XTIN/Extinction Level Event Project Update and Business Model

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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It’s been 3 months since I started the XTIN movie project with a call for team members here on BA.org. In that time we’ve had our ups and downs. Some team members rose to the challenge, some drifted away. The realistic characters and the soundtrack developed faster than I would have thought possible and forced a radical rethinking of the project timeline.

Here’s a sample of the artwork we’ve done so far:

And here’s our sounds -

Initial Development Track

Teaser Track, first public mix

Although we’ve made better progress than I’d hoped for artistically, the project has been hindered by a lack of a good business model. Before I made the team call back in September I’d looked at the possibility of using Cambrian House’s system for web based, for-profit project development. Cambrian House’s tools appeared to be perfect, but they wanted ownership which was totally unacceptable. I floated the idea of an Open Source implementation of their tools on Creative Commons and OpenBusiness.cc but the idea didn’t find any takers. Until now.

Today I received this post from Sam Rose of SocialSynergyWeb.net on the XTIN forum:

Jeremy and interested folks:

I’d like to offer the prospect of supplying you with the tools that you you need. I am not looking for anything in exchange from extinctionlevelevent other than simple collaboration in a pilot project. I help you develop the Cambrian-house-type tools and/or solutions you need, which helps you now, and helps me and everyone else in the long run.

I have set up a WikiHive at http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/HomePage

and, what I propose is that I can create a wiki for you there:

http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/ExtinctionLevelEvent/HomePage

(actually, already created wiki for you. we could use any CSS style sheet you want).

And, myself and others active at Open Business Models wiki hive can help you all co-develop the tools that you need. The OddMuse wiki engine is very extensible and modifiable. Plus, we can use WikiCalc to track hours, money,or any other numbers, and easily transclude that into other pages if necassary.

You can see an example of WikiCalc that I’ve set up here:

http://s4560.gridserver.com/cgi-bin/wikicalc/wikicalccgi.pl

The great thing about wiki, and WikiCalc, is that they leave an auditable trail. So, they are some fo the best tools to come to an agreement with online.

We have people active from Meatball wiki, communitywiki.org, and http://barcampbank.com with a wide range of Open Business expertise, and this is the type of pilot project that we are really interested in working on. We also have some good ideas among all of these communities, on helping groups of people create decision making systems that work well for open projects like this.

I think that we could use open source OddMuse wiki engine, and Open Source WikiCalc as a basis to create the types of tools you’ve been talking about on here, and on OpenBusiness.cc, Jeremy. I’d at least like to start a dialogue with you about what you envision exactly, what functions you need, etc, and see if my ideas with OddMuse and WIkiCalc might be able to create a workable system for extinctionlevelevent.

Let me know if you are interested, because I’d love to help with this end of things.
With an Open implementation of Cambrian House’s toolset we will finally have the means to create movies while maintaining ownership and creative control.

I’m going to work with Sam to develop these tools. I’ve proposed a simple project to get us started - an XTIN movie poster. We’ve tackled the more difficult problems with the characters, but there’s still plenty of work left to make this top notch.

I’ll be back tomorrow to discuss this more, and I’ll direct Sam here so he can explain the business side of the collaboration.

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Hi Jeremy and XTIN folks.

Congratulations on your progress so far! Looks and sounds awesome.

Disclaimer: I’d like to start out by saying that if anyone is reading this from Cambrian House, we are not going to be “copying” your tools directly (I’ve never even seen your actual tools themselves.)

What we are going to do is create a set of project tools for the XTIN project that will be based probably entirely around open source software.

What we should look at first is the actual business model. From what I can tell, people are contributing work now for shares of some form of revenue later, correct?

So, this is a revenue sharing model that is based around “sweat equity” or work contributions (unless I am missing something).

I recommend that for each task, such as this poster project, that we create an agreement that can equitably share the revenue generated from the project. So, for the poster project, lets ask some questions:

  • What are the projected sources of revenue from the poster? For instance, will the poster be sold through some outlet like cafepress, etc?
  • How have you currently been tracking the contributions so far (in hours worked, or some other way)? What type of value are you currently working with that converts to shares of revenue?
  • Is there a person who currently has the role of tracking the revenue sharing? How do project participants currently make their contribution values explicit to you or whomever is tracking work being done? How are project participants currently tracking their participation?
  • How are you compensating for the people who submit ideas? How about for the people who work creating the final product?I don’t know how you are currently doing this, but I can tell you that it is easier to create a set percentage of shares of revenues that you agree to pay people ahead of time for their individual contribution per-project.

