Powerhouse Animation Studios Introduces Animation History Budget Graph

AUSTIN, TX , November 5, 2015 (Newswire.com) - Powerhouse Animation Studios has produced 5000+ minutes of animation in varied styles over the past 15 years. The company has worked in games, education, Flash based web-series, episodic television, commercials, explainer videos and more, changing the services it offers as the industry changes. Although the traditional animation industry has seen a lot of flux in the past 15 years, the fact that budget affects production quality has remained an issue for studios worldwide. To better understand the timeline of animation production costs, Powerhouse has built an interactive chart that compares the budgets of animation projects throughout history with adjusted costs and budgets for inflation.

Brad Graeber, Powerhouse CEO, started research in 2008 to compare and contrast the costs of different animated pieces, how budgets compare for different styles and types of animated media, and how those budgets influences the final work. The idea was that this would help animators, producers, students, and others to understand the correlation between budgets and the animation process and quality of the product.

Graeber states, “It can be frustrating talking to clients about the level of complexity of animation versus cost. In my experience, animation companies and sales people spend a lot of their time having this conversation over and over. A client would say they want something that ‘looks like Pinocchio’ but only had a budget of $2,000 per minute. I wanted a way to communicate how cost affected production.”

The interactive chart includes costing information for different animation productions through the years. For instance, Steamboat Willie had a budget of roughly $30,000 per minute in 2015 dollars, while the Flesicher Superman shorts had a per minute budget of more than $120,000 per minute in modern money. A show like The Simpsons may have a budget of $62,000 per minute while a show like Aqua Teen Hunger Force only has about $6k. Not all of that money goes to the animators though, a lot of these budgets include voice actors and other line items- so it is not always comparing apples to apples.

“We understand that this doesn’t take into account changes in technology that also influence budgets over time. Modern budgets don’t include cels and paper. Some of the budgets we have access to include voice work, marketing, and other costs and that some don’t,” says Graeber. “We are just working with the numbers that we have available.”

Powerhouse Animation has recently taken an effort to update and redo the tool in HTML5 and would like the help of the animation community to expand and update and add more pieces to the project.

“We would love the animation community’s help. If you have access to production budgets that you can share without breaking any agreements we would love to add them to our list. For instance, we would love to see more examples of non-American animation represented in our graph. We would love to add more 3d series and films,” says Graeber. “Please visit the link and if you have some information, please share it and any source that you may have and we will try to make the tool more comprehensive.”