Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0.

My friends and I formed Plankhead to produce the series. At the beginning of 2011, we released the first full-length, 25 minute episode — a pilot that we pitched not to a TV network, but to the Internet. We were able to raise enough money from individual donors to make a second one, which came out astronomically better than the first. Naturally, we’d like to continue the series — we have five more episodes planned, and we’re starting on the third in the next few weeks. But this isn’t just yet another crowdfunded indie project.

Your Face is a Saxophone started out as an assault on advertising. Since it began, I’ve realized that the problems with advertising are just one part — along with the copyright monopoly, unchecked greed, the pursuit of censorship, and other problems — of the holistic problem that is the ancien régime of the corporate entertainment industry. Much like these motivations, Your Face is a Saxophone is a part of a larger whole; a prototype for how to produce, promote, and proliferate culture in complete opposition to the problematic habits of the copyright industry.

I certainly hope you find the show entertaining. But even if you don’t, let me explain why you should still help it succeed:

The Problems

Advertising
In conceiving the project, I decided I was fed up with advertising-supported media. Humanity had created the Internet — possibly the most empowering technology of the millennium — and yet had failed to come up with a better way of sustaining its contents than by splattering ads all over everything. At best, it’s annoying and ugly — São Paulo, Brazil mayor Gilberto Kassab famously called advertising “visual pollution” when banning billboards in 2006. At worst, advertising has a chilling effect on free speech, making it too unprofitable to say something that corporations disapprove of.

So, I decided to prove that a full-length TV show could be made without advertiser support — by making it something that nobody in their right mind would want to sponsor.

But how to finance a show without ad dollars? There’s grants, but that just gives the veto to governments or private foundations instead of corporations. No question: it would need to come from individual fans — the people who actually care about the message. So, that’s why we crowdfunded Episode 2 of Your Face is a Saxophone, and plan to continue that.

Obviously, crowdfunding alone can’t go very far; Mike Masnick reminds us often that “Give it away and pray” isn’t a business model. That’s why many independent creators make their money selling T-shirts, mugs, mousepads, posters, and other merchandise. Except that falls into the trap of…

Selling a Product
The chief reason why the copyright industry is running around with its head cut off is because its products — music, movies, news, information — are no longer products. Everything digitized can, and will, be made available for free, regardless of its creator’s wishes. You can’t sell a non-scarce good.

Obviously, many companies and artists still try this by “selling” digital downloads. But it’s been said that the way to compete with piracy is to respect your customers; selling a glass of tap water is not respectful to your customers.

Whereas the old guard tries to recreate the scarcity of information by lobbying to destroy our civil liberties, more nimble independent players simply find new scarcities to sell. This often takes the form of merchandising, which the copyright industry does its fair share of as well.

But that runs into another problem: everything can, and will, be digitized. Why buy an official T-shirt, poster, mug, or mousepad when you can print your own? 3D printers are set to drop in cost, increase in capability, and pervade society through the next decade, making the sales of merchandise into a very short-sighted business plan.

Merchandising also alienates the audience, reinforcing the false dichotomy of producer and consumer. It turns the art into yet another advertisement, and the fans into nothing but customers for the mass-produced crap which the art is hawking. Speaking of which…

Monologue Culture
When you hear the term “consumerism” thrown around, you often think of what I just alluded to: people being sold a bunch of crap in massive quantities. But the copyright industry fosters another type of consumerism: the consumption of monologues.

Most media takes the form of a creator or author communicating a message to the audience. The audience’s response, input, or thoughts do not matter, because they can’t change the message. This isn’t inherently a bad thing — indeed, it’s often a good thing for one person’s message to be communicated without meddling from others. The problem is that the audience doesn’t feel invested in the message. It doesn’t feel like it’s theirs.

The works which foster large, devoted fanbases are the ones which capture an audience’s imagination. A well-built fantasy world will inspire thousands of fan-fiction spinoffs; a great piece of music will inspire thousands of cover performances; a video game is already more engaging simply because it’s interactive, but open, hackable code will inspire thousands of modifications. Works like these do get the audience invested, and give them a sense of ownership.

This creates two challenges. First, not every story worth telling, song worth performing, or creation worth creating has the capacity to inspire direct remixing; Hitchcock’s Psycho isn’t the most fertile ground for a fan-fiction movement, for example. That point, I’d like to get back to. For now, let me digress with the second challenge: the fact that the copyright industry makes such creative communities illegal.

