Technology: Levelling Hollywood's playing field
Published: 16 Aug 2005 13:45 BST
When Hollywood producer John Williams finished Dreamworks Animation's "Shrek" in 2001, he set himself a goal: He wanted to make another animated feature, butn on his own, and for far less money.
This week, the product of that resolution will hit US screens. It's a $40m (£22m), Disney-distributed story called "Valiant" about a daring young British World War II homing pigeon. Spending less than half of what its most prominent recent competitors spent on comparable projects, Williams' Vanguard Animation has successfully undermined the notion that you have to spend in the range of $100m to produce a modern computer-animated film.
Does this make Vanguard the next Pixar? Reviews of the film in Britain, where it was released in March, indicate that the team hasn't quite matched the "Toy Story" studio's razor-sharp storytelling. But Vanguard's experience shows that there is still room in the big leagues for small companies armed with high-tech intelligence.
Pixar "has many years of experience on us, but we want to play on that field," said Buckley Collum, "Valiant" co-producer and Vanguard co-founder. "Our hope is to deliver films of the same quality that people are expecting, but at a price point that is much easier for investors."
Thanks in large part to technology trends such as fast-growing computer power, access to supercomputing facilities, and a rise in open source and standards-based software, small animation studios are tackling projects that would have been out of reach just a few years ago.
Certainly, the animation business in the United States is still dominated by Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks, whose films account for the vast majority of the genre's ticket sales. A handful of others, such as "Ice Age" and "Robots" creators Blue Sky Studios, fill in the gaps.
Those companies' big-screen productions are expensive. Pixar's first picture, "Toy Story," cost $30m to make in 1995. Last year's "The Incredibles" came in at $90m, while Disney's 2002 "Treasure Planet", which was an unambiguous disaster despite some critics' accolades, cost a staggering $140m.
Some of these costs are attributable to big-name salaries for voice-overs from actors ranging from Tom Hanks to Samuel L Jackson. But it's the animation process, painstaking and hardware-intensive, that accounts for the bulk of costs.
Over months and years, artists and programmers separately create...
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