Monday, October 25, 2004

DreamWorks Goes For 3 Films A Year

Rumor has it that DreamWorks wants to produce three films a year. That means two at their Glendale facility and one up at the once-called PDI up in the Bay Area. That isn't exactly startling news. But, what really gets my feathers ruffled are the rumors that DreamWorks is looking to another country to produce one of their upcoming CG films.

Will it be India, China, Korea, Singapore? Who knows (does it really matter?). I don't even think they know at the moment. But when you put your ear to the ground, rumblings are that in an effort to save money, they are looking to move production of one of their CG movies to one of these countries as a test. To just see what happens and if they can repeat the "success" of Father of the Pride in feature animation.

No need to perform a test. I can tell you what is going to happen. First of all, you will get away with a lower budget. But you will also get inferior quality and infuriate the local artist and technical base even further. Even if you do the pre-production and development in the states, when it comes time to put the blood and sweat into fine tuning the final product, something is going to give.

If you have read any of my previous bitch sessions, you know I am adamantly against farming out projects to other countries. Sure it will be cheaper to produce, but the quality is going to suffer. And perhaps that just doesn't matter to DreamWorks.

Now that DreamWorks is going to be a publicly traded company. It will all be about the bottom line. That is easy to see. Does it have to be? Obviously Pixar has proven that doesn't need to be the case.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hasn't Dreamworks already laid the groundwork for this kind of production with Father Of the Pride? I thought it was being produced in India. if that studio proves to be reliable and economical, they would have that studio, the internal DW studio, and PDi to count on for up to 3 films a year. With SharkTale approaching blockbuster status, I wouldn't be surprised to see even more from than 3 from Dreamworks in a few years.

Anonymous said...

I finally got around to watching Father of the Pride, and I don't know who in Dreamworks said it, but this definitely isn't feature-quality animation. It looks like Mainframe produced the whole show after they stealing another studio's fur plug-in. Uggh.

Anonymous said...

Um, 3 films a year could also mean 1 live-action, one CGI, and one Anime... So it can't really be that bad...

Mr.infoRyder said...

quality ??
CG India