Money laundering and the movie industry - $50 million for an animated movie!??

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Wow, talk about a straw man argument. Electricity to make the movie? You mean the rats turning the wheel have stopped running? What did they not get their cheese allotment and go on strike? Of course computers take electricity, but we aren't building nuclear plants to run our animation computers. These aren't super computers sequencing the human genome of doing quantum calculations. We are basically talking about web servers for the most part. By your logic it would cost us $50 every time we load a web page due to the electrical cost.

Rendering servers are not your typical web servers. These are very powerful machines with multiple GPU's that are tasked with rendering the CGI wireframe models. They can run for weeks doing just a small section of the production. So, electricity certainly comes into the cost frame for a heavy digital animation. It is a constant process, review, edit and repeat cycle that certainly uses a lot of energy.

originally posted by: enlightenedservant
a reply to: Atsbhct

To be fair, a lot of people still get duped by seemingly obvious hoaxes like the video clips from SecureTeam with UFOs & dimensional portals. That means that cheap and/or badly done cgi isn't necessarily a deal breaker for a lot of people.

True! Good point.

originally posted by: Atsbhct
a reply to: DigginFoTroof

There is DEFINITELY money laundering going on; but ...animated movies as they're made today are not "automated". It takes a team of hundreds sometimes to animate and render these big budget animated movies. Not to mention that every animated movie made today by a large studio is in itself R&D for the next animation project when it comes to tech and production.
It takes a LOT of money to produce these things. No one is working for pennies.

sometimes it takes minutes to hours to render a frame. Then theres assembling an animation.

originally posted by: DigginFoTroof
So I just heard that this new animated movie had an estimated budget of $50 million! This is basically the length of 4 cartoon TV shows rolled into one. Given that animation has largely been automated since early 2000, I have a very difficult time believing that it cost any where near that amount of money to produce a movie such as this.

Go price up the cost of running a render farm for a year.

Then price up how many animators you need to keep feeding that render farm so it's not sitting idle.

Don't forget, every extra day you spend rendering, you're paying another day's salary for hundreds of people and all the associated costs of maintaining a large workforce.

a reply to: EvillerBob

I think what we can all surmise from this OP is that they don't fully realize how animation works...or money laundering.

Keep trying to expose the man though OP, that's the real issue.

originally posted by: charlyv
a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Wow, talk about a straw man argument. Electricity to make the movie? You mean the rats turning the wheel have stopped running? What did they not get their cheese allotment and go on strike? Of course computers take electricity, but we aren't building nuclear plants to run our animation computers. These aren't super computers sequencing the human genome of doing quantum calculations. We are basically talking about web servers for the most part. By your logic it would cost us $50 every time we load a web page due to the electrical cost.

Rendering servers are not your typical web servers. These are very powerful machines with multiple GPU's that are tasked with rendering the CGI wireframe models. They can run for weeks doing just a small section of the production. So, electricity certainly comes into the cost frame for a heavy digital animation. It is a constant process, review, edit and repeat cycle that certainly uses a lot of energy.

This person doesn't know that, however I do because I used to build those bad boys (in a former life). We used to have the early prototypes in our test lab running so hot, that we had to shut off the HVAC system even in the winter. We called them "the spaceheaters". They would run so hot while actively debugging, that one time my scope probe slipped off the DSP pin, and my thumb landed on the DSP itself. There was a puff of smoke, and the smell of burned skin, and I was without any thumbprint for about 6 months or so....LOL.

Those bad boys LOVE the electricity....and having a farm of them is not a cheap endeavor either, especially when you need a redundant storage system to store the data as well. These are not your Best Buy computing systems....and the final quality shows that clearly to those with the trained eye.

originally posted by: Krakatoa

originally posted by: charlyv
a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Wow, talk about a straw man argument. Electricity to make the movie? You mean the rats turning the wheel have stopped running? What did they not get their cheese allotment and go on strike? Of course computers take electricity, but we aren't building nuclear plants to run our animation computers. These aren't super computers sequencing the human genome of doing quantum calculations. We are basically talking about web servers for the most part. By your logic it would cost us $50 every time we load a web page due to the electrical cost.

Rendering servers are not your typical web servers. These are very powerful machines with multiple GPU's that are tasked with rendering the CGI wireframe models. They can run for weeks doing just a small section of the production. So, electricity certainly comes into the cost frame for a heavy digital animation. It is a constant process, review, edit and repeat cycle that certainly uses a lot of energy.

This person doesn't know that, however I do because I used to build those bad boys (in a former life). We used to have the early prototypes in our test lab running so hot, that we had to shut off the HVAC system even in the winter. We called them "the spaceheaters". They would run so hot while actively debugging, that one time my scope probe slipped off the DSP pin, and my thumb landed on the DSP itself. There was a puff of smoke, and the smell of burned skin, and I was without any thumbprint for about 6 months or so....LOL.

Those bad boys LOVE the electricity....and having a farm of them is not a cheap endeavor either, especially when you need a redundant storage system to store the data as well. These are not your Best Buy computing systems....and the final quality shows that clearly to those with the trained eye.

Remember some of these labs going into Bitcoin mining, when it was feasible without ASIC''s. They ran just as hot and hungry as they did for digital rendering!

The amount of ignorance on display in this thread about how much work actually goes in to an animated production is astounding. Many have pointed out that despite the tools changing it doesn't make everything just point and click. It doesn't take much to sit back and research your theory a little bit to understand that, while yes shady things are happening I'm sure, it's not because of a $50mil animated film.

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If you want to look deeper into what most likely was a laundering scam of some sort, look into the story of "Food Fight!" an animated film. Quick Rundown:

Originally to come out in 2003, Food Fight had a budget of 65 Million Dollars (which at that time was astronomical). Most of which was in "foreign presales" of the rights. The hard drives containing the film all of a sudden went "missing". The film had a lot of investing from brands you'd find in any grocery store for the purpose of including their mascots in the movie. After the supposed "industrial espionage" most of the funding was pulled and a lot of money was owed elsewhere to investors whom, now that it was 2007, have started pulling their backing out of this project.

Eventually, in 2011, the film still not finished a second time, was auctioned off for 2.5 Million and the insurance company that originally provided all the insurance for the film finished "as cheaply as possible." in 2011.

The product that was released was abysmally done even by what the standards in 2002-2003 would have been, and the supposed "finished" film that was stolen never has ever surfaced, not even the hard drives ever showed back up.

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So an animated movie now, in 2018, for $50 Mil? Nothing to worry about. At all. Not to say there's not going to be messed up things out there to worry about - this just isn't one of them ultimately.

Respect the hard work the animators, riggers, lighting specialists, concept artists, etc have put in to bring these films to life. It's not automated, and when something CAN be automated its usually after 4-5 years of research, development, programming, and more put into refining a process they did manually (Ex. Sully's Hair in Monsters Inc vs Monsters University) so they DON'T have to spend literal days on 2-3 frames of animation on the next movie.