The Pigeon: Impossible Blog

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, I’m sure you’ve heard of SOPA/PIPA: Two anti-piracy bills that were just removed from Congress’ agenda for next week. I’ve had very mixed emotions on it all, but now that its off the table for the immediate future, I feel its time to start a more constructive and less politically-charged dialogue about copyright law.

In my opinion, SOPA was a very well-intentioned bill, that was poorly constructed and rushed through the political system. It was not the “end of the free internet” that most people were making it out to be, but nevertheless, it was a bill that needed to be fought against, if for no other reason than it opened up a can of legal worms that could never be shut again.

Let’s start with a personal example… About a year ago, my short film Pigeon: Impossible was taken offline by a false DMCA notice. If you’re unfamiliar with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it basically allows a copyright holder to notify a company, in this case YouTube, that they are illegally hosting a video file. YouTube then has a certain amount of time to take the video down. However, in this case, I’m the copyright holder, and someone else was claiming ownership over Pigeon: Impossible. It took over a month to be sorted out and get the film back online. Now here’s the twist: the company who filed the false DMCA claim was a small French video service who my distributor had allowed to put the film on their site. They had a limited, non-exclusive license, but somehow, they thought that gave them the right to go after anyone else who claimed ownership of the film. In this case… ME! Now dealing with all this was bad enough and the film was off of YouTube for a month, but here’s where SOPA comes in: if France had passed the exact same law the US was considering, I would have had to fight the false copyright claim in a French court. In other words, if an illegitimate SOPA claim is filed against someone, they would have to come to the US courts to get the injunction lifted. Needless to say… this issue is something that needs to be addressed globally, not by a complicated mess of local laws.

The second issue I had with SOPA was the now ubiquitous DNS issue. There are plenty of articles discussing the security problems caused by the bill, but for me, it just goes to show how poorly it was thought out. The thought process went something like this…

Congressman #1: We can just remove the website address from the DNS servers, and that will keep people from accessing pirate sites.

Congressman #2: But people could still access the site by typing in the IP address (12.34.56.78). People will just share the IP address.

Congressman #3: Then we’ll also make it illegal for people to share the IP addresses of a pirate site.

You can see where it goes from here, instead of working out a better solution than DNS blocking, a lot of energy was focused on fixing all the problems it caused… suddenly search engines are culpable… websites have to police every single piece of user-generated content… its a mess, and all because they tried to rush forward with a band aid solution.

As a content creator, I’m obviously deeply interested in solving the problem if IP theft. Some people have even gone so far as to accuse anyone opposed to SOPA as a “pirate conspirator.” Obviously that’s not the case… something has to be done to stop IP theft, but we need to have a realistic, practical discussion about what that looks like. A premature bill pushed through by lobbyists is not the solution.

NOTE: Most of this information comes from extensive research I’ve done from secondary sources. I have not read the actual PIPA bill, but I have read most of the SOPA bill as it stood at the beginning of last week. Then again, if you’ve ever read a legal document like that, its an endless web of legalese that is nearly incomprehensible for someone without a legal background. I may well have misunderstood some crucial nuances. If so, feel free to correct me in the comments.

My good friend Michael Cawood just finished his short film: “Devils Angels & Dating!” Check it out, and be sure to take a peek at all the behind the scenes goodies on his website.

Congrats Mike!

I always find cool stuff on Its Art. This week, its a very cute, well told French short…

Poussière from Poussiere LeFilm on Vimeo.

For anyone who thinks that mocap doesn’t require animators…

going to the store. from dlew on Vimeo.

One of the most fun experiences I had on PI was doing the music. The score that Chris Reyman composed was fantastic, and there’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of hearing your movie scored live. However, there’s another big part of the music that I haven’t talked about much: the recording process.

PI actually used two different groups, a 28-person studio orchestra from Millikin University, and a 46-person wind symphony that was augmented with a handful of strings to give it a more cinematic sound. I didn’t record the studio orchestra, but I co-engineered the wind symphony session with Chris Keyland and did the final mix.

For the wind symphony, we looked all over for a recording space and finally settled on a church. The big draw was that all of the surfaces were carpeted or wood so there wasn’t too much reverb, and what little there was had a rich warm quality to it. The space was also very large which gives the recording a bit of air. That epic, orchestral feel is really defined by the ways the different sounds bounce around, so you need a single, large room to let the sounds blend together.

