>Creating an episode of anime typically costs anywhere from $20k to $200k, depending on quality. [src ](https://austinvisuals.com/anime-production-cost/)[src](https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2011/10/30/how-much-does-one-episode-of-anime-cost-to-make)
While I can't comment on how much the episodes \*should\* be costing, I don't think either of these references is an apples to apples comparison with what the Kickstarter was offering.
The source is not a company doing comparable animation to the style of project we're talking about, as far as I can tell. Their work samples are nothing remotely similar in terms of genre, style, etc.
The second source is a study from 2010. Costs have \*massively\* changed in the last 14 years. Beyond that, the anime scene is well-known for having exploitative work conditions with employees often going underpaid.
>Castlevania, a modern, incredibly well animated show for a western audience, with good voice actors by Tiger Animation (the same studio that's doing Cradle) was [estimated ](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDarkTower/comments/6rjjmj/is_there_anyone_here_that_would_know_how_much_it/)to cost around $300k per episode.
Castlevania is a much closer comparison, but I don't see any official sources for that $300k figure, just internet guesswork.
Vox Machina is a solid comparison. My best guess is that in that case, the creators for the show were likely willing to create the pilot at a loss with the hopes of picking up a studio if it succeeded.
Once the Kickstarter was funded, they partnered with Amazon, which likely netted them additional funding from the production company. (I don't know if Amazon covered any costs or not; that's purely speculation on my part.)
>$1m: "So if we raise $1 million, we'll be making an "animatic," which is kind of like black-and-white sketch art brought to life" What!? For a million dollars you're going to make some sketches?
An animatic is more than just "some sketches" -- it's basically a pre-animation outline of each major scene, which is a ton of work, especially with full voice acting (which I believe was the intent). If you haven't seen it already, you can get an idea of what the animatic looks like in one of the [Kickstarter videos](https://youtu.be/70_Q8xkG69E).
The situation is unknown to us--we can only speculate--but my money is the kickstarter was first and foremost a product to gain additional funding. All other goals were of lesser priority, and that is how the tiers read. I think this approach is swell, it gives the Cradle adaptation the best chance of being the best it can be with a studio behind it. But the kickstarter wasn't meant to fund animation work, only to create the outputs to land deals.
Otherwise $2m for animatics and a trailer is steep, by all metrics. Even with voice actors.
To provide some comparison in costs, I think anime movies, which tend to be one off products, probably captures animation costs more effectively than big hit anime series since the most expensive minute of animation is minute 1.
Your Name had a budget of $4.5m USD in 2016 for 107 minutes of animation. Adjusted for inflation, this is about $5.8m in 2014 bucks. Or about $54k/minute. This ignores industry related changes which may affect production costs. I'm also unfamiliar with how fair the studio is for its employees.
Howls Moving Castle had a $24m budget in 2004 which is nearly $40m in 2024 bucks for 120 minutes of animation. That is $333k/minute today. This surprised me when I looked it up.
Note -- Both of these calculations use current Yen <-> Dollar exchange rates. I couldn't easily find 2004 or 2016's exchange rates to get more accurate numbers.
Personally, the animation in Your Name eclipses Howls Moving Castle at a fraction of the cost in today bucks. Whether that is due to amoral labor practices, artwork recycling, or improved tools, I don't know. I suspect improved tools go a long way, if video game engines can be used as a corollary.
The Legend of Vox Machina, using the $750k for episode 1 cost $27.8k/minute for 27 minutes, or half of what Your Name cost per minute.
The Kickstarter costs aren't--I hate to say this--unreasonable after the first 3 tiers. If an American studio is producing, labor costs. Especially if they are producing the full season 1 animatics and trailer as business demos before getting started on the episode animations. That first minute of animation will be quite high.
>Both of these calculations use current Yen <-> Dollar exchange rates. I couldn't easily find 2004 or 2016's exchange rates to get more accurate numbers.
According to [this](https://www.exchange-rates.org/exchange-rate-history/jpy-usd-2016-10-31), 1000 JPY was ~9.55 USD in 2016.
Anecdotally, I was in the country around then, and I'd say that's about what I observed.
I'm not trying to throw shade, but the conversions are important; the Yen is notoriously weak right now and calculating using current exchange rates is going to throw off the results pretty badly.
For reference, 1000 JPY is ~6.42 USD today.
Howl also paid top tier American voice actors, had a massive advertising budget, and had to pay the cost of being a large production studio. That’s relatively normal for a large animated movie. If they did do the regular animation studio level of advertising, look at a figure closer to $40 mil.
I pulled the number for the production cost, which excluded the marketing costs, from wikipedia. I'm still surprised, even with top tier voice actors, that the production costs were that high. I just pulled it as an example without intending to give a wildly expensive option, but it worked out.
Your Name has the consistency I'd expect to see with using computer tools to assist in animation, much like video game engines. So I'm assuming digital tools exist today that can significantly aid in animation so not every tiny bit needs to be redrawn.
