I am going to toss this out here: Most writers? Zero budget.
And I don't mean fanfiction, though that applies too. I mean most writers don't get paid a cent until their work is done, and published.
As for artists... This twit brags about being a non-union studio... So why use expensive diversity hires and people-of-hair-colors? Go on youtube, look up "I paid x dollars to animate this on Fiverr", and pick, like, five animators with loosely similar styles. Shoestring budget? Some of these people are making movie-quality music and animation pieces for less than a hundred bucks.
Do not blame the budget. CR paid out the ass for diversity hires, they get diversity hires quality. And yes, they paid out the ass. Seeing the qualities in the product, they paid far too much. The show's purpose wasn't to make a good product. If it was, it would have never hired people like this woman. The show's purpose was to virtue signal.
I could have made a better show at 5k per episode. Maybe 6k to pay myself as well. I don't know what they paid, but I suspect it's a great deal higher than 60-70k for a whole season.
If it isn't, and they did the whole season on, like, 50k or something across the entire staff, then I take it back, and my full respect to them.
One OP song. One ED song. BG music for: Pensive, Suspense, Sad, Action, Happy, Passive. 8 songs total. You'd want the copyright to them, so about 500/song, 4000 total, if you're buying it off Fiverr.
It requires approximately 200 minutes of voice acting. 3.2 hours. With 5 re-takes per line, about 16 hours worth of voice acting. Get them off fiverr, you can get away with minimum wage plus some minor bit. 200 bucks. 4200 running total.
It requires an audio mixer to lay these on tracks. About a day per half-hour. or two weeks FT for the season. Again, get them off Fiverr, likely going to be 25/hour. 80 hours is 2000 bucks. 6200 running total.
Writers! Steal a well-rated medium-length My Little Pony fanfic heavily featuring OCs, change the names and a couple descriptor words, add a character introduction yourself. Then hire a producing writer from some horrible backwater country off Fiverr to change the format to better fit a show. Probably another 10k, they tend to be pricier. 16200 running total.
54.8k to pay Fiverr animators to match lip flaps and animate 240 minutes of media, with all the rest going to you. It seems to run about 100 dollars per minute of animation at a glance. $24000. 40200 running total, the rest going to you. I feel bad about fleecing the voice actors, though, so maybe give them 1.8k more in the budget. 42k.
THAT is how you shoestring-budget. Notice how it never touches on "hire an HR department filled with people of hair color" or "hire a twitter coordinator" or "spend excess money ascertaining what color front-hole the workers may or may not have"? Pure unbridled capitalist meritocracy. Most of the work would still, even, be done by minorities! So you still get woke points by employing Indian, Asian, and African contractors! You just wouldn't know if they were or not. It would not be able to be advertised as such, only for yourself. You'd be selling a shoestring budget show, not diversity hires.
EDIT: Forgot artists. They'd need to make assets for the animator. Drop another 10k, even though it would likely be much less if you were judicious about what assets you needed.
Cant you just layer sounds in something like Audacity and put the animation and sound tracks together in some adobe animate/after effects-like software?
Or is there some critically important feature that is exclusive to those little boxes that needs to be utilized in order to have a proffesional feel/sound to your work.
The first is vocals, a partnered job with the animators, making micro-adjustments in speed if needed for lip flaps, larger adjustments in space between words to fit cadence, and yes, layering the sounds. Sound files in this case is provided by the voice actors.
The second is foley, the sound effects. There's stock sounds, but any even vaguely competent foley artist will wind up making some of their own for particular noises. Draw a chef knife along a hanger to get a sword-drawing noise, hit a warm steak against tile floor to get a swamp monster's thudding steps, and whatnot. Sound files in this case are created by the mixer.
The third is music and ambiance. How loud must it be in the scene? Don't overpower speaking, but don't go unheard. Get louder when nothing is going on. Alter the song itself to better match a mood. Start and finish it, finding segments that "feel good" to start and finish on, to best suit a scene's length.
