Indie animation: “Not Indie Enough” | Indie Animation with Pan
My host’s servers recently had a kerfluffle, and since, my website’s been a mess.
I fucked around a bit too much and wound up breaking the whole thing, so we’re starting over from scratch. I still have most of my blog posts backed up, but since some are years old, I feel like a rewrite is in order based on new and better perspective.
This blog post originally talked about the hate Boxtown got during its 2nd Indiegogo campaign. Most of it was unfounded and just stemmed from envious youngsters misunderstanding how animation works.
I still have thoughts on that, but this time around, I also want to discuss the other side of the coin, as a more or less failed small indie creator myself. For convenience, I’ll be splitting it up into two parts.
The first side is the original point I talked about. A few statements were made that I wanted to comment on.
“You’re not indie enough if you had a career in the industry.”
Indie animation has this… rather clique-y, unwelcoming vibe to it, unfortunately. There’ s a lot of great folks out there whom I have a good bond with, but there’s also so much bad blood between creators and fans for no reason.
Arbitrary standards are being made up, new ones every day, and you must abide by every single one of them in order to be liked.
Except these standards seem to differ per creator. And they change every other day.
Summed up, these are my thoughts on the above statement, and after that I’ll go into them.
- People who have worked in the industry can leave it behind to go indie. They may have more connections and more experience than someone like me, but without a studio to back them, there’s no difference between them and I.
- Indie productions can hire whomever the fuck they can afford.
So… let’s get into these.
“Industry artists are not, and can never be, indie” is the biggest nonsense I’ve ever heard. Especially coming from the “just go indie” crowd. So first, when they’re on strike and not making your precious cartoons and movies when you want them to, you claim you want all these “famous” creators to abandon their jobs to create their own indie shows, but as soon as one of them does, your next comment is, “Oh, but you’re rich. You don’t deserve or need my money.”
Then don’t tell them to go indie. Indie is crowdfunding. It always has been and always will be, no matter how rich you may perceive a creator to be.
Creators of previously popular cartoons are now working non-artistic jobs to get by. Studios are doing everything they can to stop having to pay residuals. Most stop receiving payments as soon as the show goes off the air.
These creators you claim to be rich most often aren’t. Some of them are rich, but not funding an entire studio out of my asshole rich. And investors want something tried-and-true, like 100-year-old studios. Not one that popped up yesterday that happens to be run by a guy that had this one popular cartoon in the 90s. And honestly, one indie production does not an investable studio make.
Indie productions and the studios that may or may not come from them will, 9 times out of 10, depend on merch sales, ad revenue, and crowdfunding campaigns. A creator’s own savings and expendable income can only stretch so far.
Aside from that, not everyone who’s worked in the industry is a creator of a famous cartoon. Storyboard artists, animators, even directors are like you and I. A job’s a job. After the job ends, there’s nothing.
So, no. I don’t agree. Having industry experience doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have funds to produce a cartoon. Connections help too, but did you know you, too, can attend network events? In-person and online. Networking unfortunately requires being social, which is tough for someone who’s autistic and introverted (read: me). But it’s a necessary evil, so to say…
“Indie productions can’t work with industry talent” is also BS. For Swift Spark, I put my big boy pants on and sought out the agent of a childhood hero. And guess what? He was up for it!
I did not go to art school – I don’t even have a degree. High school graduate. I have never worked for a studio before, not even as an unpaid intern. I just figured out where to go, who to contact, and I prepared a well-put together pitch and was ready to negotiate.
Just… the fact that a numb-nuts-nobody like me was able to pull that off should be enough to deflect ‘nepotism’ and ‘industry isn’t indie’ arguments. I’m about as indie as can be.
Same goes for board artists, directors, etc… not everyone’s going to want to work with you, I’ve been ghosted / rejected / unable to negotiate a price both parties were happy with plenty of times, too. So yeah, budget definitely helps, but at the end of the day, it’s still up to the talent you’re reaching out to whether they want to do it or not. I’ve now been in contact with plenty of people that don’t mind working indie at all, despite having their names attached to some pretty well-known properties.
Don’t sell yourself short.
And then there’s the completely unfounded comments about genre… people who just straight up don’t know the difference between ‘film noir’ and ‘noir (dark) comedy’. I’m just going to chalk that up to the Internet being the Internet and everyone thinks they’re an expert on there.
Now, we’re about to get into the other side of the coin, starting off with one of the comments that bothered me in my original post.
“They’re asking for an industry standard budget when claiming to be indie.”
And all I have to say to that, is:
- Indie animation, at least the kind of indie animation you care about, is way, WAY more expensive than you think.
And then I’m talking about the indies with the millions of views here. The big ones. The popular ones. The ones that got swept up by the industry and… sorry, aren’t indie anymore, frankly.
Adding another point to the list, and then we’ll talk about them both:
- Studio funding means not indie. No matter where you came from. If the IP is owned by and/or production is funded by a member of the AMPTP, it’s not indie. All else is.
Okay, let’s talk about these. And they’re going to segway into that other side.
If you want cheaper indie animation to thrive, you, the audience, will need to accept lower standards.
The cost of living is astronomical, especially for animators living in LA. We need to work to eat, just like you. You can’t expect us to sit here and churn out professionally-looking shows for free in perpetuity.
Those shows you see pop up whenever CartoonYouTubeRanter330 talks about how “indie animation is the future of mankind” or “indie animation is the worst thing mankind has ever done”, have astronomical budgets compared to most. Anything made for under 100k is shoestring. And trust me, those shows have way bigger budgets than that.
If you want more indies to look like that, you’re going to have to help them out. Even just talking about a small indie that you like can help start a chain reaction.
And sure, whilst this ‘indie animation rivalling the big bad industry’ future may sound ideal, it’s far from realistic. Let’s chat about that after I address…
Studio funding is directly tied to the industry. If you sell the IP, it’s no longer yours, and your ‘indie production’ ceases to be indie.
There’s a difference between selling the IP and the right to distribute – the former is the intellectual property, the show itself and everything that may come after it, and the latter is just the rights to episodes of the show. Distribution rights expire. IP usually doesn’t, and has to be purchased back. Now it depends on the creator and how savvy they (or their lawyers) are when it comes to negotiating how much control they truly lose, but the standard is they sell the show outright and just… become an employee of the company, basically.
That’s when you’re no longer indie. The show’s no longer “yours”, so to say, and you lose most of the control over it.
What it comes down to, is how much control, how much say do you have in how the show is produced? That’s where the difference lies in my opinion.
Fully indie: Crowdfunded and self-hosted or hosted on a free-for-all platform like YouTube.
Still Indie: Hosted by a network, but IP still owned by the creator. Creator can make new shows on the same IP without input from the network. Contract on the show’s rights expire and can be picked back up by someone else.
Not Indie: IP owned by network/studio. Creator has no say in where the show is distributed to. Creator has no say on what happens to the IP or the show itself after the network/studio decides it’s done with it.
Of course, this is my opinion, and you may or may not share it. What this comes down to, is indie is going through some kind of evolution and we’re seeing more and more ‘mainstream’ interest. Don’t dismiss someone’s desire to create something for themselves just because they’ve held a position at a studio before.
And then there’s the other side of the coin, the one I’ve hinted at. The one I’ve personally struggled with, too.
Are we putting the bar on indie too high? Are young, aspiring creatives being discouraged by the fancy, flashy “big indies” because they think they have to live up to that standard?
I’ll talk about that in my next blog post.