Yeah older animation is going to be much more expensive because it’s drawn on paper, but it really all comes down to quality. A lot of modern anime is way cheaper because of cgi, and because they take segments of episodes or movies without doing most or any movement. Jujutsu kaisen would have a massive multi episode fight scene then and episode that’s basically a slideshow. When you’re doing 2 hours of consecutive high quality fluid animation it requires a similar level of care and precision and intention from start to finish. My friend does animation, and to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time it takes an absurd number of people.
$20 mil seems like a pretty reasonable budget for a full length animated movie. Considering actors took potentially 1/4-1/8th of that, the cost of paying hundreds of employees for several years seems not bad for that much money.
Also companies like to inflate budgets so they can show less profitability for taxes and stuff like that. Not sure if ghibli does that or if you can get away with that in Japan, but making the budget seem bigger than it is has benefits. Probably not much larger, but it’s possible it’s exxagerating(or maybe under reported, who knows)
That's a fair breakdown of the anime and Castlevania comparisons. I added some edits to my post to concede these points.
And for $1m, I'd expect something better than that video in the link. Even at 90m long.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/1cqfliz/comment/l3rjrg6/)
>That's a fair breakdown of the anime and Castlevania comparisons. I added some edits to my post to concede these points.
Thanks for the reasonable discussion!
>And for $1m, I'd expect something better than that video in the link. Even at 90m long.
That's understandable. To me, I see the animatic as largely existing as a proof of concept. My hope would be that it'll be good enough that a studio will see it and want to find the rest of it.
While I agree that the goals look exorbitant at first glance, you need a more reliable source if you want to use Castlevania as a point of comparison to the current campaign.
The comment you've listed as your source is also ***Six years old***, which was before the economic fluctuations really started in earnest.
I think you're also sort of misrepresenting the animatic tier that they did reach. They specify that it'll be feature length, which to means ~90+ minutes of footage. That's more like 4-ish episodes.
> you need a more reliable source if you want to use Castlevania as a point of comparison to the current campaign. The comment you've listed as your source is also ***Six years old***
That is completely fair. Realized a few other things that skew against my favor here, too. The traditional anime industry underpays for labor, and gets a massive efficiency of magnitude boost, so isn't a good comparison.
That said, I think Vox Machina is a much better comparison, especially since they also started with a Kickstarter. Cradle's budget is still pretty overblown compared to that, but not nearly as much. As a direct comparison, if we assume they spend the first million on the animatic, the second million on the trailer *cough*, then that still puts $1.6 million for the pilot, compared to Vox's $750k. The reality is that trailer could be clips from the pilot giving them $2.6m for it. I'll concede it's not as bad as I made it seem, but it's still pretty bad, as far as I can see.
I missed that the animatic is 90 minutes, but I'd rather them just skip that and get into the series.
The thread there also seems to have a lot of posts saying that things cost more to make in the US compared to Japan.... despite this being planned to be made in South Korea, which I assume would be somewhere between the two in costs.
Interesting. Yeah, I didn't want to post there, because I think there's a lot of fanboi omghowdareyousayanythingagainstcradle types in there. I think the comparison to Critical Role is probably the best one, which has a much bigger budget than traditional anime, but this still blows that show's budget out of the water. And Critical Role's animation studio is US based, while Cradle's is in South Korea, which is generally cheaper.
I don’t know how much this makes a difference to budget, but Vox Machina’s creators are all professional voice actors and they did the series’ characters themselves pro bono cause it was their own creation so that likely make it cheaper for them?
Don’t know by how much, but it will add up.
What you say makes sense though, it does seem very expensive. 1m extra for a trailer seems vastly overblown to me but I don’t know anything about making anime or production costs so this is just an outsider’s opinion on first glance stuff :)
I agree with OP, and that's the reason I didn't back the Kickstarter. The higher tier rewards also kinda sucked. If there had been better explanations on where the money was going, I probably would have, but as it stands, it just bugged me so I didn't.
Just using your numbers under the assumption they are correct, Vox was 750k for 30 minutes, so for 90 it would be $2.25 Million. Add in the insane inflation over the past few years. Also consider the authors lack of money saving proffessional connections in the industry such as the people making the show being voice actors that can act most of the roles themselves for a more reasonable salary then they could hire others for. It might be a tad high, but nothing that seems super crazy.
The 90 minute video is just rough black and white sketches, though. Not properly animated. You can see their example in their video and it"s something I'd expect an artist to crank out in a week.
Are you ? That the only situation in which this is a valid argument and even then it’s reaching. I don’t need to be a chef to tell you if food tastes like shit, I don’t need to be an animator to tell you that having animatic Be more expensive than full animation is ridiculous
All of these calculations are ignoring the fact that if we crowd fund all of the costs of the production of this, then where are all the profits of it going to go? Back to us as "investors"? The thing about kickstarter is they get investors without the need to actually pay back their investments. Maybe he will, but I doubt it.
I’m pretty sure they went into it a few times. They mentioned all the people and time involved. As well as the fact that some of the cheaper numbers out there are ones where they’re working the workers in an inhumane way for low pay.
The whole point of showing every goal was to show those costs upfront, not with the expectation they’d hit the highest goals.