The recording equipment was fairly simple. All of the mics ran straight into Presonus Preamps with built in A-D converters. Those fed an Alesis 24-track hard disk recorder, and the mixer was just used for monitoring purposes. We did have one problem… originally we had rented a bunch of Neve preamps, which are great for certain studio applications, but for an orchestra, they just added too much noise and color to the sound. We exchanged the Neve’s for the Presonus’s but the rental shop didn’t have any word clocks for rent, which meant that the digital outputs of the preamps were running unclocked into the digital recorder. If you listen closely to the tracks, you’ll occasionally hear something that sounds like static… that’s an artifact that can happen when you don’t have all your digital gear locked together with a word clock. Lesson learned.

The big thing with recording an orchestra is the mic placement. I had spent a lot of time doing studio work, but the biggest group I had ever recorded was a 15-piece jazz band. The big difference, is that most studio recordings are about isolating instruments to get a good “clean” recording with minimal bleed. With an orchestra, you don’t want to over-isolate anything. If we had had any gobos to get a bit more separation, that would have been nice, but since we didn’t, the musicians just set up like normal and we put the mics where we needed, using nothing but pickup patterns to try to cut down on bleed.

In the end, we had 18 accent mics set up within the orchestra to pick out solos and add presence to the recording, but a big part of the sound came from a decca tree. A decca tree is just a configuration of mics that are arranged in a triangle and hoisted high above the orchestra. This gives a balanced sound, so that no instruments are louder just because they happen to be closer to the mic. The triangle configuration gives you some stereo separation. We also used two outriggers, which follow the same idea, but are spaced way out on the sides of the orchestra. These enhance the stereo effect, but in the final mix, we didn’t even use them because they sounded too thin.

I’ll fully admit that part of the reason for posting this is just a chance to geek out over something I don’t get to talk about much. Since this is the only orchestra I’ve ever recorded, it definitely doesn’t have the polish that a professional engineer would give it, but I still feel pretty proud of the results, especially since we only had 4 hours to set up, record and tear down.

In case anyone is interested, here are the tracks we recorded for the 3-minute action cue that underscores the last half of the movie… not the mixed tracks I’ve posted before, these are the original 24 unmixed tracks that came straight off the microphones. Just line them up in your mixing program of choice, play around with the levels, and let me know if you get a mix that sounds good. If you don’t have a multitrack audio editor, Audacity is a basic but solid open source program I’ve used before. TIP: mix the decca tree first, and then fade in the accent mics only where necessary to bring out certain passages or add presence.

This is a follow up to Part 1, where I discussed the reasons why short films don’t make money. However, this post is much more positive, because although the prospects seem grim, I think there could be a very simple solution to the problem.

OK… to start off, lets use Pigeon: Impossible as a case study just to get some rough numbers… I received a $5000 grant from the Texas Film Production Fund. I also spent an additional $15,000 out of my own pocket. However, these were just hard costs. By the time you figure in all of the man hours that went into it, the musicians, etc. the real-world budget (at union rates) would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $600,000. That’s right. Over half a million dollars. And if you think that’s a lot, its actually quite cheap. The budgets for the big studio features (Pixar, Dreamworks, Blue Sky…) average around $1 million per minute. We did it for a (hypothetical) $100,000 per minute… one tenth of the cost.

As I’m sure you could gleam from part 1, none of the current distribution models could even come close to making this a viable model…
DVD’s: even if I made $5 per DVD, I’d have to sell 120,000 copies.
iTunes: it may cost you 1.99 to buy it, but I’d be lucky to get half of that after iTunes and the distributor took their cuts. Even if I got $1, I’d have to sell 600,000 copies. Not likely.
YouTube: the estimated (and optimistic) $.0025 you get per view through embedded ads and the partnership program means it would take 240 million views to break even. As of June 27, 2011, there are only 7 videos that have reached that many views. All of them are music videos, aside from the infamous “Charlie Bit My Finger.”

