Annecy – short recap on days 1 & 2

Annecy has been great already, and it’s only two days into the festival. The German party on Tuesday was especially nice, with lots of familiar faces and many new acquaintances.

I’ve seen one screening per day so far: The TV competition #4 on monday suffered from eardrum piercing volume levels and a projectionist who didn’t care if the aspect ratio was cutting out heads or subtitles… Metropia on Tuesday was a big dissappointment. I wanted to like the film, but with such a clichéed script that wasn’t even well dramatised (think Avatar – thanks to Andy Blazdell for the comparison) it just didn’t work. The storyline had glitches and I didn’t even care what happened to the main character during the final chase…

I also went to check the conference on “European studios’ competitiveness”, of which I saw 4/5 speakers. The most interesting to me were Bruno Gaumétou of Neomis animation and Petter Lindblad of Copenhagen Bombay. Below is a short extract of the notes I took from their presentations. If you have any questions just post them in the comments.

Now it’s off to see TV competition #3 at Decavision and then off to the Mifa market, see you around!

Notes on conference: European studio’s competitiveness

Bruno Gaumétou (Neomis animation):
Who are the competitors? 5000 animation studios world wide…2754 in Europe, that’s a lot!

When Neomis was founded it was on the 14yrs of experience working for Disney.

Their goal was to be the go-to guys for high quality projects. They would provide connections, know-how, ideas and expertise.

Their ‘survival kit’ for the global industry (with pifalls) is:
– varied range of services (but rooted on the core business)
– technical diversity (but limited to solid internal expertise)
– a large pool of artists (but talent is rare)
– the production process (but it has to be constantly updated)
– a stable core team (but how to secure a stable work load?)
– a wide industry network (but building trust takes time)

Says it is important for EUR studios to work as a network. That is the only way to compete, keep talent and deliver projects on time!

Says for studios to survive they have to be a service company AND a production company.

Petter Lindblad from Copenhagen Bombay
‘Low budget’ animation and crossmedia

Being competitive in EUR means doing projects that can be financed in EUR, completed in reasonable time and use EUR talent.

Shrinking your budgets is a way to stay competitive. Financing is faster and less complicated. There’s fewer equity partners. And the producers investment results in a higher ownership share. Low budgets enable you to keep the project in-house. The team is close together and teams are smaller.

How they do it:
Mandatory thorough development so you know the budget will hold. Accurate animatics reduce redundant animation. Keeping the production informed and the director close to the team helps catching issues early. Optimizing the project from start to end e.g. not animating feet in 3D when they’re not in the frame. Being flexible with teams e.g. shuffling people from layout to animation or vice versa on demand.

Copehagen Bombay only do original projects to keep the IP inhouse

Drawbacks with low bud projects:
No time and money to correct mistakes – scenes might have to be cut out altogether
You need to be 100% sure if the films intentions beforehand

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