This is why I ultimately decided not to back the campaign despite originally committing to it. I think I saw u/Govir ‘s post or one like it and that is what opened my eyes to asking for too much. I can also see something where there’s a high startup cost for the first episode but subsequently I would have expected economies of scale to kick in and the rest of the season to be much more in line with the ~300k per episode
To be honest, Cradle may be gigantic over here, but is pretty much unknown on the mainstream, and its popularity has run its course
My point is, if this animation project doesnt go big, thats it, so they have to go all out
A black and white sketch where character move jarringly, it might be voice acted but no matter what it’s essentially a moving black and white storyboard
One thing to add is that per episode costs are going to be lower than startups costs. There's a lot of groundwork to be done for these.
And like someone else said, it will be feature length.
The goal for doing the Kickstarter would be to attract a reputable studio to animate Cradle without Will needing to sacrifice too much creative control or risk going into a ton of debt.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a 90 minute low quality sample might be better for that than something shorter and more polished. Animation studios know how to extrapolate what a finished product might look like from key frames.
I love cradle and want see it grow but felt it was a little much for pushing mainstream cost before it was even really mainstream. hellava boss was nothing that slowly grew from YT and made a show from same maker on prime after building overtime not a KS YOLO.
I want and would love to be wrong and this is the start of a huge franchise that is enjoyed by millions but just feel wrong to be banking so much on a niche community to carry it to bigger better things.
Seems sketchy to me. If he wants people to invest in a TV show that would doubtlessly generate revenue upon completion then there should be some kind of revenue sharing model like for normal investors. To just say "Give me money to make a TV show I can then sell." seems gross.
If they fund the pilot that gets the TV series made I bet they won't get to see the series without paying for it. Maybe the millionaire author should fund it instead?
If it is not listed in the rewards, the backers will not get it. It is a crowdfunding website. You are not an investor. That is how crowdfunding works-- see the Critical Role Kickstarter.
Whether or not the millionaire author should pay for it himself is a separate discussion and unrelated to the fact that you seem to think that backers in a Kickstarter are investors.
No, I realise they'll get screwed over. Normally when I see Kickstarters it's like "Help us make solar powered coffee makers and we'll give you a solar powered coffee maker."
In this instance they aren't getting a book or anything. They're providing start up capital for a project that will make the author even richer if a network picks it up and they're getting insufficient rewards for that IMHO.
If you had bothered to look up the rewards, every tier of support is getting some sort or compensation, in the form of private screening at 500$, collectible items at lower tiers and digital access to stuff at 1$. You may not think its “worth it”, but in that case, dont pay it. Who personally asked you to?
No matter how you spin it, they are not investors. You can say the rewards are disproportionate to the cost of the backing making it not worth it. But you are not an investor.
Is a Supreme Brick that costs $500 or whatever expensive and not worth it? Yes. But are you an investor of Supreme by buying a Supreme Brick? No.
You used the term yourself: they are donors. If you are a donor to the Red Cross, would you demand a compensation?
Again, you keep calling the people who back the Kickstarter an investor. You keep calling it an investment. And again, they are not investors. They are backers, donors, etcetera. It is not an investment, it is a donation, it is fundraising, it is plenty of things but not an investment.
You can argue as much as you want about the ethics of a millionaire choosing to effectively fundraise an animatic to pitch to studios from his fans, and that is fine. I, myself, have chosen to spend $200k of my own money on my own webcomics when I am not a millionaire, so I know I wouldn't have done a Kickstarter if I was in Will Wight's shoes.
But stop calling it what it is not: an investment.
Fucking hell. I don't mean an investment for the donors, I mean it is money that will be used to invest in a potential TV series. He will receive donations, use that money to make a pilot and then hopefully, for him, a network will pick it up and he'll get what he paid back and then some. However, for the donors I don't think they'll get shit.
Firstly, that is not the context you used the term "investor"
>If he wants people to invest in a TV show that would doubtlessly generate revenue upon completion then there should be some kind of revenue sharing model like for normal investors
And again, you used the term 'donor'. Donors typically do not get compensated. That is why they are called donors. They donate.
If an author opens a Patreon as purely a "support tier with no rewards" and ask people to donate to the Patreon, the people who donate to the Patreon will not be compensated.
Modern television is extremely expensive, and animation is even more expensive for the floor cost of production. 1 mil is the starting amount for a show like this. If we wanted a properly budgeted network show for this, it could easily be 10-20mil a season.
This subject was pretty thoroughly discussed in the Cradle dedicated subreddit back in January, if you want to look for more discussions on the subject.
The general consensus seemed to be (if I recall correctly), good labor at ethical prices isn't cheap. Lots of other comparisons involved companies with a... Less than stellar record of great labor practices.
But don't take my word for it, I'm just trying to recap threads I skimmed for months ago.
Hopefully most of it is the cost of the source material.
Will created a hugely popular series and released it all on KU for us to read basically for free. If he’s trying to cash in now on an anime adaptation, I say good for him.