Creative Monopolies
Through use of the copyright monopoly, the industry acts as an oppressive creator’s guild. If you’re not a member of their inner circle, they don’t want you to be creating anything. They can achieve this because there is no such thing as “originality” in creative work; everything is based on, built on, or inspired by something that came before. Sometimes, the best new work comes from directly appropriating the past.

This is what makes the copyright monopoly so powerful. Hollywood can license a soundtrack of popular music, but an independent filmmaker cannot. Live performance venues cannot exist without paying licensing fees to the Big Three record companies, just in case a performer does something that might intersect with a copyright. Spinoffs and sequels to stories are the exclusive domain of the original publisher, and fan-fiction is regularly intimidated or sued out of existence. These are just a few examples of the hundreds of ways in which copyright monopolies are used to financially repress artists outside of the guild.

The attacks on civil liberties by the copyright industry aren’t about irrational fears of piracy or lost sales. The executives in charge aren’t that stupid; they’re well aware that the entertainment industry is growing, not shrinking. It is chiefly about stifling competition from the masses themselves. They fear that if we can meet all of our entertainment needs with YouTube videos, independent music, local art communities, and other such things, then we’ll no longer want to watch their TV and movies, listen to their music, read their books, or play their games. And they’re right. As Clay Shirky said in his legendary TED Talk, “Time Warner has called, and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming, not producing, not sharing. And we should say no.”

The problem is, having entrenched themselves and stifled competition for over a century, the copyright industry has our work cut out for us.

Nowhere Else To Go
While I was drafting this post, Paul M. Davis of Shareable happened to put out an article describing many of my concerns. Davis is ambivalent towards Techdirt’s Sky is Rising infographic, and writes:

For the truly DIY — the creators with limited resources who live precarious lives to pursue their passions while navigating an ever-changing media landscape — the effect of the Internet is far more complex than optimistic infographics and studies often suggest.

[A]s traditional sources of industry support (promotion, distribution, and simple business admin) crumble, it can take longer for indie artists to reach the critical mass of audience awareness to quit their day jobs. In the meantime, the workload for creators has increased, until they begin consistently making enough money to hire others to handle the additional labor that the Internet adds to the equation.

It’s unquestionably a good thing that the Internet is dismantling the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly, but its promise of eliminating their stranglehold on promotion hasn’t been fully realized. Before the Internet, creative people had to play the lottery, hoping that a corporate agent would notice them and scoop them up. Now, creative people still have to play the lottery, hoping that somebody with a large social network will notice them and tweet a link to their website. The odds may be better, but it’s still a raw deal.

The notion that artists need to work a day job until they one day “make it” is a tragedy, not a desirable component of a healthy society. As I’ve touched on previously, distracting people by forcing them to worry about meeting their basic needs holds back human progress. The copyright industry has done a poor job of solving this problem, but thus far, so has the Internet. As Davis says, DIY promotion for an unknown artist is still absurdly difficult.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand, in fact. The second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone was released at the end of October 2011. The reason you’re seeing this article months later is because working full-time on its production bankrupted me. When I said we’d raised enough money to make the episode, I was referring to buying new equipment — there wasn’t much left over to cover anybody’s cost of living. While finding and keeping a day job, I neglected to open-source the assets and project files, enact a promotional strategy, finish subtitling the new episode, or do much of anything that I’d needed to. Being unable to pay one’s bills is, as you can imagine, very distracting.

The Solution

It’s these problems that we’d like to tackle with Your Face is a Saxophone, using it to lay the groundwork for a new creative culture. Others may have pioneered the bits and pieces I’m about to describe, but it’s time to put them together in a cohesive, intentional whole.

Free and Open Source
Your Face is a Saxophone is CC0 Public Domain. Once an episode is finished and released, it belongs to the commons, irrevocably. We wouldn’t be able to enforce any copyright monopoly on it even if we someday lost our minds and wanted to.

Furthermore, it will be entirely open source. All art assets, audio, project files, and (if feasible) renders will be made available to the public. We’ll use as many open formats as possible (sadly, I haven’t had the time to learn Blender, so the first two episodes’ project files are in the propirateary (that’s not a typo) Apple Motion 5 format).

We won’t use creative monopolies, and through open source, we’ll chip away at the monologue culture problem. To further attack that…

Selling a Process
As my experiment in impromptu filmmaking shows, people enjoy creating things — and it’s not just self-described “artists” who find the creative process to be just as entertaining, if not more, than experiencing the final product. This is why video games which spark people’s creativity — for example, anything that Will Wright has ever been tangentially involved with — have proved to be so massively popular.

