commercial animation cooperative.

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1

Would it be possible to make a short childrens animation series using a cooperative business model?

I have some vague ideas for the concept but really I’m wondering if its logistically possible.

A cooperative business model would mean that everyone involved in the project would have equal shares in the project and subsequent profits. Could meetings and communications be done over the internet so that people from different countries could contribute?

I think the advantage of this model would be costs. There wouldn’t necessarily be any deadlines so the work could be done in spare time. No bosses everything would be decided democratically and everyone involved would have a personal stake in the project.

What do you think?

2

It ‘could’ work, but it rarely does.

I think the best thing to do, if you are serious about getting investors and a show out there is to develop a very strong, and original (although from what I’ve seen originality doesn’t mean much to investors, they just want a quick buck) back story with strong characters that can show development through out a number of episodes, or if it’s a really simple 1-3 year old thing then just make them cute, and easy to distinguish, think of character designs like Thomas the Tank, or Iggle Piggle, my 3 year old nephew instantly recognizes them, even from a highly pixelated thumbnail, that is the sort of recognizable character(s) you want.

If you just want to get a show and progress from there think about branching off, toy designs, board games, etcetera etcetera, an investor and/ or studio is looking to make money, so the bigger the potential pot of gold, the better your chances are.

Anyway, once you develop a detailed back story, and characters then go about creating a 5-10 minute production, the quality doesn’t have to be Pixar-esque, but it should at least be polished enough to show of the story, characters and the future potential, for other episodes, and of course the marketing aspects.

I think doing the above, while taking longer, would be an easy task on your own, you will be in full control, which means you can steer the project in the direction of your chosen, something which isn’t easy with team productions.

3

It can be done . . .

4

It probably could be done, but as daniel said, it usually fails.
Imho the main problem is you’ll need somebody to lead everything, and is capable of leading, someone who doesn’t give up, and carries on till the end of a project. Those people are pretty rare. Another problem is to get the right people to finish such a project. Most professionals don’t like to work with this business model (no payroll is no food on the table and professionals need to eat) and you’ll usually end up with enthusiastic amateurs that don’t know the amount of work that is ahead of them ( I count myself one, I guess on of my biggest flaws is that I can get all excited about a project, rush in, and then find out I have other things that should be on my priority list, and then I end up doing nothing for such a project … need to work on that personally flaw).

If you’re planning on doing this my recommendation would be to form a core group first existing of a small team of people that will move the project further along. Such people preferably know what they are doing and you know them before you start such a project, so you know what to expect and how much you can rely on them. Then you can look at expanding the team with new people you might not know, or don’t know as good. The software and resources are there to create such meetings, as long as the language barrier isn’t a problem, you shouldn’t have any problems on the meeting aspect of it.

basicly my steps would be, teamwise:
1 - define what you want, and develop it till a point you can interest other people in it.
2 - form a core team that moves the project further
3 - add new members to the team to expand production capacity.

my 2cents on this, now I should take a nap, as I can barely keep my eyes open.

5

It can work but will depend on how you manage a number of factors.
Establishing a good business model that takes into account things like people dropping out of the project, other people joining, administration, who is going to market the final product and does the administration staff have the same stake in the project as the artists? legal’s, copyright etc.
A clear goal and production outline. I know you said you didn’t want deadlines but in my experience, without some sort of production schedule nothing will ever get done. Some people will contribute more than others then get stuck waiting for other people to finish their part and possibly lose interest as a result.
Technology & Communication: regular production meetings/briefs updating all involved and having a system for when no one can agree. The logistics of these meetings technology wise is pretty simple. There are dozens of virtual office and net meeting products out there. Humanology (did I just invent a word) wise it’s a different story. If you want people from all over the world to collaborate on this you will have language barriers and possibly even cultural differences that you will need to overcome. What software will be used? Is this a Blender only production? Celtx is a great tool for scripting and pre production.
Finally, the production itself. There is no substitute for good scripts. How will the production be directed and by who? If needed, who will voice the characters? Music, SFX and audio mixing. Don’t make the mistake of forgetting about audio it is possibly even more important than the visuals. (I guarantee the Blair witch project would have flopped had the sound quality matched the vision style)
So I think if you can get these issues (but not only these issues, there are a allot more I just don’t have time or space for here) sorted out you have a chance of creating something really great. I don’t think you will be the first to try or even achieve this sort of production. A little research would probably turn up other productions with the same model. If you do find some of these productions, it would be a good idea to contact the producers and pick their brains.
Good luck with it all. I hope you do get it sorted and I would love to see a finished product.

6

Yeah, I agree there would be all sorts of problems.