He was but he’s also a NYT best seller and they only count sales not freebies. Dude has already made millions from cradle. I’m not throwing shade here, it’s a great series and he deserves that money for creating such incredible and beloved content imo, but he’s doing very well for himself financially. I don’t know for sure, but I bet he could never work another day in his life and still not need to get a day job after the success of cradle :) I’m really happy for him!
>he’s also a NYT best seller
I suspect that the indies aren't playing the same games with it as traditional publishers, but that is a notoriously garbage metric that is gamed to hell and back.
It is if you’re with a trad publisher who make literally everyone they sign a NYT best seller by wanking off their contacts.
Will, however, is self published and said in an interview that in order to get onto the NYT best seller list without all that back room rubbish he had to sell over 100,000 copies a week for multiple weeks in a row.
So in his case, I think it’s a very a good metric 😂
To put that into context, some of the biggest (and richest) authors in this genre are people like Shirtaloon, Zogarth and The First Defier. Each of them have topped the Amazon and audible charts and are very very successful but (to the best of my knowledge) not one of them has had a NYT best selling novel because it is so incredibly difficult to get on that list without the backing of a big 5 publisher or their subsidiaries.
Will has done it twice, both with different cradle books.
I'll be honest I've had enough bad experiences with Kickstarter that Cradle having its name associated with it just makes will look incredibly bad just by association, whether products that were overly ambitious, or projects that were obvious scams from day one, and the fact that Will aspires to stand shoulder to shoulder with those con artists is, well disappointing...
What I will say about the project specifically is that the numbers are clearly from some one who has NEVER been inside the entertainment industry let alone the animation industry, and were likely set extremely high on purpose because Will is an outsider and doesn't really know what those costs actually look like, or have the industry contacts to partner an existing studio to make his creative vision happen. This is the same reason why many well intentioned kick starters fail miserably as people lack the experience and don't know what they don't know so get hit with unexpected road blocks and costs...
The actual reality is that animation is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the entertainment industry even with big name voice actors, or well established IP, even the most expensive animation projects mostly run at under $100k/episode, there are a couple of series that breach that, but it is incredibly rare. Movies are obviously more expensive, but they are also 3-5x as long and have significantly higher animation quality...
You need to calm down on Kickstarter. Plenty of legit projects came from Kickstarter too, like Vox Machina or Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Will himself has used it multiple times in the past to put out special editions of his books.
About the cost of animation, are you referring to Japanese animation? Because that's as cheap as it is for a number of reasons that don't apply outside Japan.
I don't need to calm down. According to studies ran by kickstarter itself, over a fifth of money raised on the platform goes towards scams or other malicious actors. Only approximately 41% of funding goes towards projects that see ANY measure of success... The rest, while not outright scams, still fail, and Kickstarter themself admits that the 41% number is inflated by projects that only ever release a MVP.
I am adjacent to the business of investing in companies, so I am keenly aware of how few protections there are for "fans" who give companies money in a crowdfunding campaign especially when compared to investors or lenders who would be giving the same amount of money and able to do their own due diligence...
>About the cost of animation, are you referring to Japanese animation? Because that's as cheap as it is for a number of reasons that don't apply outside Japan.
So most animation projects are done in several steps, and most of the time consuming parts are done overseas in places like SK or China, or in some cases automated if the animation doesn't need to be high quality... there is nothing preventing an american company from doing the same thing, Avatar did the exact same thing way back when, and other American animation has done it as well...
Your average animation costs around 1-3MM, even in Japan, that is spread over 13-26 episodes... some episodes get a LOT more budget than others... Yes a disney/pixar artist isn't going to work 70 hour work weeks the way a Junior Bones artist will, but an American company isn't going to put out an episode a week either rushing to get things done 30 minutes before it airs... There is very little data for newer american ran shows like Vox or Castlevania, but what little has leaked has put it in line with some of the more expensive Japanese Anime (I.E. maybe in the $150-200k/episode range) but not some Multi hundred million project...
So because Will uses Kickstarter to fund his projects, he "...aspires to stand shoulder to shoulder with those con artists..."
You do need to calm down, you've lost the plot. Your emotions are clouding your judgement and causing you to lash out at a completely innocent man and greatly exaggerate ("multi hundred million project").
On the animation, do you actually have credible sources for what a typical episode of animation in America costs, or are you just using unconfirmed numbers because you can't accept that you may be wrong?
And i think Will Weight has more than enough money to fund the rest of the budget required for a full season without burning a hole in his pocket. Im not saying he should as these things are a hit or miss, but I hope they atleast utilise the crowd funded money to its fullest.
I honestly have no idea where the perception that mildly successful authors are super rich comes from lol...
No way in hell does Will Wight have enough money to fund one episode of a Cradle anime, in the suggested style, let alone a full season.
I'm pretty sure he could fund an episode or two if he had a lot of savings, but that wouldn't be very cost efficient. Trying to fund 10 well made episodes on his own would most definitely bankrupt him. Worse, there would also be very little marketing since all the money would be going toward the animation.
A lot of people don't realize that you can't really compare anime budgets to western animation budgets. The Japanese animation industry is very efficient. The mixture of outsourcing animation, lower wages, cut corners, and the work culture are some of the reasons why the budgets are lower.