But not every message worth communicating can be expressed in an interactive medium. There will always be a place for monologue media — for immutable text, sound, or imagery comprised solely of the vision of its author(s). That’s why we need to blur the line between audience and author, consumer and producer, by bringing the fans into the creative process.

We can’t — and shouldn’t — finance Your Face is a Saxophone by selling access to the finished episodes. Instead, we sell access to the community. Everyone who contributes any amount of money to Your Face is a Saxophone becomes a producer of the show.

To describe what that means, here’s an excerpt of an email I sent to current producers a couple weeks ago:

Though Plankhead does provide entertaining things to the world, it’s not — as people who wear suits and have far too high incomes would say — our “core business”. We don’t aim to sustain ourselves (or, in suit-speak, “make money”) by saying to people, “You are the audience”. We do that by saying, “You are the artist”.

If you’re receiving this email, then you were instrumental in the creation of Your Face is a Saxophone. That makes you an artist, because you brought art into being. You’re all artists. Guilty as charged.

And you know how else you’re all artists? Have you ever heard a song, and then hummed it to yourself in your head for hours and hours afterwards? Have you ever quoted a movie to your friends? Ever gone halfway through a terrible pun, put on sunglasses, finished it, and then screamed YEAAAAAAHHHHH? Those are all creative acts. Even if you didn’t make up any original words or sounds, performance — even if nobody’s watching — is creative. You’re all artists.

Everyone has that burning drive to create. Some people have it during urination; they should probably see their doctors and get tested. For everyone else, Plankhead is here to help.

Enough of this abstracty mumbo-jumbo. Let’s talk concrete stuff:

For Episode 3 of Your Face is a Saxophone, we’re going to keep you updated, every step of the way, with production. And you know what I want you to do? Respond. Make comments. Make suggestions. Throw us ideas. Help us create this thing. If you think something should be animated differently, let us know. If you think there’s a hilarious prop missing from a background, tell us. Maybe you can even draw it for us and we’ll put it in. If you think Dave needs to re-record a line because he’s not making Blake sound enough like an adorable idiot, say so. Be a part of the process.

We’ll be putting up wikis and forums and stuff to make this kind of thing easier, but also suggest ideas for how we can share the production process, and get your input. Help us create the creative process.

For future episodes, we’ll also be letting you into the writer’s room. I’ve only written the scripts up until Episode 3, so I’m going to need everyone’s help to flesh out the stories for the remaining four episodes.

YFIAS isn’t just a prototype of a new way to finance art. It’s also a prototype of a new way to create it: having the community involved every step of the way, blurring the line between fan and creator.

This will effectively make our revenue stream completely indifferent to file-sharing. It won’t even be possible to lose a “sale” to a free download, and we’ll be able to brag that we have a 0% piracy rate.

For-Progress, Not For-Profit
We reject the notion that art is an investment that needs to be recouped. It is a desirable end in and of itself. The copyright industry views art as an incidental logistical concern on the path to making money; if they believed they could make more money selling toilet paper, they’d do it. This is the root of the problems that they cause.

I’m not seeking personal financial gain from Your Face is a Saxophone; my cost of living just happens to be a necessary expense of the project. And I’d wager that most artists feel exactly the same way about their work.

We’ll use the success of Your Face is a Saxophone to build Plankhead, our organization, into a support network for artists. A cooperative media company, owned and operated by its creative workers. Were I pitching it to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist — people who like to hear things like “it’s an AirBnb for Facebook games” or whatever — I’d call it “a Mondragon for media”. When we get to that stage, we will promote any work in any medium that is A) technically competent and B) willing to be released under CC0 — and finance it if possible. We’ll do our best to keep personal taste out of the vetting process, because all art has a right to exist.

Ultimately, the goal is not to make artists fabulously wealthy; it’s to keep them fed and clothed so that they can concentrate on creating things.

How You Can Help

To make this happen, we need producers and volunteers.

Today, I’m setting a new fundraising goal of $3000. That amount of money would allow me to devote my full time to animating the third episode for three or four months. If we raise even more than that, we might be able to add a second or third animator to speed the process along. You can contribute and become a producer through our donation page.

We also need people who can help produce, promote, and proliferate the show. A comprehensive list is on our volunteering page, but a few examples include:

• Subtitle translators
• Torrent seeders
• Social network/blog promoters
• Web technicians/designers
• Python coders who can figure out how to automate the “lip”-sync animation so that we can switch to Blender already (or anyone who can help us switch to Blender in any way, for that matter)

People who make significant volunteer contributions will probably get producer status out of the deal.

