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Comment by cchooper | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about TV, but for a very low budget film the major costs are:

1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand).

2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper).

3. Equipment (camera, dollies, lights etc.): 40k

4. Crew: 70k for a 2 week shoot with a cheap crew, including catering

5. Post production: 40-60k

This sort of money will get you a surprisingly professional looking 90 minute film. However, production costs on film are always eclipsed by marketing costs. It can cost thousands of dollars just to market a film to the distributors, no matter to consumers.

Obviously, you can make a film for much less than this, but only if you want to make a film like Clerks or In The Company Of Men (i.e. one location, shot in a weekend).

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The majority of cost of any TV/Film project goes into equipment and salary realistically.

The way I figure it, the minimum number of people you need in any traditional production is essentially the cast and base operators (which could also be cast members if multi-skilled)

However if you go into 3D animation, this number can actually go down - to the point where you have a content production team around the size of a small startup.

The model I'm looking at could be described as a digital aniation studio, a "mini pixar" if you will, that uses open source software (Blender, Cinelerra) and homebrew motion capture (both facial and performance) to get performance across in a quick manner and using a significantly smaller team. I'm also looking at leveraging EC2 for rendering instead of investing in purchasing multiple servers for a render farm.

The model isn't scalable across the entire film/tv industry of course, but I figure it could work for a couple studios and this is what I'm working on trying to prove right now.

Awesome, hope you guys are applying to Y Combinator.

Yes, this sounds interesting.

Thanks, unfortunately I wont be applying this round, but I'm sure you will be seeing our application next round.

A while ago, I heard a talk by the CEO of Wreck A Movie (http://www.wreckamovie.com/). They made a sci-fi movie in an open-source manner: People from anywhere contributed 3D models of spaceships and other graphical assets.

If you could tag your contributions with CC-Attribution licenses and have your name appear in the credits, that might be enough incentive for a lot of people to bring down production prices even more.

2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper).

And if you're shooting a web show you don't need the high quality film because the ultimate medium is digital anyways.

Woah. I don't think that's a good way to be thinking. One of the major downsides of internet-based television is that the video quality is typically very, very bad.

To take over TV, you need to at least match the picture quality of made-for-TV movies, and probably match 1080i resolution.

This is true, but you won't need your project necessarily projected on a 100ft screen for a blockbuster release. Film is an analog medium, which allows it to scale without becoming pixelated (it will get blurry instead). HD cameras with decent filters should be fine for web shows.

Then again, if anyone has more experience in the industry please correct me.

Edit: Also, the reason for the poor quality is probably not due to the quality of the original film. I would think it's more of a compression/bandwidth issue.

I still believe in film as an art form but for a commercial production webshow it may be overkill, especially as HD cameras get better.

An overlay surface (in a PC's video driver) smoothes out all Divx, Flash, DVD, etc video sources. You'll see, when the overlay surface is not available, that the video/DVD is actually blocky without it.

I don't think you meant "overlay" there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay

You're probably thinking of a deblocking filter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deblocking_filter_(video)

which is typically used in the decoder for the relevant video CODEC; recent video drivers do have hardware support for this, but it's not a fundamental connection. Moreover, deblocking only helps so much.

I still believe in film as an art form but for a commercial production webshow it may be overkill, especially as HD cameras get better.

I think that for content to be produced for online (not just as a novelty webisode but as an actual artform) people need to start thinking outside the 22 minute content 8 minute ad format for half hour blocks of television.

For example, a standard sitcom format goes like this.

  Credits
  Story (teaser / cold open)
  Commercial
  Story
  Commercial
  End of Story
  Commercial
  Tag
  Credits

Its a relic that was built upon from the radio age, timing designed specifically for synchronous listeners. Now we're entering the Asynchronous age, I'm curious how the ability to skip commercials (Tivo) and the associated changes in timing (shorter ad blocks for online) affect how "funny" comedies are now (since timing is everything in comedy)

It would be interesting to see some A/B testing with recutting lengths of commercials for the exact same episodes with a randomised set of people and see if the net effect of how "funny" a show is is noticeable or negligible.

(sorry, just late night stream of conciousness rambling)

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