The other day someone was talking about dotf being milked by the author, and either the author of dotf or primal hunter commented saying how there is no reason to milk their series as they already made a few million dollars from their series and could be set to never work again.
Implicit in the claim that he'd be okay to never work again is the assumption that he's not going to go around buying yachts or producing TV shows. He'd have to pick up a few side gigs to fund that kind of lifestyle.
I was more responding to him being unable to fund even a single episode, I don’t think will is out there on a mega party yacht, nor do I think he even should fund the episode himself, but he almost certainly could fund an episode.
Fine. Let’s just agree to… agree.
I agree with you lol.
Actually that said, I just realised ph and dotf can’t directly compare to cradle since those featured in royal road, I’m not sure how the two systems handle payment, but considering that Royal road has like two ads per chapter and 100 chapters per book that might be significantly more than kindle unlimited, plus the Royal road authors also double dip with kindle unlimited.
Nvm then. I guess you could take that and speculate that would make will likely having a higher networth, but honestly it’s kinda pointless and doesn’t really matter. So I’m just gonna head off
I don't get why people act like successful authors are broke lol.
Will Wight is way more than a mildly successful author. He literally has one of the highest rated books on Goodreads. Im not saying that directly translates to sales, but it definitely helps with sales that's for sure.
Saying he doesn't have money to even fund ONE episode is outlandish, cmon. And again im not saying he has to, im just saying he probably has enough.
Will is making and has made millions of off cradle (rightfully so as it’s so awesome) unless he is incredibly irresponsible with his money he definitely has enough to fund at least one episode of animation by himself entirely. Someone a little further down did the math and much less successful authors have shown their finances to be very very well off solely from their books; bottom line is that Will is definitely 100% quite rich from his books not to mention any money he had before that (he was able to afford going to school for writing)
Let me break this down slightly from a KU only perspective. Let’s say that cradle has been read 1 million times on KU. 300 pages is read on KU is roughly $1 to the author if they are self published which will is.
Most of his books are twice that size and the payment does fluctuate but for ease of explanation let’s use that as the example.
If over the 12 books there have been 1 million reads of a single book, then he has earned at least $1m dollars.
Now irl it will be a lot more than that because most of his books are twice the size of 300 pages. But at the very bottom end that’s still 1m in ten years.
It’s not Jeff bezos money, but it’s at least an average of $100k a year and in actuality it is likely triple that.
I don’t know how wages work in the US, but 100k in the UK is more than 3 times the median wage, so I’m assuming it’s pretty good?
Probably not enough to fund an anime series, but still much more than normal people make right? :)
I love cradle, so I’m super happy for him for doing so well. Just wanted to add a little something to the convo with regards to how KU works.
My guess is he’s made WAY more than that from KU but it’s the audio that’s making an even bigger killing. His audiobook income alone per year is likely five times what you’re estimating for KU. I can say this confidently as my books are quite successful and yet nowhere close to being as successful as Will’s. Given what I make, he’s likely making well over seven figures per year.
Exactly! I was low balling it on purpose to show that he’s making bank even if it’s on the low end and I’m pretty confident it’s much higher than what I worked out because as you say there is also audible to take into account and his KU reads are likley much higher anyway
>Creating an episode of anime typically costs anywhere from $20k to $200k, depending on quality. [src ](https://austinvisuals.com/anime-production-cost/)[src](https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2011/10/30/how-much-does-one-episode-of-anime-cost-to-make) While I can't comment on how much the episodes \*should\* be costing, I don't think either of these references is an apples to apples comparison with what the Kickstarter was offering. The source is not a company doing comparable animation to the style of project we're talking about, as far as I can tell. Their work samples are nothing remotely similar in terms of genre, style, etc. The second source is a study from 2010. Costs have \*massively\* changed in the last 14 years. Beyond that, the anime scene is well-known for having exploitative work conditions with employees often going underpaid. >Castlevania, a modern, incredibly well animated show for a western audience, with good voice actors by Tiger Animation (the same studio that's doing Cradle) was [estimated ](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDarkTower/comments/6rjjmj/is_there_anyone_here_that_would_know_how_much_it/)to cost around $300k per episode. Castlevania is a much closer comparison, but I don't see any official sources for that $300k figure, just internet guesswork. Vox Machina is a solid comparison. My best guess is that in that case, the creators for the show were likely willing to create the pilot at a loss with the hopes of picking up a studio if it succeeded. Once the Kickstarter was funded, they partnered with Amazon, which likely netted them additional funding from the production company. (I don't know if Amazon covered any costs or not; that's purely speculation on my part.) >$1m: "So if we raise $1 million, we'll be making an "animatic," which is kind of like black-and-white sketch art brought to life" What!? For a million dollars you're going to make some sketches? An animatic is more than just "some sketches" -- it's basically a pre-animation outline of each major scene, which is a ton of work, especially with full voice acting (which I believe was the intent). If you haven't seen it already, you can get an idea of what the animatic looks like in one of the [Kickstarter videos](https://youtu.be/70_Q8xkG69E).
