The Cost of Animation & The Power of NFTs

Animation ain’t cheap. But it’s cheaper.

Powerful new animation tools and real-time technologies have allowed animators to move fast, be more agile, and create stunning art with a lot less fuss.

Our choice of a simple style plays into this, we wanted to ensure we could be modular, and have the ability to swap, reuse, recycle, and re-map as much as we could to all our assets, similar to how game development treats it, all without sacrificing quality.

This more procedural pipeline even plays into our animation software and the development of our generative NFT collectibles. Using the complex node network, and tools to build a system that lets us feed two birds with one seed.

All our production assets can be reused across our NFTs, animated expanded universe, main show, and even future game development opportunities!

This keeps costs down, and frees’ us up to innovate in a new space, and to nurture our animated world into a thriving community of fun and mayhem.

But back to our first point. Animation is expensive. Production costs average between $10,000- $50,000 per MINTUTE of animation and beyond! this bloats full scale production budgets into the millions per episode for production alone.

But there are other ways to do this, and that’s where we want to live, and that’s how we see NFTs empowering it, empowering us to innovate, and thrive.

Smaller slower releases of our main episodes, with our expanded universe of animated shorts filling the gaps between, to keep Unicronitopia alive, and telling regular new stories.

How did we get here?

Well it all started with small baby steps, a lot of donate time & dedication, and a reimagining of how things are done.

It began with sitting down, and re-assessing the typical production pipeline for an animated television show. Then we needed to pull it apart, and allow for more crossover between stages of development, and for that we looked to automation, and real time tools.

A traditional pipeline for animation is rigidly linear, accounting for a great deal of the quality we see in television shows. And its hard for massive studios with well over 100 employees to pivot away from the tried and true.

But for us we can be more agile, we can experiment, and we can start by building a new way to produce a different form of animated content.

Next we looked at our art production pipeline, and how we can fill our world without putting a massive strain on our small team of artists. That started first with our simple style, but soon grew to ensure our NFTs, and animation assets could essentially be the same.

Then we looked to find cross over in the stages of development that we could pull new types of NFT collectibles from. These would be our collectibles that are more a “Piece of animation history” style reward for supporting, such as literal shots of animation from our show.

Lastly we dug into ways we can streamline this new development pipeline through new tools and tech.

This is just the beginning

These are the steps we are taking to create a vibrant and community driven show, expanded world, one where we want to grow with the technology , integrate into a greater metaverse, and develop more unique interactive experiences in this brave new future!

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