HELP ME AND MY FRIENDS STAY EMPLOYED! SUPPORT AMERICAN ANIMATORS!
June 13, 2012 2:54 pmThis is more of less the same post I had on Tumblr, but it’s really important(!!!!) so I’m posting it here too. If you want to skip all the gum flapping, the kickstarter I’ll ultimately be pointing everyone to is over here.
The folks in my audience may not know that I work at Six Point Harness animation studio (the folks behind Nickelodeon’s El Tigre, MTV’s Good Vibes, The Drawn Together movie, and more). And you may or may not know that Six Point is home to Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, creators of the Mondo series, Dick Figures. You probably remember it from posting animated gifs of the characters doing funny things on your tumblrs a lot.
The style of Dick Figures is very much about using simple character designs to allow animation quality you wouldn’t normally be able to pull off with a youtube series budget. The people here work very hard on it, and have really made something to be proud of.
Some fans have expressed interest in a Dick Figures movie, so Ed and Zack have decided to take it to kickstarter. Crowd sourcing the movie like this means that they would be able to make it their way, without having to rely on producers who would turn the process into a matter of committee approval and quite likely turn it into something completely different than the creators envision.
Funding this project would be amazing, it would completely revolutionize the options available for the creators of animated features in this day and age.
The kickstarter is asking for $250,000 for a half-hour special, but if we make it to $700,000, we can produce a full hour and a half feature film. Contributing to this kickstarter, or even just spreading the word along means you are personally supporting the livelihood of every person in our studio.
And I cannot stress how much that means to all of us.
Awww man I wish I could help, but I don’t even have a single penny to spare :( Good luck for that, though!!
There are 5 girls in that pic. Which one are you??? ( Just wondering )
If the boots I’m wearing don’t tip you off, well…
My sword… err funds… are at your squidly disposal Coela! :P
I wish I could help but I’m still unemployed right now. (I’m trying, don’t get me wrong, but until I find a new job I need to save every penny that I can.) I still wish you luck in getting those donations! :)
Would totally toss some money your way, if Kickstarter accepted Paypal. As-is, I’m seeing how far I can go without a credit card.
If you really want to chip in but don’t want to get a real credit card, you can go to the corner store/most places that sell gift cards and get a prepaid credit card. They work just like a normal gift card, you buy them and load them with however much money you want to spend, you can use the number on them to spend like a normal credit card, but they aren’t linked to your bank or credit history at all.
I believe Kickstarter doesn’t use paypal partially due to the delayed payment system they have. You don’t just authorize the payment and the money is gone, you don’t actually get charged until the project succeeds (and if it doesn’t, you don’t get charged at all).
Just another reason to love you.
As if this webcomic wasn’t enough.
$300 is yours!
I spent the entire day watching all 4 seasons. . . I can’t wait for a movie version! :D
As much as I like “Dick Figures” I am opposed to this sort of… well… scam. Really? 250k $ for a 30 minute movie and 700k for a 1 hour special? That’s like a year’s salary of 20-55k per month! Even if it splits between 5 or 10 people it’s still a fuckton of money per person. People like this show because it’s drawn in a simple style and has really good humour. Moreover, it’s a web series so they have almost no restrictions on what they put in it. And now there’s a plea for a funding so that the 30-minute special won’t be weighed down by producers? Since when do you need producers for a 30 minute animation that would be probably made in flash?!
With all due respect to the creators of the series, I love their work and would gladly pitch in some cash, but I’m beginning to think someone at Mondo smelled the opportunity to make some money the fast way and is trying to milk that cow.
Saying it’s a scam shows a complete lack of understanding of animation in a studio setting. To put it in perspective, South park is extremely simple, they can finish an episode in six days, but the budget for a 22 minute episode is $300,000. The movie cost $21 million.
Dick Figures is not free. Mondo produces the episodes you see presently on youtube. Adults make living wages working 40 hours a week on it, it’s a full-time job that pays rent, utilities, and groceries for many people. Mondo will not pay for the movie, thus the need for funding. Any big Hollywood producer would undoubtedly PUT those restrictions you’re saying they don’t have on it. The only reason they have as much control as they do now is due to the way it’s funded and distributed, but that won’t work for this project.
They do a breakdown of the current crew they use for episodes over here, as well as information about the movie budget.
Saying it’s a scam shows a complete lack of understanding of animation in a studio setting
Probably the only people who know all the details about this kind of work along with its cost are the ones who do it so don’t be so surprised at my point of view. Thank you for explaining and linking the video about how Dick Figures came to be. I never realized so many artists and other people were involved in the proces of making such a simple looking piece of animation.
Several Mondo series are in the same boat, Happy Tree Friends has been worked on by a number of different studios, Goodbye Kitty was also a team project. All Mondo shows are paid gigs. Even vloggers like Yahtzee and the Extra Credit guys are all paid for their shows, the ads pay the companies and the companies pay the talent. People just get the idea that it’s free because they don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes, and assume that since some people make content for free, everyone must.
Dick Figures itself is deceptively simple, they use the simple character designs so they can pull out all the stops on the animation, this is especially apparent in the more recent episodes now that they have a whole crew as opposed to the first couple where it really was just Ed and Zack working on the weekends. The style guide for the animation is probably more specific and detailed than any prime time show I’ve worked on because it needs to be crude but, crude in exactly the right way or else everyone’s work won’t blend seamlessly together. The character designs are simple, but that allows them to make animation you couldn’t otherwise afford on a web series budget.
About this week’s comic: Is his final form’s main body a set of Giant Abs with tentacles?
You should’ve chosen a career with future, like community organizer, lawyer or chicago thug, you could’ve been as wealthy as barack obama. So no, fu, I’ll support subpar sub $1 an hour korean animators