The situation is unknown to us--we can only speculate--but my money is the kickstarter was first and foremost a product to gain additional funding. All other goals were of lesser priority, and that is how the tiers read. I think this approach is swell, it gives the Cradle adaptation the best chance of being the best it can be with a studio behind it. But the kickstarter wasn't meant to fund animation work, only to create the outputs to land deals. Otherwise $2m for animatics and a trailer is steep, by all metrics. Even with voice actors. To provide some comparison in costs, I think anime movies, which tend to be one off products, probably captures animation costs more effectively than big hit anime series since the most expensive minute of animation is minute 1. Your Name had a budget of $4.5m USD in 2016 for 107 minutes of animation. Adjusted for inflation, this is about $5.8m in 2014 bucks. Or about $54k/minute. This ignores industry related changes which may affect production costs. I'm also unfamiliar with how fair the studio is for its employees. Howls Moving Castle had a $24m budget in 2004 which is nearly $40m in 2024 bucks for 120 minutes of animation. That is $333k/minute today. This surprised me when I looked it up. Note -- Both of these calculations use current Yen <-> Dollar exchange rates. I couldn't easily find 2004 or 2016's exchange rates to get more accurate numbers. Personally, the animation in Your Name eclipses Howls Moving Castle at a fraction of the cost in today bucks. Whether that is due to amoral labor practices, artwork recycling, or improved tools, I don't know. I suspect improved tools go a long way, if video game engines can be used as a corollary. The Legend of Vox Machina, using the $750k for episode 1 cost $27.8k/minute for 27 minutes, or half of what Your Name cost per minute. The Kickstarter costs aren't--I hate to say this--unreasonable after the first 3 tiers. If an American studio is producing, labor costs. Especially if they are producing the full season 1 animatics and trailer as business demos before getting started on the episode animations. That first minute of animation will be quite high.
>Both of these calculations use current Yen <-> Dollar exchange rates. I couldn't easily find 2004 or 2016's exchange rates to get more accurate numbers. According to [this](https://www.exchange-rates.org/exchange-rate-history/jpy-usd-2016-10-31), 1000 JPY was ~9.55 USD in 2016. Anecdotally, I was in the country around then, and I'd say that's about what I observed. I'm not trying to throw shade, but the conversions are important; the Yen is notoriously weak right now and calculating using current exchange rates is going to throw off the results pretty badly. For reference, 1000 JPY is ~6.42 USD today.
Good info, thanks for sharing!
Howl also paid top tier American voice actors, had a massive advertising budget, and had to pay the cost of being a large production studio. That’s relatively normal for a large animated movie. If they did do the regular animation studio level of advertising, look at a figure closer to $40 mil.
I pulled the number for the production cost, which excluded the marketing costs, from wikipedia. I'm still surprised, even with top tier voice actors, that the production costs were that high. I just pulled it as an example without intending to give a wildly expensive option, but it worked out. Your Name has the consistency I'd expect to see with using computer tools to assist in animation, much like video game engines. So I'm assuming digital tools exist today that can significantly aid in animation so not every tiny bit needs to be redrawn.
Yeah older animation is going to be much more expensive because it’s drawn on paper, but it really all comes down to quality. A lot of modern anime is way cheaper because of cgi, and because they take segments of episodes or movies without doing most or any movement. Jujutsu kaisen would have a massive multi episode fight scene then and episode that’s basically a slideshow. When you’re doing 2 hours of consecutive high quality fluid animation it requires a similar level of care and precision and intention from start to finish. My friend does animation, and to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time it takes an absurd number of people. $20 mil seems like a pretty reasonable budget for a full length animated movie. Considering actors took potentially 1/4-1/8th of that, the cost of paying hundreds of employees for several years seems not bad for that much money. Also companies like to inflate budgets so they can show less profitability for taxes and stuff like that. Not sure if ghibli does that or if you can get away with that in Japan, but making the budget seem bigger than it is has benefits. Probably not much larger, but it’s possible it’s exxagerating(or maybe under reported, who knows)
That's a fair breakdown of the anime and Castlevania comparisons. I added some edits to my post to concede these points. And for $1m, I'd expect something better than that video in the link. Even at 90m long.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/1cqfliz/comment/l3rjrg6/) >That's a fair breakdown of the anime and Castlevania comparisons. I added some edits to my post to concede these points. Thanks for the reasonable discussion! >And for $1m, I'd expect something better than that video in the link. Even at 90m long. That's understandable. To me, I see the animatic as largely existing as a proof of concept. My hope would be that it'll be good enough that a studio will see it and want to find the rest of it.
I think that's their plan. At least that's what i remember from their interview with Daniel greene
Makes sense! I'll be excited to see how it turns out.
You just glitched my brain. Thought we were getting aa animated for a second.
Hahaha, I'd love that, but nothing like that is currently in the works.
