What do you think is holding back indie animation? What do you think the indie animation community can improve on?
For me it is bad writing. It seems most indie people have little experience writing and don't bother picking up a book or two to learn how to get better at it.
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Careful, that twink is a top
budget
in fact it is what holds back animation as a whole
People on the internet used to animate for fun, without getting any money out of it.
That was when you could make something as cheap and shitty looking as Eddsworld or Homestar runner and still find an audience.
The thing holding back indie animation is that people expect teams of 1-3 people to be absolutely pumping out content or producing stuff on the same level of quality as Lackadaisy, Digital Circus, or Helluva Boss. In reality those projects are the outliers. There is a TON of indie animation out there but people only care about the shit that looks like a studio made it.
I truly believe you could pump out a web series in animatic form and as long as it still hits all the humor with decent voice acting, it will find an audience. I was hoping Becky Prim would start that experiment, but I know the dude is either busy or probably wants to pitch it as a real series.
1. If you are making very simple animations, you will get shat by people who don't understand that high quality animation requires a lot of labor, and by consequence a lot of money.
2. If you're aiming for decent quality or better, your output frequency will be abysmal, specially if you gotta have a normal job to keep yourself afloat.
3. Whatever is your case, you can't ever dream of being as ambitious as the big studios.
They still do. Newgrounds is still around and people publish new shorts every day. The problem is that people have much higher expectations now and that requires more people who have more expertise/education/experience which means they'll need to get paid.
Rudimentary flash-style animation can still be made for free, but you can't make something on the level of Lackadaisy for free.
>bad writing
Bold claim when 95% of the official cartoons we get are beyond garbage. The main issue is time, animators and money. Animating a single episode takes ages, especially if it's actually animated, not shit like Family Guy (and even that takes ages). And there are simply not many indie animators and they don't have much money. If you want to animate a series you have to make it your fulltime job but that means that you need adequate payment to do it without requiring multiple other jobs.
Even low level sketchy youtube cartoons I knew were cancelled since they were too much fricking work for the team. Plus fans demand more than one episode every year and this isn't possible without a huge team and time and therefore also money, since you have to live from this.
No one is backing the Kickstarter to the degree required
Yes I’m shilling this, I like it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofalethrion/tales-of-alethrion-season-3
https://www.youtube.com/@TalesofAlethrion
Books on how to write exist? I thought the israelites burned them all when the 2008 economic crash either definanced all writing schools or hired incompetent israelite puppet teachers to dumbify society down further to enjoy badly written slop.
The issue is reach, not budget. Stuff with good writing will never rise to the top because social media algorithms cannot amplify good writing in any work. It's got to be overstimulating garbage for teenagers or something that you can make a billion self inserts of, otherwise it will be consigned to the pits of obscurity like Plague of Gripes. He's genuinely a great screenwriter, but very few people know that (and those that do learned from the flashy parody animations). That's why Reincarnated in a Video Game World as a Clown Girl is so popular despite being atrociously written.
Ultimately, a new model, or new paradigm within existing models, in distribution will be the only way to make writing come back to the forefront, and it most likely will have to involve indie animations failing for their bad writing.
I do wonder alot how the hell are writers operating under this current social media algorithm. I'm not talking artists who also write but people who purely do write (novels, screenwriting, comic scripts, etc.) cause it must be fricking hell. You probably either need to be controversial as frick, doing smut (which apparently is the main way you get viewed on tiktok with books from what I heard) or have some quirky funny side to you. Having to just rely on whatever else to your stuff seen when everything has fallen to the lowest-tier of memes to even get molecule of attention probably has caused suicide rates to rise in those who can't do or keep up with that.
Yes, in the current model the viable prospects are to get into politics and ragebaiting, do pornography, or be the Green brothers. I don't agree that this is a proper evolution in terms of the draw of writing, though, because the current situation has shown that without any marketing of writing you end up with absolute abject garbage, or people trying to force audiovisual mediums to fit something that would be better served in writing. Those ten hour long video essays would be better served in text.
This only happened because the first internet and social media companies decided to destroy publishing for the lulz by creating a monopoly market, and then proceeded to do nothing with their new power there. If Larry Page hadn't taken getting clowned upon by AP English students so hard, we might still have the writing that the market is so obviously demanding, because guys like him don't know how to platform alternative works; they only know how to destroy.