But you're talking about the vocals specifically... There is some editing to do in vocals. Do you hear any breaths? Those need to be edited out, unless the scene calls for audible breathing. And of course the space between words is shorter or longer as needed to fit the scene. Vocal pops need to be removed, too. And any volume disparity between voices needs equalizing. And noise removal, but competent voice actors will likely record in sound-absorbing studios where noise removal is not an issue: You don't want to echo like you're in a cave if your character isn't in one (and if they are, they better echo the same as every other character, another job of the audio mixer team: Creating uniform environmental alterations to vocal performances).
A good audio mixer will go unnoticed, because the sound effects sound on point, the voices all mesh and match, and the songs play appropriately, so instead, you can comment on the voice actors, musicians, and scene-setting. When they screw up, is when they get noticed: No one says "man, that last episode the bat screech, that wasn't stock audio, they got real bat noises, wow, respect", but they WILL say "what the hell was that walking noise supposed to be? It sounded like dying rubber ducks!" or "Protagonist 1's voice was just a tiny bit echoey... But Protagonist 2's voice wasn't. Is that going to be a plot point or was it just bad mixing?"
Probably the whole point of original CR content is so that people from their parent company can double dip. They can say to their Japanese owners "We barely take in any profit, it all goes to buying content, we even use retarded Moldovan developers to save on costs." Meanwhile they get paid for work from Crunchyroll and then they get paid again for producing their original content.
According to Quora, an episode of South Park takes 300k to make, approximately. And those are shit animation and as low budget as any CN show that is "comedy centered with simple BGs and characters".
So if you halve it for half-length episodes, about three times the budget I allocated.
I am going to toss this out here: Most writers? Zero budget.
And I don't mean fanfiction, though that applies too. I mean most writers don't get paid a cent until their work is done, and published.
As for artists... This twit brags about being a non-union studio... So why use expensive diversity hires and people-of-hair-colors? Go on youtube, look up "I paid x dollars to animate this on Fiverr", and pick, like, five animators with loosely similar styles. Shoestring budget? Some of these people are making movie-quality music and animation pieces for less than a hundred bucks.
Do not blame the budget. CR paid out the ass for diversity hires, they get diversity hires quality. And yes, they paid out the ass. Seeing the qualities in the product, they paid far too much. The show's purpose wasn't to make a good product. If it was, it would have never hired people like this woman. The show's purpose was to virtue signal.
I could have made a better show at 5k per episode. Maybe 6k to pay myself as well. I don't know what they paid, but I suspect it's a great deal higher than 60-70k for a whole season.
If it isn't, and they did the whole season on, like, 50k or something across the entire staff, then I take it back, and my full respect to them.
HGS needs the following:
One OP song. One ED song. BG music for: Pensive, Suspense, Sad, Action, Happy, Passive. 8 songs total. You'd want the copyright to them, so about 500/song, 4000 total, if you're buying it off Fiverr.
It requires approximately 200 minutes of voice acting. 3.2 hours. With 5 re-takes per line, about 16 hours worth of voice acting. Get them off fiverr, you can get away with minimum wage plus some minor bit. 200 bucks. 4200 running total.
It requires an audio mixer to lay these on tracks. About a day per half-hour. or two weeks FT for the season. Again, get them off Fiverr, likely going to be 25/hour. 80 hours is 2000 bucks. 6200 running total.
Writers! Steal a well-rated medium-length My Little Pony fanfic heavily featuring OCs, change the names and a couple descriptor words, add a character introduction yourself. Then hire a producing writer from some horrible backwater country off Fiverr to change the format to better fit a show. Probably another 10k, they tend to be pricier. 16200 running total.
54.8k to pay Fiverr animators to match lip flaps and animate 240 minutes of media, with all the rest going to you. It seems to run about 100 dollars per minute of animation at a glance. $24000. 40200 running total, the rest going to you. I feel bad about fleecing the voice actors, though, so maybe give them 1.8k more in the budget. 42k.