So as we look through those three options, there seems to be two pretty widely different approaches at work… iTunes and DVD are definitely the premium services. Theoretically, if all 6.6 million people who have watched Pigeon: Impossible on YouTube, had instead bought the movie through iTunes, I’d be swimming in money. Literally. I could take all that money, convert it to quarters, and swim in it ala Scrooge McDuck. It would be a friekin’ awesome party. However, this would never happen, because no one would have known anything about the film, because it never would have gone viral. You just can’t go viral at $1.99 a pop.

The other side of the coin, is YouTube’s partnership program. However, it pays such a low amount of money that I’d be more likely to win the lottery than rack up that many views. Plus… those ads are just annoying.

If only there was some middle ground… something between $1.99 and $.0025 a view. For purposes of example… lets say 6 cents. Would you pay 6 cents to watch Pigeon: Impossible? That number isn’t totally random. The film happens to be 6 minutes long… so it’s 1 cent per minute. That also happens to be the magic number for hollywood movie rentals. Redbox charges $1.00 for a ~100 minute movie. If I could get 10 million people to watch the film at 6 cents each, I could make back my theoretical budget of $600,000.

Of course… I’m talking about micropayments. Its a model that has worked for many different industries, but no one has ever applied it to the film world, much less online short films. But why not? What would it take to put together a system like that?

Well first of all, it couldn’t be a new video service. Sure… I could create some sort of player myself, but if you had to type in your credit card, just to pay 6 cents to watch one video, you’d skip it and never watch (or pay) for the film.

So how about existing video services? From my quick research, there’s only 2 possible companies that are large enough to generate the 10 million views I’m after. iTunes has a reported 120 million users. Having 1 out of 12 of them watch my film is overly optimistic, but iTunes does have several advantages… they’ve already got everyone’s credit cards and a rental delivery system in place, so all you have to do is hit the “Rent for 6 cents” button and off you go. Of course, there’s also several downsides. You can’t embed a video on a website, which is the way videos go viral. Plus, how is Apple going to vet this ridiculous amount of content that people would be sending them? Under their current model, they’d have to hire people to screen it, which pretty much kills that possibility right there.

The second company with the necessary number of users, is of course YouTube. They have an estimated 300 million registered users. It also has the ability to embed videos, a rating system, and is the go-to place for user-generated content, so they’ve got a lot to draw from. What if you took the top rated stuff, and I mean the EXTREMELY top rated stuff. Stuff that the viewcounts and thumbs up ratings have proven to be content worthy of paying a couple cents for… and charged a small micropayment? There’s just three things that would need to happen for this to work…
1. To watch a video, you’d need to be a registered YouTube user, which of course many people already are.
2. You’d need to link a credit card to your account. They could bundle this and charge monthly, or even quarterly. After all, at these small micropayments, you’d have to watch a LOT of premium videos to make it worth the credit card transaction fees.
3. At the beginning of a “premium” YouTube video, there would need to be a confirmation button. Something that in a nutshell says “The YouTube community has deemed this video to be worthy of a small micropayment. Watching this video will charge 1 cent per minute to your YouTube account.” Obviously that’s not the exact wording, but you get my point.

I realize this is a wishful thinking, but lets imagine that a system like this had been in place when I released PI. If everyone had paid 6 cents, then at 6.6 million views, and a 50/50 split, I would have made $198,000. It’s still only a third of the budget, but that’s not bad. In fact, now that I’ve got more experience, I could probably find a way to make another short of a similar quality to PI for that price. Oh… and did I mention that this would also mean a lot of money for YouTube? Even splitting it 50/50 with me, they would still make 20% more than the estimated $25/1000 impressions they charge advertisers for the most expensive preroll ads.

Of course there’s always the issue that at 6 cents, I probably would have lost a significant number of views. However, if the film was featured on some sort of YouTube “premium” page, that could more than make up for the views lost to people without YouTube accounts, and (cough) cheapskates (cough).

There’s one last benefit to a system like this that I think is the biggest selling factor of all… even at micropayment levels, some people are unwilling to take a chance on something they don’t know anything about. However… in a system like this, you’re not paying 6 cents to watch the film… you’re paying 1 cent per minute that you watch. If you watch the first 30 seconds and aren’t into it, you click off and don’t get charged. Jump to the middle to check it out… whatever. You only get charged a penny when you’ve watched a minute worth of the film.