>If Larry Page hadn't taken getting clowned upon by AP English students so hard
What the Hell. Is that a real thing that happened?
>Stuff with good writing will never rise to the top because social media algorithms cannot amplify good writing in any work.
Algorithms reward what is popular.
>It's got to be overstimulating garbage for teenagers or something that you can make a billion self inserts of, otherwise it will be consigned to the pits of obscurity
Welcome to all media ever made.
>Plague of Gripes. He's genuinely a great screenwriter, but very few people know that
I went to his channel. He just draws cartoon characters while talking about this. That's not good writing.
This channel does this better simply because they include drawings about what they're talking about instead of rambling.
>Ultimately, a new model, or new paradigm within existing models, in distribution will be the only way to make writing come back to the forefront
Or teach those who know how to write how to actually make a video someone will want to watch.
Or pair up writers and animators.
Big media still owns the only distribution platforms which are likely to get your work seen. What's needed now is essentially an Image Comics for animation streaming.
You would still need a way to market that isn't bought by Big Tech. Digital advertising is a ripoff, and all of the physical stuff is gone now.
Streaming isn't going well for the big studios, it would be reasonable to assume it would be even worse for indie productions.
I believe the best route right now is the Glitch/Vivzie pop way of creating merchandising friendly cartoons that can also spread through word of mouth (theories and fan works), and to also be smart with your production by reusing assets and the like.
Remember VRV?
Any service that remains independent needs cash flow but people don't want to pay for an indie service with very limited offerings when stuff like youtube exists. Unless there's a huge audience base, advertisers aren't going to have a reason to invest in the platform.
It's a nice idea, but people won't put their money where their mouth is.
>only distribution platforms
I say this every day and it still gets ignored: there are hundreds of film festivals that exclusively feature animated movies, and nearly all live action festivals have some in them too. Short length, feature length, that's where financiers go to find up-and-comers and vice versa. That is their entire purpose.
There's a couple of issues with this:
1. Entry fees which can add up if you stretch yourself out to dozens and dozens of them. If you aim only for the big festivals, you have stiff competition which means you NEED to already be a well-known name or have a really impressive film.
2. The submission options for animation is smaller. If you submit to a mixed medium festival, often times, they only have "animation category" while having a bunch of live-action genre categories. The amount of animation-only festivals that are worth submitting to are not very large. After a certain point, the only reason to submit to them is so you can list it as another accolade and make your film look more popular than it is.
3. Some festivals have exclusivity requirements or otherwise demand you do not put your film online for a certain period of time.
4. You never truly know how the festival is going to operate until you get there. For example, running all their best stuff first and last and then sticking your films somewhere in the middle when people start to get up to get a bite to eat because they won't do an intermission.
If you're someone who was already in the business, has contacts, can produce quality in their spare time, and can understand how to maximize their festival efforts, it's a good option. But this strategy was also highly recommended to me by all my art professors after making my thesis film and it didn't pay off for me at all. Obviously, a recently graduated student is not going to benefit as much from this system as a John Dilworth, but consider the type of people who are TRYING to get their indie work seen: Artists in their 20's with MAYBE a year or two worth's of job experience and not a lot of savings.
Indie animation used to be able to get across more on visual alone but now I'm seeing that audience standards for writing are starting to rise too. You're seeing the casual viewer pick up on bad writing when before they didn't even bat an eye at it. When you've been exposed to enough indie shows/shorts it's become very apparent how formulaic they are and outside of that visual level how samey it can feel. I'm not saying things need to be utterly the newest thing possible but it does feel like alot of 'follow the leader' when it comes to plot-beats and characters.
The biggest issue there is that animators and writers do not run in the same circles. An animator can say they know a guy who can do audio mixing or backgrounds but writer will usually draw a blank. Not that I blame them cause writing, while being something that takes a good deal to get good at, has such a low bar of entry you really gotta know what makes it good from the shit especially people who call themselves 'writers' but never wrote a damn thing in their lives. You can tell someone is a great animator from looking at their portfolio but to find a good or even decent writer nowadays who would be in cartoons is a pretty frickin tall order. There's also how alot of people have that 'my vision' angle with their stuff when they have to be open to compromise.
>pick up a book
>to learn to write a cartoon
Completely different.
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Aesthetic worship
you only gain knowledge through praxis. theory is derived from praxis, not the orher way around.
I wanna frick the female one and lick her feet.