There could also be a “base-percentage” that everyone gets an equal share of in addition to the shares that people who commit to working longer term. This could cover the “hit and run” contributors. This precentage would be split up evenly among all contributors.

These are just some example ideas off the top of my head. But, before I really go on at leangth, Jeremy, I’d like to really give you the chance to lay out your vision of the business and revenue sharing models, and the tools that you envision you’ll need to make it possible. Also, I’d like to discuss the issue of ownership, because this can affect how you structure the actual “business” that administers the revenue sharing. This is why a lot of businesses take the ‘easy way out’ and just create an LLC and claim ownership of all IP. Because it is easier than thinking about how to let people retain ownership, and how to monetize content that is owned by many different people. So, maybe you can detail how you want to see ownership handled. Inother words, to what degree are people currently retaining onwership over their contributions, and how are those contributors sharing that ownership with the project, etc?

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PS.

I like the idea that you have at http://www.extinctionlevelevent.com/forumXTIN/viewtopic.php?t=31

Where you have basically created “roles” for paticipants, and each “role” will have a set amount of revenue sharing.

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I think the contributers are doing it more on a hobby basis, but it’s my intention that, if the project gets to the point where it’s making money, that those who contributed be compensated.

Sounds like a good description. I’d rather not stick with the “faith-based” contribution system.

Deviant Art. They’ve got a good art print service.

I opened a thread to discuss this in the XTIN thread forum, but there has not been much interest in the topic yet. Let’s just say the area is open for development.

At this pint in the project, who-did-what isn’t difficult to track. :fokus: did all the music, I did all the concept art, aws357, .:Tracer:., and myself have done most of the modelling. Since the other artists are doing this as a hobby, nothing as specific as hours has been tracked. Since we’re working remotely, there’s no way other than the honor system to track hours anyway, so I don’t think we want to go by hours in the system we’re building. It’s better to post a job and how much it’s worth, and the artist will spend however much time it takes them personally to do the job to a satisfactory level.

[/quote]

Currently I’m the only person on ideas, and it’s likely to stay that way. As rough as it can be for an artist to collaborate on the ideas of others, when they have their own ideas waiting to be done, I think it’s 10X tougher on writers. We had a writer working on XTIN in the beginning, but the co-writer role is, understandably, not very satisfying. I probably won’t ask anyone to step into the co-writer role again. Anyone who wants to write will be happier waiting until the XTIN movie is done, taking the CC-licensed art assets, and creating their own work.

I agree with that. It has to be kept simple so the accountant wing of the project doesn’t need to be larger than the art department.

These are just some example ideas off the top of my head. But, before I really go on at leangth, Jeremy, I’d like to really give you the chance to lay out your vision of the business and revenue sharing models, and the tools that you envision you’ll need to make it possible. Also, I’d like to discuss the issue of ownership, because this can affect how you structure the actual “business” that administers the revenue sharing. This is why a lot of businesses take the ‘easy way out’ and just create an LLC and claim ownership of all IP. Because it is easier than thinking about how to let people retain ownership, and how to monetize content that is owned by many different people. So, maybe you can detail how you want to see ownership handled. Inother words, to what degree are people currently retaining onwership over their contributions, and how are those contributors sharing that ownership with the project, etc?
Ownership is a tricky question. At the ultimate level, copyright, the XTIN project AFAIK will have to own the copyright. I don’t think American law allows for any other possibility (but IANAL). However, underneath that ultimate level of copyright is the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which gives back many of the aspects of ownership. These are aspects of ownership which MPAA studios would take as a matter of course. While the BY-NC-SA license may not be the end-goal Utopian way of film making, it’s a giant and radical step forward from where we’re currently at. We shouldn’t be so blinded by the end goal that we forget “The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.”

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Jeremy,

Thanks for your responses. I went ahead and started summarizing the model that is emerging from our discussion at http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/ExtinctionLevelEvent/HomePage

So far, I think that you have a really good basic model here. I wanted to suggest that we should spend some time defining the ProjectRoles, and creating a revenue sharing percentage number for each role that we define in the project. I will summarize the roles for us here:

http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/ExtinctionLevelEvent?action=edit;id=ProjectRole

You can feel free to add to that page too (or any page on the wiki, of course).

So, far, based on the model that we are talking about here, once we define the roles, and the percentage that will be payed, the accounting tools will be easy. If the project small (say, under 50 people total), then you can basically require people to possess a paypal account. I know that a lot of people don’t like paypal, but, it is a pretty universal system. Anyway, I propose that you use it in this project to keep things simple. The reason why I propose that you use paypal is because paypal has an option for mass pay.

