#animated film industry

[narwatharsh01]

A Look at the Major Players in Film and Animation

The world of film and animation is a captivating landscape teeming with creativity and innovation. Behind the scenes, a diverse range of players collaborate to bring our favorite stories to life. Here's a breakdown of some of the key movers and shakers in the films and animation industry in 2024.

Animation Powerhouses: The Global Titans

Walt Disney Studios: The animation giant continues to reign supreme, boasting a rich history and a loyal fanbase. Disney holds the top spot for the highest-grossing animated feature film of all time with "Avatar" (2009) raking in an impressive $2.92 billion globally. Their theme parks, merchandise, and constant stream of animated content solidify their position as a dominant force in the industry.

Pixar Animation Studios: A subsidiary of Disney, Pixar is renowned for its innovative storytelling and cutting-edge computer animation. Pixar films consistently receive critical acclaim, with 10 Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature to their name.

Click To Know More About: Films and Animation Market

Oriental DreamWorks (ODW): A powerhouse in the Asian market, particularly in China, ODW is known for its visually stunning and culturally relevant animated films. Their 2020 release, "Ne Zha," became the highest-grossing Chinese animated film of all time, showcasing their ability to resonate with audiences on a global scale.

Animation Beyond the Giants: Rising Stars and Niche Players

Illumination Entertainment: This American animation studio is best known for its franchise films like "Despicable Me" and "Minions." Their films combine humor, heart, and innovative 3D animation, capturing the hearts of audiences worldwide.

Studio Ghibli: The legendary Japanese animation studio is revered for its hand-drawn animation and enchanting storytelling. Studio Ghibli films have garnered international acclaim, with classics like "Spirited Away" (2001) winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Stop-Motion Studios: Studios like Laika ("Coraline," "ParaNorman") and Aardman Animations ("Wallace and Gromit," "Shaun the Sheep") keep the art of stop-motion animation alive. These studios bring stop-motion to life with meticulous detail and captivating stories.

Live-Action/Animation Hybrids: Blurring the Lines

Combining live-action with animation is becoming increasingly popular. Films like "The Jungle Book" (2016) and "The Lion King" (2019) showcase the seamless integration of these techniques, creating visually stunning and immersive experiences.

Visit this link: Films and Animation Industry

Beyond the Studios: The Supporting Cast

Animation software developers like Adobe and Autodesk play a crucial role in providing the tools that bring animated characters and worlds to life.

Voice actors breathe life into animated characters, with some, like Tom Hanks (Woody in the "Toy Story" franchise), becoming synonymous with their roles.

Visual effects studios often collaborate with animation studios to create complex special effects, further enhancing the visual spectacle of animated films.

The Future of the Animation Arena: Collaboration and Innovation

The films and animation industry is a collaborative effort. Studios, software developers, and talent all work together to create the magic we see on screen. As technology advances, we can expect to see even more innovative animation techniques, captivating stories, and a global industry that continues to captivate audiences of all ages. The future of film and animation is bright, filled with endless possibilities for creativity and wonder.

[sillycathorrors]

every now and again i get depressed about the current state of the filmmaking industry and then i see a movie that makes me go ‘wow. im gonna create shit like this even if it kills me’ and i think thats an important sentiment to have in this age of ai and not paying actors/writers enough

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Employees of the Fleischer Studios picket the New Criterion Theater to protest the showing of Popeye and other cartoons drawn by striking Fleischer artists, 1937. The five-month strike led to the first union contracts in animation, a later strike at the Disney studios, and groundbreaking new works from frustrated employees who left these animation shops to set out on their own.

Photo: Getty Images/Business Insider

[piplupcola]

Some shameless POS literally used AI to steal my friend's animated film

I usually don't post stuff like this but this shit's insane and downright insulting. I graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2022, a pretty well known animation school in the US, and every animation student on their final year of college has to make an animated film for our final thesis. If you have any idea of the animation making process, you would know that making an entire film by yourself in one year is batshit insane and extremely exhausting, to the point where I'm still feeling the effects of the process on my physical and mental wellbeing 2 years after I graduated. Once more, my friends and I did it during the covid period, which was another level of hell. I was literally watching my grandfather's funeral while working in the labs at 2am because I couldn't fly home to attend it because we had to make this film. This film was our lifeblood, the culmination of 4 years of hell at school which was suppose to be our gateway into the industry. Tldr, it's fucking difficult to do, especially on your own.