I think the principle problem, would be the distance. How would we choose who should join the project, more importantly, who shouldn’t. (we would need a reliable arsehole filtering mechanism)

Regarding a leader. Well thats the point of a cooperative. There isn’t a leader, everything is determined democratically. There are roles that the best person for that role will fulfil. So there would be a concept artist who would naturally take the lead regarding the look of the models, but every decision is potentially subject to a company mandate.

Remuneration might be more complicated. But it should probably be based on how much actual work each member of the cooperative contributed to the project. Again with some democratic input. Maybe half of the shares are divided between the cooperative based on actual work committed and half are distributed based on a vote determining what everyone thinks people deserve.

7

With the person that needs to lead I didn’t necessarily mean somebody that makes all the important decisions, but you need somebody that at least can channel a discussion in the proper way, so you don’t end up only discussing ideas but not getting any further :slight_smile: and having somebody that you’re looking up against might make you more inclined to work harder.

I’m wondering is there any (more or less) known example of this business model that actually achieved good results? I mean I see it a lot when people try to get other people interested in joining there game dev project or feature film project, but I haven’t seen (afaik) any project that actually achieved this.

8

The bolded part of the quote is receipt for chaos/destruction,
there’s nothing wrong with benevolence but a certain level of ‘dictatorship’ is needed.

as far as democracy goes, adopting a model similar to the way debian(linux) project is managed may be of interest.

every year a new ‘president’ of the debian organization is elected trough democratic voting,
mind you only participating people get to vote, for obvious reasons. :slight_smile:

9

I couldn’t disagree with you more about the dictatorship. That’s an idea from someone who has fallen for the capitalist con! :yes:

As I said, there will be roles that some people will naturally fulfil and there might be roles that an the organisation might need people in, such as administrative or organisational roles. Then I think you’re right a voted or rotation president might be appropriate. But even then I think that is only necessary in large organisations (debian has thousands) and the administrator wouldn’t make major decisions he would just administrate. But again for a simple childrens series which could be done by a dozen staff I can’t see why it would be necessary.

Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

And Month I don’t know if this model has ever been used in a animation studio but it certainly is used in other companies, very successfully. Watch this video for a brilliant examination of ther capitalist system an the coop alternative.

http://fora.tv/2010/03/03/Richard_Wolff_Capitalism_Hits_the_Fan

10

You don’t need a dictatorship, but you do need a person who the rest of the team can look up to, which will essentially be the leader, sort of like how developing Blender is a totally open and true democracy, in that any person can come along and do whatever they want with Blender, they may not be able to distribute it through the Blender Foundation, but that doesn’t mean they can’t set up their own thing, it’s completely free and open, but Ton is accepted as the leader in many ways and helps steer Blender in the right direction (along with the other developers of course) and manages resources.

That sort of thing works, but it’s very hard to achieve such a set up with people you don’t know very well.

11

@Daniel,

Yes I completely agree, but I don’t think a coop model would exclude some people exerting more influence than others. Anyone should be able to contribute ideas to the coop as a whole and some ideas will be better than others and some individuals will have consistently better ideas. So in a sense they will lead, but that leadership is legitimate because the others are willing to follow and it’s contingent one the quality of ideas. And most importantly these types of leaders don’t automatically get more money simply because of a job title!

12

when I said “dictatorship” (notice how I said it, not only what I said/wrote) I didn’t mean the H. guy kind or the S. guy kind.

more T. R. kinda guy[edit: in other words I meant a Benevolent dictator for (projects) Life]. :wink:
in other words leadership’s still needed and it needs to be damned well organized.
I am not just randomly guessing here, been involved in these kinds of ‘community projects’ before,
and even lead one(quietly broke apart when I lost my website hosting, we had our forum there).
Organization is damned important, so is a guy who handles it,
and essentially thus that guy will be the leadership.

Mind you I interpreted your message earlier as ‘no leadership necessary’ whilst now that I read it,
I see you might have simply meant that it will be found later
(need a plan from the start any way’s, no matter how much it will change throughout production, tho). :slight_smile:

13

I’m going to guess the best route is to make simple yet appealing work that you can do on your own, come up with a studio name, maybe actively recruit or just have a job opportunities on your site, then go from there. Or start a meetup group in your area to be able to actually work in person, not that’s any more secure, but at least you can actually kick people, as opposed to doing it on IM.

14

Hello tmcthree,

I like the idea of partnering skills and work to get something done and share the results as you have suggested. In my case I am trying to develop a 3D game for Android platform; however, it is quite hard to do everything (modeling, animating and coding). If you or anyone else is interested in creating a team for that please let me know. My direct email is mv_emailATyahooDOTcom
(replace AT and DOT by actual symbols).