So, what we can do right away, is ask participants to agree to the ParticipantAgreement that we will have up on the wiki site soon. Then, ask them to email their paypal email address and a statement that they agree with the ParticipantAgreement. Then, we can plug them into an instance of WikiCalc, like the one I have installed here. (I’ll install a new instance on the server that the wiki is on, and we can create a password-protected sheet for the XTIN project). We can also then plug the revenue that comes in once a month. and have the WikiCalc spreadsheet automatically calculate the percentages convert them into dollar amounts for each participant. Then, we can export a tab-delimited file right to paypal that will pay everyone at once. You can even generate reports from WikiCalc to a password protected site automatically!

I think that even if the project scaled up to as many as a few hundred participants, that this would be manageable for even one person to do, once it is all set up for them. No matter how you did it, you’d would want to have a human at least do a quick review of each person that enters the project. So, in the way that I propose above, this allows you to basically:

-plug people into a spreadsheet that already has calculations of percentages built in based on their roles

-Plug in revenue as it is reported from Deviant Art, then export a pay-out to paypal

-Automatically export a report to a webpage if you want participants to be able to review.

So, I think w have a good core model, and good idea of the license, and a good basic accounting tool system. Do you think this can work for your project?

Beyond this, are there other tools that you envision needing for this project? If so, what might they be?

I think that you can basically use the forum for ongoing general discussion, and possibly voting if needed, and the wiki for summarizing and creating key documents out of different discussions, and WikiCalc as the accounting and money reporting tool. You can have people join the project and declare agreement via email.

I would also recommend the following:

-That you ultimately create an LLC to seperate your own assetts from the project assetts.
-That you run agreements by a lawyer before actually requiring people to agree to them 9to make sure that the agreements are legal in the statecountry that you are in).
-That in the participant agreements, it states that percentages paid are “net” revenue, so that you can pay fees from paypal, webhosting costs, and any other expenses generated first (there probably won’t be many), and then distribute the rest.

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The Mass Pay option is great - the only thing that troubles me is, in the event of a hacker attack, how responsive is PayPal going to be (giving their history of unresponsiveness)?

I don’t mind requiring PayPal in the beginning - we’re a small project and we’re already doing a lot for our size. As the project progresses we can look into other options if they’re needed.

Gamasutra does a survey of industry pay rates. I suggest we use it as a guide for our project roles and the value of various art tasks. It’s for games, but I’m not aware of a similiar survey for movies (if anyone knows of such a survey, let me know).

Gamasutra Survey

Unfortunately they are being cheesy about requiring a registration to view the survey.

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Hmmm…like what kind of hacker attack are you thinking of?

I agree. I mean, there are other more elaborate ways to do this, and probably other merchant services besides paypal, but most of them are a lot more expensive, or more time consuming in programming forms and logins. The system that I have come up with so far is something that can be implemented pretty much right away. If your project scales up larger, then we could create a project space, maybe that uses OpenID as a login system, and ties into some kind of mass pay system from an ecommerce system of some kind (possibly drupal’s ecommerce, perhaps).

I am totally cool with using that. Seems like a good guideline.

So, for this poster project, what should we say the “ProjectRoles” are?

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Project Roles -

Concept Artist - I’ll probably do this. It’d be nice to have someone who paints better than me on the project though. We could have a competition to design the poster if anyone’s interested, with the winner getting the concept art position on the poster and possibly taking on that role on the one minute short.

Modellers - I think we’ve got enough modellers for this project.

Texture/shader artist - I can do textures, but XTIN needs someone who can really get results out of Blender’s shader system.

Lighting Artist - Need one of these

Animator - There’s no animation on a poster, but we need someone who can rig and pose the characters

Marketter (marketeer?) - I assume this will be you Sam.

I’d like to set a percentage aside for Blender Foundation and our web hosting.

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The Gamasutra survey wasn’t as useful as I thought it would be - they’ve put all artists into one category instead of having them divided into modeller/texturer/lighting/etc. classifications.

Has anyone seen a more detailed salary survey?

If not we’ll have to find another way to do this.

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I’ll start summarizing these on the Wiki site today, and we can always revise them later. Sure, I’ll take on the marketing role. I actually thought that while you are small, ther can be a marketing/accounting/adimistration role, and that later if you get bigger, marketing and account can become seperate roles.

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I am already looking online right now, and I’ll post some links to some sites soon that give some different rough numbers for 3D animators.

