Facebook, with sponsorship support from Intel and AutoDesk, is hosting an online collaboration called Mass Animation designed to produce a short animated film entitled Live Music directed by Yair Landau (The Chub Chubs), about the ‘unlikely’ romance between a guitar and a violin. Now, absolving the story itself of criticism except to say that it’s like something Disney would’ve done in the 1940s, or Pixar in the 1980s, the noteworthy aspect of this project is the distributed production model.
The production of animation, as I have long maintained, will point the way toward new models for production for all sorts of products and brands, just as television animation led the way in outsourcing manufacturing to Asia in the early 1980s, ten years before American industry embraced the model en masse. How it works is going to be a key to the creation of jobs and the generation of new wealth in the networked economy.
A little background:
Animation director Kent Butterworth explored the distributed production model with television cartoon series he directed for Saban Entertainment in the mid-1990s. He and a small team in Los Angeles built character models, story and voice tracks, and environments, then distributed these ‘packages’ to animators scattered around the world, from Austin to Adelaide, who’d animate the various scenes described to them.
Entrepreneur and animation producer Karen Johnson of Racine, Wisconsin, whose production company Aha! Studios, was the first to bring professional animation to the Jumbotron scoreboards in modern sports stadiums (at one time they had 26 pro sports stadiums under contract), employs a distributed production model for her animation studio. A team of 15 people based in Racine can manage a virtual collaboration involving hundreds of people aroung the world.
Mass Animation extends the model even further by opening it to anyone who wants to contribute. It’s Smart Mob-imation. As you’d expect for any experiment as ambitious and new as this one, it tends to place its emphasis on the technical aspects of the production. That’s cool. The way it has to be. A necessity for now. As the distributed production model evolves, look for elements of the narrative to move front and center. The narrative, whether its for a brand or an animated film, contains the essential emotional and meta information that bring the narrative to life.
This is going to be the post-tech challenge for distributed production models like Mass Animation, and for any brand looking to communicate effectively in the networked world. How can we communicate in ways that transcend the technology? How will the new narratives resonate emotionally with collaborators and audience alike? Answering these questions will be the next step toward making viable commercial products–animated or otherwise–using the Mass Animation model.
Tags: Aha! Studios, Animation, AutoDesk, Environment, Facebook, Intel, Karen Johnson, Kent Butterworth, Mass Animation, Networked World, Pixar, Racine, Saban Entertainment, Toy Story, Wisconsin, Woody
It’s amazing to see how widely open-source ideas and distributed collaboration and communication platforms can be applied.
While we’re testing the range of applications of the model for economic organization, we’re also testing the boundaries of how groups work.
Your pointer is spot-in: this isn’t just about the tech, but it’s about what we do with it once the tech is understood, commoditized, etc. How it will the tech change how we think?