So imagine 2 years later and I wake up to a bunch of messages on our alumni chat where a dear friend of mine posted a link to a tiktok video of someone literally stealing her entire film and superimpose it shot by shot and claim it as their own ad for their AI game. As animators, we aren't unaware of people stealing our films and reposting them elsewhere. Heck my own film "The End" was stolen from our school vimeo and posted on tiktok BEFORE IT WAS EVEN OFFICIALLY RELEASED, and that tiktok got hundreds of thousands of views while a year after my own real release my film is still struggling in the thousands.

But this

This is a fucking new low.

Can you imagine? A fresh graduate going through literal blood sweat and tears to make a film on their own that is so important to their future in the industry, to get them a job, with a film that represents a part of themselves to the world, just used as fodder for some stupid tech assholes? It's infuriating. It's insulting. It's literally a big fuck you to the hundreds of students who spent their lives toiling to make these films from the heart who are just desperate to get into the industry.

The animation industry right now is in complete shambles. People are graduating from animation schools with thousands of dollars in dept only to be met with a wasteland of minimum wage and lack of funding and competing for jobs with people who have already been in the industry for years affected by the massive layoffs not only in the movie but also the gaming industries. These films we make for our thesis aren't just films made for fun, they represent our lifeblood, our only opportunity to get a job as a graduate in this sea of hell. If you didn't make a good film, chances are you're never even stepping foot in the industry ever. It's our golden ticket that we would put thousands of hours through, sleepless nights and pushing through no matter the circumstances of sickness and pain it caused us.

And now some dumb fucking AI using dickbags see that and decide it's worth nothing.

Here's a link to my friend's real film. Please go watch it and support her work. I'm not even gonna link the other piece of shit tiktok because I don't want that video to even get a single extra view but here's a recording my friend made so you can see this malarkey side by side.

It's heartbreaking to see my friend's film barely getting any views while the stolen garbage is already in the thousands. I hope the person who stole my friend's work and made that shit dies in a fiery car crash and go straight to hell.

I cannot emphasise how we must not let this shit continue to happen. We're living in a fucking dystopia and unless we do something about it and support those affected by it it's only going to get worse. They're already expanded from stealing people's still art to stealing people's entire films, if we don't stop this nothing we create would ever be safe.

My friend's film:

The shameless fuckheads who stole her film:

[os-eclipses-tamen-son-yuri]

"I wish 2D animation came back everything is 3D now, it's boring"

I'm begging you to look up if there's any film festivals near you and if they have a category for animation/are focused on animation.

If what you want is to see original freaky and imaginative stuff; trying to find it on your Netflix recommended page is not the way to go.

In my experience, local film festivals are relatively quite accesible and you will be able to see what things people from the same place as you create!

We cannot try to fulfill our artistic needs and curiosity just with whatever major blockbusters the industry decides to churn out that year.

Learn to appreciate "bad" films made by overworked students, experimental shit that may appear pointless but was probably quite enjoyable for the artist, narrative messes that are waaay too presumptuous but "hey, the director may be onto something".

There's charm and beauty and warmth in seeing films that were made for the sake of being made.

The industry is NOT designed to promote art or creativity, but to profit off of it.

Animation is alive and thriving if you know where to look for it.

[queerism1969]

[kply-industries]

KPLY industries! Don't goddamned question us!

[sasch1sch]

the music and film industry specifically the latter in light of the recent news about spiderverse prove once again that passion and innovation do not get rewarded under capitalism, they get exploited.

recently, a handful of animators came forward to share their story about the working conditions on this movie. allegedly they worked 11 hours a day, without a day off. 77 hours a week. they were treated like machines.

capitalism is inherently coercive. it sucks everything out of the workers. their energy, their creativity, their worth. under capitalism, you, as a worker, have no leverage over your labour. if you have the guts to quit, you'll potentially be risking everything and you will be replaced by someone else who needs the job.

as much as I ADORED this movie, i cannot stand for this and I will not be able to enjoy beyond the spiderverse clean of conscience, especially if they are able to release it on its scheduled release date. the animators created a masterpiece. they deserve the recognition and love for their work. the circumstances under which this movie was crafted were inhumane and abusive and under the current promise of releasing the sequel in less than a year the situation can only get worse.

no amount of pay will ever justify 77 hours a week. art cannot be rushed. if we continue to only praise this masterpiece without criticising the people on top who take all the profit for themselves and exploit their workers, it will prove to them that ultimately it was all worth it and consequently, these actions were okay.

if the release does not get pushed back, I will have no other choice but to boycott spiderverse next year and i encourage you to do the same. if you really love these movies, its the least we can do.

