Lew speaks
THE LONG JOURNEY
To make this feature film, I had an extremely limited budget, limited software, limited amount of equipment, and no crew. Most studios, and even small commercial boutique shops, would find the assets I had laughable. But what I did have was my unstoppable drive to make movies, a love for telling stories, a ton of animation production experience, a unique visual style, technical innovation, and the ability to simply get things done. Confident? Yes. But you have to be if you want to complete an 85 minute CG animated feature film on your own. Killer Bean Forever had over 1000 separate shots.
To put it in perspective: CG animated feature films have more box office success stories than flops when compared to their live action counterparts. However, CG animated films tend to cost a lot more to make, requiring 300 to 400 artists, technicians, and support staff. Big budget CG animated feature films range from $75 - $150 million. Mid range animated films, with distribution in place, range from $35 - $60 million. Low budget independent animated films range from $10 - $25 million.
What would an ultra low budget be? Is there even such a thing in CG animation? My guess would be in the $2-$3 million range, but to my knowledge, a CG animated feature film has never been made with that type of budget. Each 22 minute episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars costs $1.2 million.
More over, big budgets don't necessarily mean faster production time. The typical production schedule for an animated feature is around 18-24 months. But many big budget animated films have taken 4 years to make. The $40 million budgeted Delgo took 7 years.
Killer Bean Forever officially took 5 years while I was raising 2 babies and taking time off to work side animation jobs to pay the bills. If I were to redo the entire movie from scratch under the same conditions (meaning no money, no man power), I know I could get it done by myself in 3 years with the extended experience I have now.
Killer Bean Forever's budget was well under $1 million. I say under $1 million to factor in the cost of my 20,000 man hours of labor, but what I actually spent on hardware/software assets could barely buy a BMW. I really had no money, but I had a lot of passion backed up by extensive animation production experience.
How was all of this done? For me to finish 85 minutes of footage nearly all on my own, I needed extreme efficiency and precision. Decisions had to be made quickly and executed perfectly. I didn't have a 500 processor render farm where I can keep re-rendering shots until they looked perfect. Some bigger studios have up to 4,000 processors. I had 5 quad core computers that basically were rendering in my apartment for 2 years, 24 hours a day. Needless to say, I didn't need to heat my apartment during the winters.
I built my animation production pipeline from the ground up, making sure it was as streamlined as possible for the limited amount of money that I could spend. Yes, my movie could have been completed much faster than 5 years, but I simply lacked the funds to make that happen. Instead, I innovated new techniques, cheap techniques, to create animation. It dealt with a lot of 2D motion tracking and dynamic simulations. The goal was to offload as much work to the computer as possible, and reduce as much manual labor as I could. Killer Bean Forever took roughly 20,000 man hours of my time, but without my innovations and methods of production, it would have taken me a hell of a lot longer. Maybe twice as long.
Killer Bean Forever was a long and grueling project, that I just loved to make.
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