Inside the Magic: How James Cameron and Disney Are Revolutionizing Animation—Secrets Revealed by Pietro Schito
Ashley
Okay. So, and that’s all fantastic. And I hope people really listen to that because I think that was a real good sort of crash course in sort of, you know, getting these, these animated projects through and, and exactly what you’re saying. And that’s been my understanding. I’ve never worked in animation is that it’s just a very difficult, I mean, Pixar is not just looking at spec scripts and producing them. These things are the people that are writing those have long track records have been probably working for Pixar for years. So, I get all that. So, and so now let’s talk about, and that’s definitely one track, um, that people, if they want to be animated some writers. I met a woman when I first got to LA, that was an animation and she had gotten a job. It was some sort of like, you know, she was in the writer’s room of some sort of kids TV, animated TV show. And it seems to me that was sort of a very traditional track where you get in there and become a producer and a writer as, I mean, she was like, whatever the lowest person in the story room was taking notes type of a thing, but then working way up. So there’s definitely that track, but let’s talk about just if you wanted to produce this independently and don’t be afraid to push back on me because I want to get a real reaction. I want people to hear to hear your reaction to me about some of the things I’m about to propose. So I’ve done a lot of work, or I’ve used a lot of outsourcing through, services like upwork.com where there’s just, there’s tons of people in other countries, that were willing to work much cheaper than Americans, for programming and animation is a big one. I had an animated logo created for ASM media incorporated. When I did some of my films, it was a nice 4k animation. I think I paid $150 for it. You know, I got someone to do it very, very inexpensively. And I have since, you know, I have young kids there on YouTube all the time. Now they’ve gotten a little older, but certainly when they were younger, like six, seven, eight years old, they would run into tons and tons. And I would definitely say it was sort of lower end animation, but it was tons of these YouTube channels. And when I would sort of research them, they were folks in Pakistan and India that were just flooding YouTube with these animated kids shows and getting a lot of views and stuff. And when I’m on Upwork and I’ve had some conversations with some of these animators and stuff that are in India that are in some of these other countries where they’re willing to work cheaper is that you get some really low price and you kind of keep going back to seeing what you need a studio to produce this. Suppose I actually, because this is my idea. Again, maybe I’m completely out of my mind. This is a crazy idea, but my idea is to produce this pilot independently, hire the animators, find some people in it in another country to work cheaply and war work through that process, but end up with a 22-minute pilot that I can take around and sell. And maybe I would even try and raise the money and just shoot an entire season, like 12 episodes, write them, and then try and produce 12 and then try and sell like a season of animation to some sort of a network or, I mean, there’s so many of these stream platforms. If the quality was good, maybe I could find some success that way, but walk through that. Like you keep saying you need a studio to produce it. Is it because you just need like 200 people to produce a 90-minute animated thing? There’s just so much work to be done that even if you’re only paying them a dollar an hour, you still need hundreds of people. What is sort of the, some of the pitfalls that I would run into if I try and do this where I try and go and really cut corners and do it super, super cost effectively?