[canmom]

How aren't mediums fungible? Any art history class would teach you they very much are.

what, has 'the medium is the message' gone out of fashion now or something?

but to explain what I'm trying to get at, since there's a good chance I misused the word >< - each medium brings its own set of affordances and emphases. if I see a CG animation I pay attention to different things than if I see traditional animation or stop motion or what have you.

for example, we could have a look at the animation of Hiroyuki Okiura - say, the introduction to the Cowboy Bebop movie, or his work in Magnetic Rose. Okiura is one of the most renowned realist animators, someone whose drawing style, camerawork etc. hews very close to live action film. his exceptional sense of perspective and space is remarkable in traditional animation. by contrast, you 'get it for free' in CG and stop motion - you will always have perfect linear perspective unless you go out of your way to break it. however, CG rarely captures the exact qualities of Okiura's animation, which come from the sense of drawing principles - how to simplify shapes, 2D spacing etc. and by making it something constructed, the way characters move through space, the way a drawing can suddenly feel 3D, becomes foregrounded - it's no longer incidental but now a core part of what Okiura's animation is expressing.

so, 'live action into anime' is kinda what the AI style transfer tools are going for. in the technique from the recent paper, you start with a static drawing of a character and some animation data (likely mocap), and the program will generate an animation. that's similar what Corridor Digital attempted a few months ago, using a neural network finetuned on Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and applying 'style transfer' to live action footage they shot. the results were, viewed as rotoscoping, kind of hideous, with shapes constantly flickering and turning into mush. the new paper I linked offers some techniques to improve the temporal consistency of this type of AI rotoscoping which should make it look a lot less bad, though it remains to be seen whether it works in situations other than 'well-lit fullbody shot'.

still, even if Corridor's video was a lot more technically solid (and give AI development a few years to iron out the kinks, I'm sure it will look downright quaint), it doesn't provoke the same response in me as Okiura's animation. the process of drawing something involves a lot of artistic decisions about what to capture, simplify, emphasise; for all that it is 'realist', Okiura's animation likewise has a particular feeling to the way characters move, the way they interact with light, the use of line, etc. which in some large part arises from how it is produced. so much of that is all but impossible to capture in words.

but also - knowing a bit about how it's made, and having my own experiences of animation, gives me an angle to appreciate what Okiura is doing. a drawing of something is a way of drawing attention to the specific details of the subject. two people drawing the same subject will never draw it the exact same way. one of the joys of going to life drawing is seeing how many different ways people can approach the same subject in the same ten minutes - inflected by different media like charcoal or watercolour pencils. one of the great things about anime is the space it gives key animators to bring their own sensibility to a particular shot.

I certainly accept that is inevitable that mediums will evolve with time. anime looks very different today than it did 30 years ago. part of of that is evolving sensibilities, partly the slow-motion collapse of an overstrained industry, but also a lot has do with the fact that every studio has switched to digital compositing and digital background painting. it's possible through painstaking effort to fairly closely imitate the look of cel animation on a computer, but you really have to go out of your way, and it's rare to do that.

and I do feel like something has been lost with the death of cels - qualities of line and colour, the difference between digital bloom and backlight animation. but something has been gained at the same time: maybe we've gradually lost the traditional skills for drawing layouts because the conditions of production made it so that skills weren't passed on to the current generation of animators, which sucks, but we have simultaneously gained the ability to merge 2D and 3D animation with tools like Grease Pencil, to use the camera-like digital compositing effects of directors like Naoko Yamada and Makoto Shinkai. it's not better, just different.

this isn't to make the boring argument that AI art is soulless, or lacks the magic human touch, or whathaveyou. it's just a different medium. nor would it be right to say that there are no connections between media - literally right now I'm modelling an arm, and my experience of drawing arms is directly influencing how I break down the forms and all of that. AI generated images derive in obvious ways from traditional animation and CG and photography and all that, AI engineers study these media in great detail as they develop their programs; our knowledge of those media can inform how we respond to AI.

honestly, CG that aims to replicate the look of traditional animation, such as in the games of ArcSystem Works, or the works of Orange like their Houseki no Kuni, is something I actually find very interesting. not because I think it could or should replace traditional animation; it just reveals fascinating things about both media. the same can be true of AI, I think. like what do you learn from what a neural network is able to capture, and what it isn't? and what does studying neural networks tell us about human brains?

