CHAOTIC TIMES

How do we Turn Our Indie Animation into Cold, Hard Cash?
Part II

Independent animators don't exist in a vacuum. Our love for animation causes us to want to devote ourselves to it. While we me may love it enough to work a day job somewhere and then burn the midnight oil on our magnum opus, the goal is to be able to make a comfortable living doing indie animation. No one wants to make and let go of their original creations for free, right? Well, originally, that's exactly what I did.

Understanding Chaos, my first short anime movie of note, was released as a downloadable video on the internet in the year 2000. It was, in fact, downloaded so much initially, that my web site was permanently shut down. I had to scramble to get a new web service, the service I still use on this site today. So you may ask, well what would be the advantage in this? Well, a lot of people watched it.

In the old model, before there were hundreds of cable channels, television animation was very commercial. Not to say that it isn't now, but I mean many of these shows were literally 30 minute commercials to sell toys. If they weren't selling toys of their own franchise property, then they were selling someone else's. You see, when I say 30 minutes, in reality, inside each half hour you actually saw only 22 minutes of animation. That meant 8 whole minutes of advertising which the network wants to be able to charge a premium for. What determines how much they can charge? The amount of eyeballs they command. The shows that bring the most viewers get the prize.

This was a concept I will understood, and so I released Chaos for free on the net. Websites devoted to anime, 3D computer graphics and indie film quickly picked up on it and started carrying stories about the show. I was able to command quite a few eyeballs. The question then became, how do I capitalize on this?

More on that in the next post...

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