Cost-Effective CG For TV...The Hour-Long Variety
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The bottom line? “When you take all the tax credits and so on into account, the $2 million budget probably translates to more like $2.5,” says Mischel. “Of course, for a project of this scope, that’s still not a lot of money when you see CG feature films with budgets of $40 to $50 million and up. So there are always constraints.”
Apart from budget constraints, there are also constraints in time. “While Pixar can spend up to five years creating a feature film, we spent just one year to make this special,” points out Mischel. “But then by not going to film and doing a theatrical release, that saves you a lot of rendering time, and you don’t have to render to such a high resolution when you’re going to TV and direct-to-video.”
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Mainframe is also helped by its well-established production pipeline and methodology. “After all these years of delivering TV projects and now four direct-to-video features, we know exactly where to save time and costs and how to overlap pre-production with production and what size crews to assign,” he notes. “We’re on our fourth Barbie direct-to-video, an 88-minute feature, and we’re also starting a 44-minute Popeye CG special with Hearst Entertainment that we’re co-producing and co-distributing, so it’s a format we’re very comfortable with.”
For the company, the financial pay-off for such projects can he “pretty big,” says Mischel. “On Popeye we have certain rights, as we co-financed the special, and we believe because of the growing demand for branded TV and direct-to-video products, it’s a great business to expand in.”Indeed, Mainframe views its Scary Godmother special as a potential franchise. “We’re also anticipating that this special Halloween show will become a theatrical feature film at some point,” he adds. “We already have another one of the books that’d make a great movie.”
With regard to the special’s artistry, Mischel doesn’t hesitate to call Scary Godmother “groundbreaking, particularly in terms of characterization, production design and comedy. It’s a very different look from the usual TV CG project.”
The company, which employs over 200 artists, animators, technicians and production personnel, is perhaps best known as the pioneer of computer animated television series for ReBoot, and has produced over 230 half hours of computer animation since its inception in 1993. It has always prided itself on delivering projects on time and on budget. “There are a lot of post houses and visual effects companies that try and get into the longform CG business, and the big challenge they face is that pipeline and methodology. To do two or three minutes of CG work versus 88 minutes from start to finish for a feature is a very different skill and approach, and we’ve got that down pat.”
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