to 20 seconds!
    Gosh, it took me 5 years and a couple of short films to figure out that I have to reduce my style even more to make a living as an independent filmmaker.
  • Markus Koivisto
    As for Valves promotional footage - a 95-second bit doesn't really compare with a feature film. It is impossible to recreate those 95 seconds of footage with the tools Valve has released. You need a lot of additional work. You can bet that behind that promotional spot was several days of custom animation. And that precisely is my point: you can't bring that time down if you want to do something custom. 30 seconds of animation is still going to take all day, and you can't bring that down by an order of magnitude no matter what tools you use. Consider the above for a moment. That spot took anything from one to five days to animate.Extrapolate from there to a feature film, and you can quickly see that there is no real time saved.

    Clear Skies was an amalgamation of the Source engine with specific tools for posing and animation, combined with EVE online footage chromakeyed in, which you'd know if you'd looked into it. It really was a split approach, and the Source engine tools you specifically referenced were definitely used. The most time-consuming part was the facial animation, since even though the facial animation was provided by the engine, every phoneme still needed to be extracted and timed.

    It becomes painfully obvious to me that you haven't been involved in any animation work. People always underestimate the duration of tasks they don't understand. Animation is time-consuming no matter how you slice it.

    The reason why machinima can be faster is that you use premade animations to create your content. You are essentially combining canned goods to make your film. As long as you are relying on the work of the character animation of the game company, you are able to make great progress. If you want to do something other than the canned bits of animation, you are SOL and have to start the time-consuming process of animation again.

    If you are not using the canned animation work provided by the character animators at the game company, you are not really saving any considerable amount of time. Red vs. Blue for instance, is rather simple to churn out since they did not have to do any custom animation. However, this does show in the end result, which is not quite Pixar-quality to say the least.

    The examples you quote (Mass Effect, Valve promo spots etc.) are all the results of much custom animation, and not something that can be replicated easily. Procedural animation is a red herring - things like IK and skeleton animation is of course used in any reasonable animation tool already, and is not something unique to game development. The same tools are available to the animators at Dreamworks or Pixar or what have you.

    I suggest you pop over to Machinima.com and take a good look at what kind of work is being produced with the four friends and a macbook -toolkit, and then think about the limitations of the medium for a while.
  • You're correct, I haven't been involved in any major 3D animation work. I have, however, done fifteen seconds of fairly minimalist two-dimensional animation, and I'm going to estimate it took me an absolutely ludicrous 30 hours over the course of a couple days.

    I've looked at a wide range of machinima, and I'm well aware of the limitations, and what it is. I apologize for only taking a cursory glance at Clear Skies, I simply assumed it was similar to the rest of the machinima I had seen.

    However, I think you were misinterpreting exactly what I've been trying to say. I don't feel that raw machinima, at this stage, can rival Pixar, and I'm not suggesting independent teams try to imitate Pixar to the letter with video game-quality art assets. I'm suggesting drastic innovation and experimentation.

    You're right, it is impossible to recreate the 95 seconds of Valve's footage with the tools they've released. Source Filmmaker is not available to the public yet. Regardless, tools like it aren't the be-all and end-all of quick, cheap, quality animation. From what they've said about it, it is used only for choreography, motion blur, and depth of field. The custom animations still have to be produced in another animation program.

    That animation program doesn't necessarily have to be the time-consuming keyframe programs like the ones used by Pixar. Procedural animation is used in video games, even ones in development by small teams like Wolfire. Obviously, as their more detailed example shows, this can't account for the entirety of an animation; that's the exact principle on which professional software like Endorphin works, supplementing keyframe animation with procedural.

    But keyframes can be cut back even further with recent motion capture techniques that don't necessarily have to be expensive. Benjamin Button used a special camera to overlay CGI in real time, but what if a similar technology were used for rotoscoping digital video? Combining a technique which was originally demonstrated by researchers in 1999 with face (or other body part) tracking, it would be possible to capture an actual actor's performance from a single camera angle, then apply the same animation data to a compatible model.

    Perhaps an integrated and easy suite of tools to do all this doesn't yet exist. But programming things like that have been done by four friends and a MacBook, and they've often been released open source.
  • Markus Koivisto
    There is at least one false assumption here that should be cleared up. Animation studios already use a wide variety of tools to speed up the animation process. Don't for a moment kid yourself and think that mocap and procedural animation isn't already used in feature-length animations. It is, and extensively, whenever it makes sense to do so. In fact, it is used first in those instances before it ever becomes viable to do with games.

    Mocap doesn't make things any less time-consuming either. Instead of animating, you end up shooting real footage with real actors, motion capturing it, and cleaning up the result. You are just trading one set of problems for another.

    What I'm trying to say is that there is all kinds of research that is being done on how to animate quickly. This research is being driven by the needs of the VFX and CGI industry, and they are of course the first to benefit from new developments in the field.

    For an indie filmmaker getting into the CGI field, the learning curve is steep. The tools aren't there yet, as you say, and I would go one step further and say that they will probably never be, since the bar is constantly pushed higher.

    Questioning why Pixar chooses to spend the amount of money doesn't really lead anywhere. The simple answer is that a feature-length production with the level of quality they aim for in any reasonable timeframe will always require a large team, and large teams cost a lot of money. Of course, Pixar is pushing the envelope, so they are doing a lot of R&D. If they wouldn't stray from the beaten path, they would be able to create more of the same far cheaper, but that's not what they want to do. They have the resources, and they are turning a good profit, so I would say they could in fact throw MORE money at more challenging problems, not less.

    Where does this leave the small team? As with live-action, small team should concentrate on their unique strengths and the power of their vision to turn their limited resources to their advantage. It doesn't really matter which approach you choose, the important thing is to know it so that you can concentrate on the story instead of the tools.

    If the story is compelling, and the basics of good filmmaking are there, the audience will be sucked in and won't care what you used to create your movie. Learning the latest and greatest technique will leave you chasing a moving goalpost instead of getting up to speed and actually producing your movie.
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