We can then use these numbers and figure out a way to estimate pecentages of revenue based on the numbers.

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Sounds good. I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

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Jeremy,

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Please let me know if these are enough examples to come to the conclusion that I came to:
Project Roles Research

(mouse over little white balls to see links)

(I concluded that the range is about 40-50,000 US a year average for all of the animator roles. maybe about 30-40,000 a year average for marketer/accountant role)

If so, then we can figure out a way to convert this into a revenue-sharing percentage. These percentages would be dependent also upon the exact number of people involved. So, the gross revenue would be the overall actual amount of money that comes in. Once you pay project expenses, tithe some money to Blender foundaiton and any other donations you want to make, then what is left over is the net revenue, and this is what is split up among project participants.

Now, we need to figure out how the average salary translates to how net revenue will be split up.

But, we also need to figure out a formula for percentage compared to amount of people. Because, if we don’t, everytime you add a new participant, existing people would have to sacrifice some of the amount of money they receive to give the new person a share.

So, there are two possible ultimate directions that this can go in:

  • Keeping the amount of money shared consistent means throttling or limiting the amount of people you can add to the project, based on the amount of revenue available to share.
  • If you need the felxibility of adding people as needed, then the agreement with participants would be “x”% of total net revenue, which may change with amount of participants.Does that make sense? :slight_smile:
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Thanks Sam. Let me look at those numbers, I think I can come up with a good compensation breakdown from what you found.

If you need the felxibility of adding people as needed, then the agreement with participants would be “x”% of total net revenue, which may change with amount of participants.
There will have to be flexibility until any individual product is finished, then it can be etched into stone. Right now I don’t know if we’ll need a lighting artist or if aws357 or myself can fill that role. Those involved will have to realize that, if we need more people to do the job right, we’ll have to bring them on. Theoretically we should all end up making more by creating a good product than a shabby one, right?

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I would be interested to work, but what is the plot after Rau shows up?

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I have taken the perhaps doubtful position of not revealing plot details in advance, which a couple team members have disagreed with. We’re 1-2 years from starting on the main movie project, I’m worried that if I give out the story now it will be old long before we start work on it. Or I may want to change it and then people will be upset because they liked the original version better.

There are 3 animation projects planned to build up to the full movie - a 30 sec teaser which is halfway or better to completion, a 1 minute movie, and a 10 minute movie.

The 30 sec teaser is pretty simple story wise, it’s a clip of Taonui standing on a bunch of corpses in the middle of a vast battle, interspered with shots of her gearing up prior to battle.

The one minute short is going to follow a young queen as she leaves her mother’s pyramid and takes her swarm off in an attempt to conquer somebody else’s.

The 10 minute short will be the battle that occurs when the young queen from the 1 minute short tries to take Queen Sina’s pyramid (the black pyramid in the blog’s title banner).

If you need proof of my ability to write before offering your services, I’ll be tackling/revealing the script for the 1 minute short around the time work on the 30 sec teaser wraps up.

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After more thought, I think it’s going to be better if “project points” are assigned per art task, rather than on a “position” basis. This should avoid a situation where, for example, artist A is pulling a lot of weight and getting a lot of work done for the number of project points they’re getting, while artist B isn’t.

To preserve flexibility, XTIN project will break from the Cambrian House system in the way it assigns points.
Cambrian House gives a project a set number of points and, once they’re assigned, there’s no more to go around. A bad situation if the project manager makes a mistake and underestimates the tasks needing to be done, or if more tasks are added later for creative reasons. Therefore, XTIN will add up the total project points when the project is finished, and make compensation based on what percentage of the total points an artist holds. The downside to this system is that an artist doesn’t know exactly what their percentage is going to be when they sign up. The upside is, this system should result in a better end product. As always, XTIN project will proceed with quality as its highest priority, on the assumption people know quality when they see it, will reward it, and we’ll all come out better that way.

There are three numbers everyone needs to understand - “base units,” “difficulty level,” and “project points.”

Base Units - reflects the type of job being done. Animators are generally paid higher than modellers in the industry, so an animation job has a higher base unit.

Difficulty Level - reflects how difficult an art task is. For example, modelling a primitive, the easiest modelling task of all, would have a difficulty of “1.” Modelling a human head would have a difficulty level of “100.” The scale is open ended to allow for incredibly difficult tasks.

Assigning difficulty levels requires community interaction to be fair, and I will be posting requests for help here (unless the mods suggest a better location).

Project Points - Determines the percentage of profit the artist is entitled to for successfully completing the job. Base Units x Difficulty Level = Project Points.