Like I said… this is not something that I, or any other startup company could implement as it requires a large, established video service in order to work. I just wanted to throw it out there in the event that someone at YouTube (or a competing video service) gets inspired and considers small micropayments as an alternative to advertisements and $1.99 purchases.

Click here for Part 2

I’ve gotten a lot of questions along the lines of “the short is great, but how do you make any money doing it?” The answer is of course that you don’t. People have been trying for decades to make short films profitable, and to be perfectly frank… it just doesn’t happen. Please feel free to flood the comments section with objections to this statement. However… let me first try to address most of the examples you are already thinking of…

Serialized Content.
Red vs. Blue… The Guild… Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog…
These are not short films, they’re episodic shows similar to TV, only each episode is shorter and designed specifically for the internet. Even Dr. Horrible which is the closest example to a short film still had a total running time of 42 minutes. Definitely NOT a short.

DVD
Let’s face it… very few people want to buy a DVD of a short film. I have sold 122 DVDs to date, earning a grand total of $752.86. I am extremely grateful for everyone who bought a DVD, but I’m not really making any money, that goes towards paying off the $20,000 that was spent on the film and the festivals. Oh and did I mention that the film took approximately 10,000 man hour to produce? Yeah… its safe to say that a third world sweat-shop laborer does better.

iTunes.
For years, people said that iTunes would be the key to unlocking the potential of short films. However, there’s several problems with the iTunes model…
1. It’s nearly impossible to get shorts onto iTunes. You can’t just send your short to apple, you have to go through a distributor. When PI was released, the only distributor who had access to iTunes was Shorts International who handles many of the Oscar Nominated shorts. There may have been new distributors that popped up in the last few years, but it’s probably not more than a handful.
2. In the event that you do manage to get your short onto iTunes… you are now faced with the problem of how to get people to watch it. Feature films have marketing budgets and compelling trailers, but how do you do a trailer for a 5-6 minute short? I cut a trailer together for Pigeon: Impossible, but it was really just a teaser for people who were already following the project, and a promo piece for festivals to use. Not many people would have actually bought the film because of that trailer.
3. Lets say for the sake of argument that you somehow accomplished the first two. You got your short on iTunes and managed to attract people to the iTunes page. The only way to watch the film is to buy it, because you can’t rent short films. Plus, every short I’ve found on iTunes costs $1.99 and up. You can rent a feature-length movie for the same price. Honestly, how many people are going to buy a 5-minute movie they know very little about when they could instead rent a feature film that they’ve seen tons of ads for, heard people talking about, and have read the reviews for? These three issues have effectively killed iTunes as a potential distribution model for shorts.

YouTube Partnership Program.
This is probably the one that most people consider when they think of making money off of short films. There are tons of examples of people who have made a living off the YouTube partner program… however, all of these are examples of Serialized Content. (see above) They put out 1 or more videos a week, all made for essentially no budget, and have developed a fan base that tunes in for every episode. Their videos seldom hit a million views, but if you have a ton of videos, you can make up for it in volume. However, lets try to apply this to the world of short films. The cheapest, dirtiest example of short filmmaking is the 48-hour film festival. The average team is 15 people, and let’s optimistically say that they only work two 8-hour days at the dirt-cheap rate of $10/hour. If you were able to get all of your equipment and locations for free, then every film would still cost $2400 (15 people * 2 days * 8 hours * $10) just to pay everyone for their time.

Now lets look at the revenue generated by the YouTube partnership program. This is a sticky question that is answered in more detail here. Unfortunately, YouTube specifically forbids partners from revealing what they make off of their videos. Since I am not a partner, (I’ve been invited, but declined for the reason you’ll see in a minute) I can only guess… the most optimistic number seems to be that 1000 views earns $2.50 for a total of $.0025 per view. However, several YouTube partners have said that they don’t earn nearly this much per view. Another stat estimated that it would take 2000-3000 views a day to generate $100 in income. That puts the per-view rate at $.0013 ($100 / (2500 views * 30 days)) Lets put together a hypothetical scenario using the best-case numbers…

Say you make a decent short film, 48-hour style at $2400 each. You put it on YouTube and it gets a million views… 1,000,000 views * .0025 = $2500. That means that for your extremely successful, dirt cheap but awesome film, you made a grand total of $100… which lets face it… you’ll probably spend feeding everyone while you work your butt off trying to make a decent movie in 48 hours. Now is this possible? Sure… but in order to make a living… you’d have to make at least 2 of these hit films a week. Forever. Not exactly a small order. Plus… you’ve become the thing we were just discussing… a serialized content provider. There’s nothing wrong with this… it IS possible to make a living for the few people that can pull it off. But remember… the name of the game is fast and cheap, which means that the quality will have to take a backseat. What if you want to make something a bit more ambitious? Something that requires a bit more time and money, but will REALLY blow people’s socks off?