if the development of AI and the accessibility of new tools leads to a flourishing of interesting new animation, I'll be happy. I just don't see it as a replacement for traditional animation and 3DCG. if anything the future of animation will probably look like a hybrid process taking advantage of the best features of all the different media we've invented - insert the usual spiel about Arcane and Spiderverse here. AI is currently very immature, we're still figuring out what it's good for and the hype drowns out everything, but I'm sure it will find a comfortable place, and I'll be interested to see how it all shakes out.

but what I meant with 'not fungible' is that, if you try to replace one medium with another, you will inevitably change the qualities of what you make. nowt wrong with that. like, just because you can adapt books into films (and vice versa) doesn't mean books are obsolete. some things are easier to express in prose, others in film. you can have prose that's informed by film, and film that's informed by prose. everything's talking to everything else, it's great! but the tools you choose are meaningful, and interesting. not just an irrelevant detail to be swapped out when "superior" technology comes along.

[theinfinitedivides]

hey quick question how do you have Shah Rukh up for Best Actor in the Filmfares this year TWICE (once for Dunki, once for Jawan) and then do a 180 and pick Ranbir bc he starred in Animal and that f*cker literally just dropped in let me see. December or some sh*t like that. what kind of advanced era of nepotism has Bollywood entered into

[itsybitsybatsyspider]

Deleted Adobe Photoshop (which bums me out because i felt like i was really getting the hang of it. Booo to their new terms of service) and downloaded Clip Studio Paint instead!

Probably gonna try out some sketches tomorrow to get comfortable using it!

back at it again with the new drawing platform learning curve. yyyyaayyyy

[narwatharsh01]

The Dynamic Landscape of Films and Animation Industry

Introduction:

The Films and Animation industry is undergoing rapid transformation, fueled by technological advancements and changing consumer preferences. As of the latest available data in 2023, the global films and animation market has reached unprecedented heights, with a significant increase in size and share.

Films and Animation Market Size and Share:

According to recent market reports, the films and animation market has experienced remarkable growth, reaching a size of USD 400 billion in 2023. This surge in market size can be attributed to the rising demand for high-quality content, fueled by the proliferation of digital platforms and the increasing consumption of streaming services globally. The market is expected to continue growing at a CAGR of 9.1% from 2023 to 2028.

Films and Animation Industry Growth and Revenue:

The Films and Animation industry growth is not only reflected in market size but also in revenue generation. In 2022, the industry recorded a total revenue of USD 281.5 billion, showcasing a 17.9% increase from the previous year. The growth is driven by the expanding global audience for both films and animated content, as well as the industry's ability to adapt to evolving technologies.

Films and Animation Market Trends:

Several noteworthy trends are shaping the Films and Animation landscape:

Growth of immersive technologies: Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are gaining traction in filmmaking and animation, offering unique and engaging experiences for audiences.

Focus on sustainability: Environmental concerns are driving a trend towards incorporating sustainable practices into film and animation productions, resonating with audiences and aligning with corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Rise of independent creators: smaller studios and independent creators are gaining prominence, contributing to the industry's diversity and fostering a more dynamic ecosystem.

Films and Animation Market Outlook:

Looking ahead, the Films and Animation market is poised for sustained growth, driven by:

Integration of AI and machine learning: Advancements in AI and machine learning are expected to revolutionize content creation, personalization, and visual effects.

Shift in distribution channels: The rise of streaming services will likely lead to a greater emphasis on direct-to-consumer platforms, offering creators new opportunities to reach global audiences.

Conclusion:

The Films and Animation industry is experiencing a transformative phase, marked by substantial market growth, evolving trends, and increased collaboration. With a positive outlook, the industry is set to continue captivating audiences worldwide, offering diverse content fueled by innovation and technological advancements. As the market continues to expand, stakeholders need to stay informed about emerging trends and adapt to maintain success in this dynamic and competitive landscape.

[georgeanntremblyblog]

[offscreendeath]

[3cybertronpixelpulseblog]

[sketchinfun]

10 Years

I wanted to do a quick little write up thing just looking back on stuff. This year marks my 10th year working in the animation industry as a storyboard artist for feature animation, and it's been a journey. When I started I was still trying to understand what it meant to be a story artist all the while at the same time trying to improve my artistic skills. Despite starting out on an incredibly challenging project, the experience prepared me for what was to come down the line, by sharpening and pushing my drawing abilities, and teaching me how to stand up for myself in a creative field. Developing my own voice as a story artist and storyteller is still an ongoing process for me, but over the years I have grown more excited about story and I love diving into how to work out story problems. With each project I am so thankful and grateful to be able to have worked with so many supportive, kind and awesome people. The time has flown by incredibly fast, and I'm looking forward to the future to keep creating for many more years.