Thursday, October 13, 2005

A New Player

A visual effects company in the San Francisco Bay Area has recently announced it will jump into the CG feature animation business. Genndy Tartakovsky signs on with "The Orphanage" as creator for their slate of pictures. ...continued...

First things first. Just because you can do special effects, doesn't mean you can do CG feature films. The pipelines are entirely different, the way the work is produced is different, the thought process is different, the personnel NEEDS to be different, there is a lot of mindset to change. That won't stop Orphanage from making the plunge and trying to strike gold with the dozen or so other studios all attempting to do the same thing.

Those of you unfamiliar with Orphanage must not of read the survey for worst visual effects company. Orphanage ranked right up at the top with hundreds of posts from people that must of dreaded their time there. Although this feature division will be separate from the visual effects division, there is a strong liklihood that some of the same work practices and management will seep into the new group.

The good news is that they are trying to keep the budgets in the $50-$75 million area. This is a completely realistic budget to create a CG film, especially for the first project. Companies like Critter Pix in San Rafael are lowballing their feature endeavors with budgets under $30 (equates to lower wages in one of the most expensive cities in the country).

Orphanage has a really rocky road ahead. And considering they don't have distribution yet, they may never get started. However, with all the potentially negative things, at least they are not shooting themselves in the foot claiming Pixar quality work at a $20-$30 million budget.

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