If it seems like I’m pessimistic or bitter, I’m really not. I wouldn’t trade the experience of making PI for anything… and everyone who worked on the film did it for exactly that: experience. But, you have to admit… it would be pretty cool if there was some way for people to make a living off of their short films. Which is the subject of Part 2.

I got a great question from Naudin Erwan regarding final gather and color bleeding that I thought was worth posting… its a subject I haven’t touched on much because we didn’t use it at all on PI. However, I have used it quite extensively on VFX projects. My rule of thumb for color bleed is simple…

A scene lit by direct light will have much less color bleed than a scene lit by indirect “bounced light.”

Aside, from the technical issues and render time, the reason that PI didn’t require GI or FG, was that all of our scenes were lit with direct light. In the street scenes, the sun was so bright that it would totally overpower the subtlety of the color bleed effect. Of course, you can always turn up the effect, but look around outside on a bright sunny day… you probably won’t be able to see any color bleed at all, and if you do notice any, it will be in very specific areas and conditions – inside of trees and in shadows around really large areas of bright color. In PI’s outdoor scenes, occlusion was adequate to give us that detail without any color bleed… and it rendered a lot faster.

The other lighting setup in PI was inside the briefcase. This scene appears to be full of bounced light, but the reality is that the light is actually coming from dozens of dim direct sources. The main one is the laptop screen which covers the entire ceiling, basically one huge area light. The various flashing lights and buttons also contributed greatly to the scene, but still, these aren’t bounced lights, they’re actually emitting light. In fact, the only place that has any true color bleed is around the big red button. However, because I was lighting this whole scene with dozens of point lights, I simulated this color bleed effect by putting a few yellow point lights under the warning stickers, and a red one inside the button. This is the same technique I showed in Podcast #18 with the red floor.

So… what conditions really do necessitate a good deal of GI/FG color bleed? The strongest example is an interior scene with a single, strong offscreen light source… usually the sun bouncing in through a window. Think of a kitchen lit up by the morning sun or a hotel room… but even then, notice how subtle the color bleeding is in these images? The white shirt on top of a red bed is one of the most extreme cases you’ll find, but still, the effect is barely visible.

So… the moral is that in the real world, the amount of color that gets bounced around is much less than you might think. It can be used to create a cool stylistic effect… think of Ratatouille or Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs… two films that used GI and color bleed extensively to create a very unique, colorful and stylized look. Also, color bleed isn’t the only reason to use GI/FG… HDRI image-based lighting is great, especially for VFX. Then again, if you’re using a renderer like Arnold that is specifically designed for a GI approach… why not use it? However, if this isn’t the case, GI and FG isn’t the end-all be-all. A good lighter should be able to create a beautiful image using just about any lighting technique, so the more versatile you are, the easier it will be to choose the best approach to accomplish the task at hand.

On another note… I know I haven’t posted in a while. My focus lately has been more on the writing side of things than 3D, and I’ve been trying to keep this blog animation-centric so as not to alienate the people who subscribed for that content. If people want to see more posts, please ask questions or offer suggestions!

Chris Perry’s “Incident at Tower 37″ just went online! The short has a really powerful story, and was a standout on the festival circuit, picking up some top shelf awards. From the director:

We are releasing it online today, World Water Day, to bring even greater attention to humanity’s role in creating and perpetuating this planet’s critical water issues. Our film is allegorical, but the challenges we face are real.

Enjoy the film! I’ve had the privilege of meeting Chris on several occasions, and can’t wait to see what he does next!

Another awesome short from some Supinfocom grads. In fact, their website even shares the page with the Salesman Pete short I posted a while back. Enjoy!

Meet Buck from TeamCerf on Vimeo.