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pierrot
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by pierrot Fri Nov 01, 2019 12:44 pm

I feel reasonably confident that anyone who could have predicted social media influencers, from thirty years ago, would have tried to put a stop to the internet, immediately.

I just mean that we still haven't gotten to Blade Runner 2049's shit, yet. Here's a thought, though: I think I'd take Blade Runner's 2019 LA over actual, historical, 1970s NYC. Hell, I might prefer it to NYC today.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by RCBH928 Wed Nov 06, 2019 5:59 am

I am saddened that drawn animations have been abandoned. Personally the art style appeals to me, maybe the newer generation thinks I am old styled. I saw Herc's Adventure for the Saturn and I remember it was dream-like to be able to play in a cinema-like "animated movie" graphics. The old classic films still look as good as they ever but the newer generations don't seem to think so. I heard Disney gave it a shot with The Princess and the Frog but the revenues were less than what they were hopping for. More indications show that kids just prefer the computer graphics, and while I am not against it, I do not understand why children would prefer one over the other. If anything, the hand drawn style looks more fun.

Of course, anime still exists, but that is more of a niche thing for people who are into "Japanese anime" compared to the rest of the world, I have no idea when was the last hand drawn animation production was outside Japan.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by marurun Wed Nov 06, 2019 10:08 am

I don't think it's so much that audiences prefer CG to hand-drawn as it is CG is ultimately cheaper than hand-drawn, especially since you can much more easily make adjustments on the fly with lighting, camera changes, etc... Paying people to hand-draw everything take a lot of money and also makes cut content and story or presentation changes dramatically more expensive.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by isiolia Wed Nov 06, 2019 11:07 am

marurun wrote:I don't think it's so much that audiences prefer CG to hand-drawn as it is CG is ultimately cheaper than hand-drawn, especially since you can much more easily make adjustments on the fly with lighting, camera changes, etc... Paying people to hand-draw everything take a lot of money and also makes cut content and story or presentation changes dramatically more expensive.


It may depend on how you read the numbers. In general, the later hand-drawn animated films were making less of a profit, with some of the bigger budget ones (like Treasure Planet) actually losing money. By contrast, the animated movies turning in the sort of return on their development costs that Disney had seen in the early 90s have all been CGI.
Someone just looking at that information, and not considering marketing/release date/etc problems, could certainly conclude that audiences prefer computer generated movies.

That being said, this is predominately a trend for big Hollywood animation studios working on feature films. Most TV shows are still using a 2D style, and most international projects (not just anime) seem to still gravitate to 2D or at least cel shaded CGI.

The 2020 Oscars apparently have a record number of (potential) submissions for the animated film categories - 32 feature films, and 92 shorts (embedded in this article).

Looking at those, across the world, there's a lot of variety in animation being made. Even in the US, to an extent, as we've got stuff like Primal or stuff like the Netflix Castlevania (anime look, but, from Texas), stop motion projects, and so on....but there's also a good bit of stuff coming out of the Middle East there (for instance), and Europe, and wherever else.

Maybe there's a parallel there to what we see in games today - some genres or styles may not be where the AAA money is being spent, but maybe smaller studios are now able to leverage modern tools to make them.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by RCBH928 Thu Nov 07, 2019 7:57 am

marurun wrote:I don't think it's so much that audiences prefer CG to hand-drawn as it is CG is ultimately cheaper than hand-drawn, especially since you can much more easily make adjustments on the fly with lighting, camera changes, etc... Paying people to hand-draw everything take a lot of money and also makes cut content and story or presentation changes dramatically more expensive.


I believed it was the other way around. I don't think I saw too many works done by smaller companies in 3D on par of Toy Story, while hand drawn shows were being pumped world wide in the 70s->late 90s. I also believed that the software and hardware were extremely expensive, not to mention I read there is insane amount of rendering time, something like 80+hrs for a single frame.

note, I am not talking about images drawn using computer software but a full fledged 3D animation.

isiolia wrote:That being said, this is predominately a trend for big Hollywood animation studios working on feature films. Most TV shows are still using a 2D style, and most international projects (not just anime) seem to still gravitate to 2D or at least cel shaded CGI.

.



