#blockbusters

Something I keep thinking about is how bad people are at understanding budgets.

I wrote about this before. And yes, this is very much inspired by a vent that @bobokitty posted. But it has been in my head swirling around for like two months now and I just need to get it out.

Y'all need to understand that budgets are mostly wages and salaries. Yes, there is obviously also stuff like materials and food and energy use and what not. But the largest chunk of budgets is just wages and salaries and generally payment for the people involved.

Let's talk about 2D animation. Because I feel that 2D animation actually is a bit easier to understand - at least in an environment like tumblr, where people are somewhat familiar with stuff like commission prices and such.

Let's look at an episode of 2D animation. Those tend to average out on 21-25 minutes of animation. Let's say for simplicity's sake that it is an average of 22 minutes. That is 1320 seconds. Every second has 24 frames, but of course TV animation usually is largely animated on twos or threes (meaning only every second or third frame is actually a new drawing). Still. If we average it on twos, that is 15 840 drawings per episode.

Yes, obviously animation uses a lot of tricks. There will be some shots where we just get a couple of seconds of a background tracking shot where characters are talking over it. Or we see the back of someone's head while they talk, or if we see it from the front we might see very limited animation (like just the mouth moving with nothing else) and so on. So, yeah, it is not 15 840 completely different drawings. Absolutely not. But you also have to keep in mind that still in the end in many places there is more than one character on screen.

Obviously, animation is not quite like artwork online. Stuff goes through a pipeline. I mean, just superficially:

We need a script.

Then there is a storyboard.

Layout/Composition

Key-Animation

Inbetween Animation

Cleanup Artist

Colorist

Someone does the background art

Final Composition

Something like that. And that for every single of the frames. And everyone who is working on that needs to be paid, needs to pay rent, and presumably - given that they are human - also needs to eat.

Yes, the fact that there is a pipeline makes it often a big faster within a single sequence (aka a sequence of animation that is in one perspective and with one background before there is a cut) than it would take if every single frame was drawn individually.

But I feel like most of you will still have a feeling of how much work it is going to be to have 15 840 frames of animation. And of course, while there are a lot of scenes where animation can get away with animating on twos or threes, there is also scenes in which they are animating on ones. Action sequences often just look better when you do that.

There is always a lot of talk about how anime manage to make "better animation than western animation with less of a budget". Because yeah, a lot of anime to this day are done on a budget of somewhere between 200 000 to 400 000. And now just look at the math of that. Even if we said it was animated on threes - 10 560 frames - that is somewhere between 18 and 38 bucks per frame. And... I think we all do understand that this, translated into just the amount of work going into the animation itself... that is just based on underpaying everyone involved.

Especially as - of course - it is not just the screenplay and the animation. The budget also needs to pay for the soundtrack, and the voice acting, and the mixing, and so on. Let's be honest here. The math is not mathing.

Whenever you talk to people who work in western animation, too, you also know this one particular line: "Ah, yeah, animation is sadly so expensive." But... a lot of western shows still are at a budget of maybe 1 million or so per episode. If we assume it was animated on threes, we get a budget of 94 bucks per frame. But also, let's face it, nothing is throughout animated on threes. Most is on twos with some sequences on ones. On twos we are talking 63 bucks per frame.

The reason I am talking about this as 2D animation is because I feel most people understand it a bit better this way. Most people should have at least a rough understanding how much effort there goes into a drawing.

But the same thing applies obviously to everything else.

Live action movies? You need to pay director, actors, people who designed and build the sets, people who designed, and sewed, and fit the costumes, people who do the lighting, and the electricity on set, people who operate cameras and mics, people who do the logistics, people who create 3D models for any VFX, people who do the editing, people who work on the soundtrack, and so on and so forth.

On top of that you also need insurance. You need likely to rent places. There might be a need for some security.

A lot of big budget movies employ hundreds if not thousands of people for one and a half to three years. That is the budget.

Yeah, sure, there is also the four big name actors who on their own get like 30 million bucks each at the very least. But the vast majority of the budget is just the many, many people who all get underpaid.

Same with video games. There was so much talk about how Dragon Age Veilguard had such a big budget and how the game was too bad for that. And I think people do not understand that the 400 to 500 million budget is not Veilguard. It is the budget of Joplin, Dreadwolf, and whatever other cancelled project was in there rolled into one. It is 10 years of keeping a studio of people employed. 10 years of scrapped stuff.

To a lot of people budgets read as this abstract thing. People think that budgets translate to some specific kind of quality.

But all it means is that a lot of people worked on this for a certain amount of time.

This list is in descending order, with Superman being the most popular.

Nerdstalgic x "The Death of Practical Effects is Ruining Movies."