Welcome to Television
This community is for discussion of anything related to television or streaming.
Other Communities
Television Communities
A community for discussion of anything related to Television via broadcast or streaming.
Rules:
but the truth of the matter is, it is impossible to do the show now the way it was done then. The hand-drawn animation, the water colors, those don’t exist anymore. If they exist, they certainly don’t exist at a cost where you can do a TV show.
i.e. no desire to pay artists what the work is worth
No, it's similar to how film is expensive now; the demand for the product decreased to near non-existence so the few people who still make it have to demand a high cost to be able to keep making it.
They're still paying artists (presumably unionized too, from what I know of the industry, which isn't much). They're just not paying the cost it would take to get the ancient technology back into manufacturing, and train new artists to use the tech that no one is trained to use anymore. (It's more than just watercolor. I'm sure the paint is special, as well as the material it's painted on, and the tools that help them use it all.)
Right? Water colors no longer exist? Please.
This might actually be a materials issue, outside of very few working artists still being trained on it. Animation cels aren’t used in the industry anymore, so it’s become a high priced specialty art item. $1/frame when animation is usually done with 8-12 frames per second adds up fast. That number is a guesstimate based on the bulk supplies I can find online, but even half that price would still be huge just for materials.
That adds up to $1200 per episode
$14,400 per episode just for the celluloid sheets; not to draw anything on them, not to have extra to replace bad/damaged/revisions, not to scan/photograph them onto film or digital; not to clean them up, not to store them, categorize and organize them, and not considering that they’re usually drawn and photographed in layers of more than one.
Or you can license Toon Boom Harmony Premium for like $133/month per seat and it renders full quality straight to a file you can drop into your NLE.
My husband has also reminded me that rarely was any given frame of animation a single cel; characters, eyes, mouths, anything moving often got its own cel to make it easier to make changes to.
Math gets hard here because it really just depends on what’s going on for how many cels will be used at once, but let’s lowball it and multiply that figure by a 2.5 average for $36k/episode.
Math is hard and Blender is free
That would be if there was 1 frame per second. You need to multiply it by 8-12 per episode.
Also assuming perfect 1:1 cel production:finished product, which is highly optimistic.
I’m not saying the cel animated seasons or cel animation in general isn’t beautiful or worth doing, but as long as they’re making a commercial product at a big studio they’re going to be dealing with management having a stick up their ass about the fact that nobody else does this and it easily costs the same as a skilled storyboard team or several animators to pay just for cels.
Also:
Patterson bluntly admitted to his host that said change was an unfortunate side-effect of the industry’s move towards cost-cutting and digitization.
So it's possible, they would just make less money if they remained faithful to the show they're fucking rebooting.
This reminds me of a video or discussion I once saw (can't find it now), on why we can't recreate the Saturn V. We still have all the old blueprints for the rocket; NASA took great care to archive those. But the Saturn V was designed for an entirely different era of engineering and manufacturing. Its parts were all designed for an era of manual machining and welding. It was built using many techniques that are now abandoned or incredibly niche and expensive. The plans simply cannot be practically built in an era of CNC machines, laser cutting, automatic welding, 3D printing, etc. Manufacturing methods affect part design. And designs built for one era's techniques may not map well those of a new era. We still have the plans for the Saturn V, but we can't build another one, as the world has simply moved on.
The economy of scale sure can be a bitch and a half sometimes.
That really is the heart of it. All the skills to make it still exist, in the same way that some artisans still practice making swords by hand. All the skills needed to remake the Saturn V still exist; the knowledge hasn't been lost. Those techniques just are rare enough that they are specialized and very expensive. The Saturn V was built with the most accessible techniques available in its time, and it still cost a fortune. But now? It's cheaper to just design a whole new rocket from scratch, designed and optimized for today's techniques.
I hate to agree with them, but this is kind of true. We dont have armies of artists anymore who know how to do hand drawn animation like they did 30 years ago. Those days are gone, and those artists have long since retired, died, etc.
What they're really talking about here isn't the technology so much as the institutional knowledge that they'd amassed.
Its long gone, and been replaced by digital artistry, which is very different.
I'd be surprised if there's even an art school out there that teaches that stuff anymore. It wouldn't be worth it to teach bcz there isnt enough demand for that skill set anymore.
The older I get, the more I perceive institutional break down around me.
I mean, I'm talking about company institutional knowledge right now, but yeah, I get it. Its only going to get worse as we see more people retire in the next 10 years. We don't have an influx of experienced people to replace those retiring..
There's of course, also AI, and more systemic changes happening around us, and climate breakdown. Gonna be a fun few decades.
Tbf, the last fully hand drawn ep of KOTH is in like what, season 7? Even by KOTH's original end the old ways had died, to society's detriment.
That's the same reason we can't go back to the moon. ?????
Edit:
The new animation style is all digital now, but the truth of the matter is, it is impossible to do the show now the way it was done then. The hand-drawn animation, the water colors, those don’t exist anymore. If they exist, they certainly don’t exist at a cost where you can do a TV show.
So to save money, they threw out supplies they already had. These guys are tasked with reviving a show but given none of the tools or budget to do so. And if they fail due to lack of investment from Disney they will still take all the blame.
because you fired all the artists to chase profits and cheap ai