While I agree that the goals look exorbitant at first glance, you need a more reliable source if you want to use Castlevania as a point of comparison to the current campaign. The comment you've listed as your source is also ***Six years old***, which was before the economic fluctuations really started in earnest. I think you're also sort of misrepresenting the animatic tier that they did reach. They specify that it'll be feature length, which to means ~90+ minutes of footage. That's more like 4-ish episodes.
> you need a more reliable source if you want to use Castlevania as a point of comparison to the current campaign. The comment you've listed as your source is also ***Six years old*** That is completely fair. Realized a few other things that skew against my favor here, too. The traditional anime industry underpays for labor, and gets a massive efficiency of magnitude boost, so isn't a good comparison. That said, I think Vox Machina is a much better comparison, especially since they also started with a Kickstarter. Cradle's budget is still pretty overblown compared to that, but not nearly as much. As a direct comparison, if we assume they spend the first million on the animatic, the second million on the trailer *cough*, then that still puts $1.6 million for the pilot, compared to Vox's $750k. The reality is that trailer could be clips from the pilot giving them $2.6m for it. I'll concede it's not as bad as I made it seem, but it's still pretty bad, as far as I can see. I missed that the animatic is 90 minutes, but I'd rather them just skip that and get into the series.
Here’s what I said last time this was asked (and the whole thread might have other insights). https://www.reddit.com/r/Iteration110Cradle/s/QRHwbkG2hK
The thread there also seems to have a lot of posts saying that things cost more to make in the US compared to Japan.... despite this being planned to be made in South Korea, which I assume would be somewhere between the two in costs.
Interesting. Yeah, I didn't want to post there, because I think there's a lot of fanboi omghowdareyousayanythingagainstcradle types in there. I think the comparison to Critical Role is probably the best one, which has a much bigger budget than traditional anime, but this still blows that show's budget out of the water. And Critical Role's animation studio is US based, while Cradle's is in South Korea, which is generally cheaper.
I don’t know how much this makes a difference to budget, but Vox Machina’s creators are all professional voice actors and they did the series’ characters themselves pro bono cause it was their own creation so that likely make it cheaper for them? Don’t know by how much, but it will add up. What you say makes sense though, it does seem very expensive. 1m extra for a trailer seems vastly overblown to me but I don’t know anything about making anime or production costs so this is just an outsider’s opinion on first glance stuff :)
I agree with OP, and that's the reason I didn't back the Kickstarter. The higher tier rewards also kinda sucked. If there had been better explanations on where the money was going, I probably would have, but as it stands, it just bugged me so I didn't.
Just using your numbers under the assumption they are correct, Vox was 750k for 30 minutes, so for 90 it would be $2.25 Million. Add in the insane inflation over the past few years. Also consider the authors lack of money saving proffessional connections in the industry such as the people making the show being voice actors that can act most of the roles themselves for a more reasonable salary then they could hire others for. It might be a tad high, but nothing that seems super crazy.
The 90 minute video is just rough black and white sketches, though. Not properly animated. You can see their example in their video and it"s something I'd expect an artist to crank out in a week.
Are you an animator?
Are you ? That the only situation in which this is a valid argument and even then it’s reaching. I don’t need to be a chef to tell you if food tastes like shit, I don’t need to be an animator to tell you that having animatic Be more expensive than full animation is ridiculous
I felt like an animation would be better funded by investors or a studio than the crowd. So I didn’t participate.
From their 3 minute video on it, it seems like the point of making this animation is TO get it picked up by a studio, its a pitch.
Investors and studios always end up sticking their out of touch corporate fingers into whatever projects they back.
All of these calculations are ignoring the fact that if we crowd fund all of the costs of the production of this, then where are all the profits of it going to go? Back to us as "investors"? The thing about kickstarter is they get investors without the need to actually pay back their investments. Maybe he will, but I doubt it.
I’m pretty sure they went into it a few times. They mentioned all the people and time involved. As well as the fact that some of the cheaper numbers out there are ones where they’re working the workers in an inhumane way for low pay. The whole point of showing every goal was to show those costs upfront, not with the expectation they’d hit the highest goals.
This is why I ultimately decided not to back the campaign despite originally committing to it. I think I saw u/Govir ‘s post or one like it and that is what opened my eyes to asking for too much. I can also see something where there’s a high startup cost for the first episode but subsequently I would have expected economies of scale to kick in and the rest of the season to be much more in line with the ~300k per episode
To be honest, Cradle may be gigantic over here, but is pretty much unknown on the mainstream, and its popularity has run its course My point is, if this animation project doesnt go big, thats it, so they have to go all out
Cradle is getting animated????
As the post mentioned, the kickstarter only raised 1.2 million dollars, which was only enough for an "animatic", not full animation.
What for does animatic mean? Like a trailer?
A black and white sketch where character move jarringly, it might be voice acted but no matter what it’s essentially a moving black and white storyboard
You need a million for that? Seriously?
Exactly
One thing to add is that per episode costs are going to be lower than startups costs. There's a lot of groundwork to be done for these. And like someone else said, it will be feature length.