Ultimately, we need you to help us prove that this works. Let’s give the world hard, concrete evidence that even a traditional TV-length show with no copyright protection whatsoever can be successful. Let’s show that we don’t need to create a false pretense of buying and selling digital “goods” to sustain artists. Let’s validate the idea that art for art’s sake is something that society values, believes in, and wants to exist.

This tense situation leaves a burning question in the mind of everyone in the world: what would this situation be like if the disputed Iranian President were a tarantula?

This femto-length film is my attempt to answer that question:

For a larger display size, see the film’s official page.

I don’t have much to say about this, as I feel it speaks for itself. I should mention, though, that once I figured out the best workflow, this film took an average of under one hour of work per second of finished animation. It’s 268 seconds, and I completed all the art, animation, and sound editing in less than a week. Granted, about 36 hours of that work happened consecutively; I totally would have done stuff like eat and go to sleep if it wasn’t due at 6 PM yesterday (it was a project for my Editing class). Nonetheless, a 3600:1 ratio of work vs. finished footage is, I’m willing to bet, significantly lower than mainstream hyper-expensive Hollywood productions, and would probably be feasible for a high quality film if only I was working with someone who was good at drawing. I’m not implying that I created a Pixar-quality film, but it’s technically on par with Dragon Ball Z, if not artistically.

Also, Kyle Gabler is awesome for letting me use his music in this. He originally composed the three songs spliced into this for World of Goo, which is way up there with Grim Fandango and Portal on my short list of Games You Should Play Before You Die But Preferably Right Now. So after watching this movie, go get World of Goo. Here are fifteen links to the exact same page at which you can do this.

Pixar has $180 million to spare, and doesn’t mind having hundreds of people manipulating 400 yottabytes to create one film. Good for them. But that shouldn’t scare off the rest of us.

The barrier to creating great looking animation doesn’t seem to be time, money, or resources; it’s the misconception that those, in fact, are an obstacle. Video game developers constantly show us that there is the potential for great looking visuals without an excessive amount of polygons. The reason video game graphics don’t yet rival Hollywood CGI isn’t because there isn’t enough processing power for detail, but that there isn’t enough processing power for implying detail.

Simple depth of field can dramatically improve a low-detail image. By simulating the focus of a camera lens, not only is a more photographic look achieved, but strategic use of it can remove most of the ugly portions of an image. This is possible in Valve’s Source engine, and can look great, but it’s not practical for video games; about two frames of it per second can be rendered in real time. But movies don’t need to be rendered in real time – a three minute high-definition sequence from Final Cut can take up to half an hour to render on my laptop, but after that it plays back smoothly; Pixar, by contrast, produces films that would take a single supercomputer several million hours to render (that’s why they have a ton of supercomputers), and they too can be contained within a smoothly-playable video file. But by taking graphics which could, theoretically, be rendered in real time, then rendering it with realistic looking blur and smoothing effects at two frames per second, an independent animator wouldn’t need to have access to supercomputers with enormous hard drives to make a film.

Perhaps I was too quick to call Meet the Scout on par with The Incredibles or WALL-E. Jenni Chasteen‘s comment about the lighting design was spot-on – Pixar has people who know cinematography, and Valve isn’t nearly as experienced. I disagree that it’s not even close, though; while it’s not great for photorealism, “cartoony” CGI is very possible to do with just a video game engine and blur effects.

Valve’s promotional movies may not be Pixar-quality, now that I think about it, but the technique and technology has the potential to be. In the hands of talented filmmakers, it’s wonderful for compositing onto live action. Is extending it to a full animated film that much of a stretch? I doubt it, myself.

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.

UPDATE: I guess this piece got high up in some common Google query, because I’ve had a lot of vicious comments on it over the years. So let me explain: This article is from 2009. I was nineteen when I wrote it. I also wrote this follow-up piece clarifying what I meant to say, which apparently isn’t as popular on the Googletubes. Anyway, this is a terrible post. I was trying to encourage people to innovate with low-cost animation, but the following is a completely ridiculous way of saying that. Please stop getting angry at me.

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?

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.

Anyway, here’s a 15 second movie depicting Nintendo employees as people with D-Pads for heads:

If you’d like to see it in HD without full-screening it or if you’re reading this on a “mobile device,” check it out on YouTube.

I call this a “femto-length” film because it’s astronomically shorter than a “short film,” and the “femto-” prefix is smaller than both “nano-” and “pico-”. So yeah, that’s REALLY small. Not quite as small as “yocto-“, but this movie isn’t quite that pointlessly short.

Maybe it’ll catch on. Maybe not. But if it doesn’t, I’ll cry.