I am not too big on the computer drawn animations or cel shading. While technically it is 2D and hand drawn, the end results seems too clean, sharp, and flat. They look something closer to a Flash web animation. I like the richer, I guess, pencil drawn looks like Disney's Robin Hood and An American Tale.I don't see too many of those lately, but based on the art project one or the other could work better.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by marurun Thu Nov 07, 2019 9:52 am

Those stylized looks are cheaper, faster, and easier to animate. No TV show is going to use a labor-intensive method. And most of those shows use occasional CG for complex shots. Look at the Simpsons and Family Guy. They both do it.

A lot of the anime on Netflix is also CG, and you can tell, because everyone moves in such a robotic way. CG offers some cost benefits.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by isiolia Thu Nov 07, 2019 10:56 am

RCBH928 wrote:I believed it was the other way around. I don't think I saw too many works done by smaller companies in 3D on par of Toy Story, while hand drawn shows were being pumped world wide in the 70s->late 90s. I also believed that the software and hardware were extremely expensive, not to mention I read there is insane amount of rendering time, something like 80+hrs for a single frame.

note, I am not talking about images drawn using computer software but a full fledged 3D animation.


There are a lot of factors going into the costs of both. Animation is labor-intensive either way, making high quality animated features of either kind relatively expensive movies to make. By contrast, a lot of what you'd find on TV has pushed to find cost-cutting measures whenever possible, and there are plenty of low-quality CGI productions out there as well.

Generally though, 3D movies have been cheaper to produce. Toy Story had a $30M budget, compared to the $55M that Pocahontas cost that same year. Costs for either style spiked up after that. The 1999 comparison would be $90M for Toy Story 2 and $130M for Tarzan (or $145M on some sources). Relative to the many other memorable movies that came out 20 years ago... both were still fairly expensive movies, even compared to big budget action stuff like The Matrix or The Phantom Menace.
There were more modestly budgeted animated movies that year too - The Iron Giant (which lost money on a ~$50M budget) and Antz...but even then, those were not cheap movies, still on par or pricier than many live-action ones.

By the time that Disney sort of phased out the theatrical 2D movies, they were pretty steadily $100M+ movies. So while there have been some 3D movies since then that have had significantly larger budgets - several cresting $200M, with Tangled ($260M) still being one of the most expensive movies of any kind (a bit of R&D and production delays contributing to that AFAIK)... I'd suspect 2D features would have ended up being up there too. More commonly, the modern Disney 3D movies are in the $150-160M range budgets, which isn't that far removed from what some of their pricier 2D films cost decades ago.


I am not too big on the computer drawn animations or cel shading. While technically it is 2D and hand drawn, the end results seems too clean, sharp, and flat. They look something closer to a Flash web animation. I like the richer, I guess, pencil drawn looks like Disney's Robin Hood and An American Tale.I don't see too many of those lately, but based on the art project one or the other could work better.


While I don't necessarily disagree regarding end results, to be fair, it's also not uncommon for cel shaded CGI to be akin to special effects. Done well, you don't even notice it. Many films have used it for select elements (like for the actual Iron Giant in that movie) without it looking out of place. I think a lot of the problems with it will be fixed over time (if not already). Mostly, I think the issue is that good animation is stylized well beyond the shader. The more effort put into making it work, the better the tools will get, and the more convincing results we'll see.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by RCBH928 Fri Nov 08, 2019 6:20 am

I do not blame the show's producers for maximizing their profit margins or shrinking their risk of commercial failure, but I hope we have not see the end of the traditional hand-drawn cartoons.

I don't know how much it used to cost, but I do appreciate the old cartoons much more now and I am glad that I got to see stuff like Thundercats and Sooby-Doo which I am guessing we will not see the sorts of in the future...unless its in CG!
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by RCBH928 Sat Nov 09, 2019 6:31 am

I feel sorry for game developers after reading this article that breaks down the price of a video game console, it states developers profit $1 on each game sold. The numbers seem a bit off, but if its true that console manufacturer fee is $7 per game, then Nintendo pockets must have exploded in the Wii era. I wonder how many total games sold for Wii, not how many released.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by marurun Sat Nov 09, 2019 10:42 am

All you have to do is read the comments to know that breakdown is pretty nonsense. For one, retailers actually get a pretty small piece of the pie these days. And you can’t use percentages like that for fixed costs. You don’t pay your programmers more per year because their title sells well. They may get a performance bonus, but it ain’t a percentage of sales.
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