Here’s an example project -

Say we want a ball with a red plastic shader. The art tasks, base units (see below for determination of base units), and difficulty would be -

modelling - 1 B.U. x 1 D.L. = 1 P.P.

shader - 1.5 B.U. X 1 D.L. = 1.5 P.P.

Total project points for this project = 2.5. The modeller is entitled to 40% of profits, and the shader artist is entitled to 60% of profits. If profits are $100, the modeller would get $40 and the shader artist would get $60.

But if profits are $10, the modeller will only get $4 and the shader artist will get only $6. One can see the wisdom of picking good projects to work on, or spreading one’s risk across multiple projects.

Determining Values for Base Units -

To give me a baseline for how much each art task is worth, I’m going to take the 3-6 yrs experience values from this site and this site.

If you are more junior, it will take you longer to do a good job, thus you will be able to take on fewer art tasks and will make less money. If you are senior, it will take you less time to do a good job and therefore you will be able to take on more art tasks and make more money. Rewards for experience and seniority are built into this system. Plus, you don’t have to politic for “advancement” like in a normal office situation, you just have to be able to do the work well.

I’ll be breaking the general “Artist” category into multiple categories. So far the vast majority of people who have applied to XTIN project have been modellers. It’s necessary to split off the remainder of general artist tasks into their own categories, which will get nearly a third again as many base units to reflect the rarity of Blender users with these skills.

So here are my baseline values that I’ll be using for assigning project points to art tasks -

Modelling = $55,594 = 1 project point/per difficulty level

Shaders = 1 p.p. (from above) x 1.3 (low supply of artists modifier) = 1.3 project points/per diffulty level

Textures = 1 p.p. (from above) x 1.3 (low supply of artists modifier) = 1.3 project points/per diffulty level

Lighting = 1 p.p. (from above) x 1.3 (low supply of artists modifier) = 1.3 project points/per diffulty level

Cloth Sim Artist = 1 p.p. (from above) x 1.3 (low supply of artists modifier) = 1.3 project points/per diffulty level

Other F/X = 1 p.p. (from above) x 1.3 (low supply of artists modifier) = 1.3 project points/per diffulty level

Animation = $65,619 = 1.18 project points/per diffulty level

Lead Artist/Animators = $74,861* = 1.35 project points/per difficulty level

Producers/Project lead: = $60,802 = 1.09 project points/per difficulty level

Sound designer/Engineer = $68,571 = 1.23 project points/per difficulty level

Composers/Musicians = $64,000 = 1.15 project points/per difficulty level

Producer = $60,802 = 1.09 project points/per difficulty level

*The 3-6 year value listed is actually 62,411, less than a regular animator with that level of experience makes. This has to be an error. Looking at the less than 3 yr and greater than 6 yr values, an animation lead makes more than an animator. I added up how much more, for both those levels of experience, split the result in two, and then added that number to the salary of an animator with 3-6 yrs of experience, to get a new ( and better? ) value for Lead Animator, 3-6 yrs experience.

Positions which have yet to be determined -

Marketing = ??? = ???

Accounting = ??? = ???

Concept Artist = ??? = ???

Art Director = ??? = ???

Storyboards = ??? = ???

Creator/Writer = ??? = ???

Graphic Design = ??? = ???

Compositing = ??? = ???

Director = ??? = ???

Film cutter = ??? = ???

Legal = ??? = ???

DVD Authoring = ??? = ???

Mocap Director = ??? = ???

Voice Actor = ??? = ???

Mocap Actor = ??? = ???

Any other roles I haven’t thought of?

Comments are welcome!

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It looks to me like you have yourself a well built budding plan. I look forward to the day it comes to fruition.

Regards,
-albert

1 Like
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Jeremy, the points system is obviously way better role-based sharing revenue. Looks like it will scale well.

I think the system that you have is great. I’ll try and research the other Positions, adn I’ll rework the wiki so that this is all documented there soon.

Here’s a mock-up WikiCalc spreadsheet report of 3 imaginary people, and how they would share 51,623.00 in revenue (if they were the only people working on the whole project):

http://s4560.gridserver.com/cgi-bin/wikicalc/wikicalccgi.pl?view=barcampbank/test1

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Also, a quick thought is that, once a project is ready to launch, we may want to progressively spread out incentive for Community marketing, because otherwise overall revenue coming in could be make or break by just the marketing person(s). Just a thought. The solution does not have to be complicated. We could break out another point system, modeled after spreadfirefox.com, that awards incentive points for people who market. This is something that I am going to research and come up with a proposal on.