It doesn't really have a huge scaling potential does it? Your output is constrained by your animation stable surely.
The closest analogue to a breakaway product or hot patent would be a hugely popular IP, but you don't need to be a studio to develop a property.
Perhaps you intend to develop animation productivity tools and the studio provides the opportunity to dogfood. That kind of software still has headroom I guess.
As an animator/programmer I'd be very interested in an animation suite that could do what emacs/vim does for my text editing.
Why not? I wouldn't have thought startups are limited only to webapps/software? We're building from the ground up?
It doesn't really have a huge scaling potential does it?
Why not? You don't think Pixar (800+ employees) and Dreamworks (1400+ employees) started out as large companies did you?
In fact, to further illustrate my point, I'll actually give you a rough timeline on how Disney started.
1923 - Walt Disney animating on own, formed company with brother in August of that year
1924 - Joined by Ub Iwerks and others from Kansas city
1925 - Company size grows to 12
1929 - Sound comes in, steamboat willie released
1930 - Staff increased to 30
1932 - More than 100 employees
1934 - More than 200 employees, Work on first film starts (snow white)
1935 - more than 400 employees
1937 - more than 800 employees
1939 - more than 1000 employees
So by 1939, they had only just released their first Cinema release, were working on 4 films concurrently (but had many small scale projects under their belt) and had essentially defined the entire field of animation for generations to come. In fact, a lot of the stuff they figured out back then is still applicable today.
What's even more startling is when you consider just how much they did, when each film at the time required approximately 2.5 million drawings to complete.
Your output is constrained by your animation stable surely.
I'd say no, it really depends on how you set up the animation pipeline.
I've got a different model in mind. I don't want to say too much on how it works, but it has potential to create lots of content with a significantly smaller sized team (to start out with).
That's not to say I don't have aspirations to scale it, I do. I'm just focussing on building something from the ground up.
I don't use "startup" generically to mean any small/new company that hopes to one day be big. That isn't to say that my definition is definitive (what?) or that a small company that doesn't fit into it is less worthy.
I've always used the term startup for a company whose potential earning is not constrained by its size. Who are developing something that will generate wealth that is disproportionate to the size of the company.
With a software startup the duplication cost for their product is practically nothing therefore they could fill up their target market overnight. With a web-app you can server tens of thousands of customers relatively easily.
The market is the only real constraint and this puts these small companies on almost equal footing with the big companies in the same market.
With every animation studio it seems that the potential to generate wealth is constrained by their size (and their skill but the scaling power of skill is finite).
The power of a successful IP to generate disproportionate wealth is the exception (and is often independent of the studio).
The Disney story to me re-inforces the idea that in this space, to compete you need more people and your ability to produce is directly proportionate to the number of people you employ.
The growth curve doesn't look like a startup to me, when they were small they did shorts, as they grew over years they did features.
If they had developed a way for 12 animators to make a feature of that could compete with the features being made by 100-200 animators then sure, they were a startup (by my entirely arbitrary definition).
Although where Disney (the company) innovated (IMO) was by producing a product that the other studios couldn't no matter how many employees they had unless they had the disney training and skills.
I've written way too much for how "compelling" my point is so I'm stopping here.
If they had developed a way for 12 animators to make a feature of that could compete with the features being made by 100-200 animators then sure
Aah, I think we have some wires crossed here - I'm not trying to make films to start out with, we're going to be building episodic content, basically webisodes to start with.
One of the inspirations has been, very roughly, the sitcom model. Artificially limiting your sets, characters and creating story week after week. Also, since a lot of things will be set up in advance, the pipeline changes considerably to something that Disney/Pixar or Dreamworks would do.
The cost of production for episodes after the initial artifact production is, for all intensive purposes, the cost of the animators + voice talent, so it is a scalable model in that sense.
Think about it like the TV show Frasier. They essentially used 4 sets, 5 main characters, several occasional characters, one fictional character and a slew of extras to create 6 seasons of content.
If you keep the voice talent inhouse (utilise people around you) then the numbers of employees required goes down and so does essentially your cost of production, which is the limiting factor really for why stuff doesn't get made for the web.
3D animation is a totally different beast to 2D (unless you go with a cutout style) in that it is essentially a form of puppetry with digital characters. If that makes sense?
The purpose of this thread was (for me) to get some intelligent feedback on the Zombie genre and a rough estimation if I'm in the right ballpark or not. The genre itself lends itself well to being something that can be produced with a small outlay in human capital which is why I'm investigating it.
It doesn't really have a huge scaling potential does it? Your output is constrained by your animation stable surely.
The closest analogue to a breakaway product or hot patent would be a hugely popular IP, but you don't need to be a studio to develop a property.
Perhaps you intend to develop animation productivity tools and the studio provides the opportunity to dogfood. That kind of software still has headroom I guess.
As an animator/programmer I'd be very interested in an animation suite that could do what emacs/vim does for my text editing.