THAT is how you shoestring-budget. Notice how it never touches on "hire an HR department filled with people of hair color" or "hire a twitter coordinator" or "spend excess money ascertaining what color front-hole the workers may or may not have"? Pure unbridled capitalist meritocracy. Most of the work would still, even, be done by minorities! So you still get woke points by employing Indian, Asian, and African contractors! You just wouldn't know if they were or not. It would not be able to be advertised as such, only for yourself. You'd be selling a shoestring budget show, not diversity hires.
EDIT: Forgot artists. They'd need to make assets for the animator. Drop another 10k, even though it would likely be much less if you were judicious about what assets you needed.
OOOOORRRRR, just be Tatsuki and work for a percentage cut.
"MERCHANDIZING! MERCHANDIZING! WHERE THE REAL MONEY FROM THE MOVIE IS MADE!" -Spaceballs
Still waiting on Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money ;_;
Iirc, George Lucas did that with the first Star Wars movie, when the studio heads thought that Stars Wars merch wouldn't sell.
Nobody will ever get the deal Lucas did again. No producer would be dumb enough to sign over ALL the merchandizing rights.
Both sides walked away from that table thinking the other side was a fukkin idiot.
Confused about the Audio Mixer thing.
Cant you just layer sounds in something like Audacity and put the animation and sound tracks together in some adobe animate/after effects-like software?
Or is there some critically important feature that is exclusive to those little boxes that needs to be utilized in order to have a proffesional feel/sound to your work.
Genuine question.
Audio has three parts to the job.
The first is vocals, a partnered job with the animators, making micro-adjustments in speed if needed for lip flaps, larger adjustments in space between words to fit cadence, and yes, layering the sounds. Sound files in this case is provided by the voice actors.
The second is foley, the sound effects. There's stock sounds, but any even vaguely competent foley artist will wind up making some of their own for particular noises. Draw a chef knife along a hanger to get a sword-drawing noise, hit a warm steak against tile floor to get a swamp monster's thudding steps, and whatnot. Sound files in this case are created by the mixer.
The third is music and ambiance. How loud must it be in the scene? Don't overpower speaking, but don't go unheard. Get louder when nothing is going on. Alter the song itself to better match a mood. Start and finish it, finding segments that "feel good" to start and finish on, to best suit a scene's length.
But you're talking about the vocals specifically... There is some editing to do in vocals. Do you hear any breaths? Those need to be edited out, unless the scene calls for audible breathing. And of course the space between words is shorter or longer as needed to fit the scene. Vocal pops need to be removed, too. And any volume disparity between voices needs equalizing. And noise removal, but competent voice actors will likely record in sound-absorbing studios where noise removal is not an issue: You don't want to echo like you're in a cave if your character isn't in one (and if they are, they better echo the same as every other character, another job of the audio mixer team: Creating uniform environmental alterations to vocal performances).
A good audio mixer will go unnoticed, because the sound effects sound on point, the voices all mesh and match, and the songs play appropriately, so instead, you can comment on the voice actors, musicians, and scene-setting. When they screw up, is when they get noticed: No one says "man, that last episode the bat screech, that wasn't stock audio, they got real bat noises, wow, respect", but they WILL say "what the hell was that walking noise supposed to be? It sounded like dying rubber ducks!" or "Protagonist 1's voice was just a tiny bit echoey... But Protagonist 2's voice wasn't. Is that going to be a plot point or was it just bad mixing?"
Probably the whole point of original CR content is so that people from their parent company can double dip. They can say to their Japanese owners "We barely take in any profit, it all goes to buying content, we even use retarded Moldovan developers to save on costs." Meanwhile they get paid for work from Crunchyroll and then they get paid again for producing their original content.
I'm using this now.
"Our budget was comparable to a CN show, which are usually 11-minutes long, are comedy-centered and have much simpler BGs and characters."
According to Quora, an episode of South Park takes 300k to make, approximately. And those are shit animation and as low budget as any CN show that is "comedy centered with simple BGs and characters".
So if you halve it for half-length episodes, about three times the budget I allocated.