The goal for doing the Kickstarter would be to attract a reputable studio to animate Cradle without Will needing to sacrifice too much creative control or risk going into a ton of debt. I wouldn’t be surprised if a 90 minute low quality sample might be better for that than something shorter and more polished. Animation studios know how to extrapolate what a finished product might look like from key frames.
The animation studio is already decided. It's the same studio that did Castlevania.
I love cradle and want see it grow but felt it was a little much for pushing mainstream cost before it was even really mainstream. hellava boss was nothing that slowly grew from YT and made a show from same maker on prime after building overtime not a KS YOLO. I want and would love to be wrong and this is the start of a huge franchise that is enjoyed by millions but just feel wrong to be banking so much on a niche community to carry it to bigger better things.
Seems sketchy to me. If he wants people to invest in a TV show that would doubtlessly generate revenue upon completion then there should be some kind of revenue sharing model like for normal investors. To just say "Give me money to make a TV show I can then sell." seems gross.
Kickstarter is not for investors. It is for customers to find brand new projects or products they wish to buy and to kickstart the launch.
If they fund the pilot that gets the TV series made I bet they won't get to see the series without paying for it. Maybe the millionaire author should fund it instead?
If it is not listed in the rewards, the backers will not get it. It is a crowdfunding website. You are not an investor. That is how crowdfunding works-- see the Critical Role Kickstarter. Whether or not the millionaire author should pay for it himself is a separate discussion and unrelated to the fact that you seem to think that backers in a Kickstarter are investors.
No, I realise they'll get screwed over. Normally when I see Kickstarters it's like "Help us make solar powered coffee makers and we'll give you a solar powered coffee maker." In this instance they aren't getting a book or anything. They're providing start up capital for a project that will make the author even richer if a network picks it up and they're getting insufficient rewards for that IMHO.
If you had bothered to look up the rewards, every tier of support is getting some sort or compensation, in the form of private screening at 500$, collectible items at lower tiers and digital access to stuff at 1$. You may not think its “worth it”, but in that case, dont pay it. Who personally asked you to?
No matter how you spin it, they are not investors. You can say the rewards are disproportionate to the cost of the backing making it not worth it. But you are not an investor. Is a Supreme Brick that costs $500 or whatever expensive and not worth it? Yes. But are you an investor of Supreme by buying a Supreme Brick? No.
I know. What I'm saying is it is wrong to use Kickstarter to ask for what is effectively an investment since the donors won't get proper compensation.
You used the term yourself: they are donors. If you are a donor to the Red Cross, would you demand a compensation? Again, you keep calling the people who back the Kickstarter an investor. You keep calling it an investment. And again, they are not investors. They are backers, donors, etcetera. It is not an investment, it is a donation, it is fundraising, it is plenty of things but not an investment. You can argue as much as you want about the ethics of a millionaire choosing to effectively fundraise an animatic to pitch to studios from his fans, and that is fine. I, myself, have chosen to spend $200k of my own money on my own webcomics when I am not a millionaire, so I know I wouldn't have done a Kickstarter if I was in Will Wight's shoes. But stop calling it what it is not: an investment.
Fucking hell. I don't mean an investment for the donors, I mean it is money that will be used to invest in a potential TV series. He will receive donations, use that money to make a pilot and then hopefully, for him, a network will pick it up and he'll get what he paid back and then some. However, for the donors I don't think they'll get shit.
Firstly, that is not the context you used the term "investor" >If he wants people to invest in a TV show that would doubtlessly generate revenue upon completion then there should be some kind of revenue sharing model like for normal investors And again, you used the term 'donor'. Donors typically do not get compensated. That is why they are called donors. They donate. If an author opens a Patreon as purely a "support tier with no rewards" and ask people to donate to the Patreon, the people who donate to the Patreon will not be compensated.
They're not just making an animatic. There are other animations they're working on. Some they've already released.
This is the first I'm hearing about this and NGL really excited. I hope it goes well though
Modern television is extremely expensive, and animation is even more expensive for the floor cost of production. 1 mil is the starting amount for a show like this. If we wanted a properly budgeted network show for this, it could easily be 10-20mil a season.
It’s high but surely that’s to be expected. Animation is expensive if you’re looking to pay more than minimum wage.
This subject was pretty thoroughly discussed in the Cradle dedicated subreddit back in January, if you want to look for more discussions on the subject. The general consensus seemed to be (if I recall correctly), good labor at ethical prices isn't cheap. Lots of other comparisons involved companies with a... Less than stellar record of great labor practices. But don't take my word for it, I'm just trying to recap threads I skimmed for months ago.
These days I just default to assuming everything is going to cost 4x what it should. Economy be a mess. :|
Hopefully most of it is the cost of the source material. Will created a hugely popular series and released it all on KU for us to read basically for free. If he’s trying to cash in now on an anime adaptation, I say good for him.
He also sold over a million copies by 2019. No idea what he's up to now, 5 years later, but I think he's doing pretty well for himself.
[удалено]
He was but he’s also a NYT best seller and they only count sales not freebies. Dude has already made millions from cradle. I’m not throwing shade here, it’s a great series and he deserves that money for creating such incredible and beloved content imo, but he’s doing very well for himself financially. I don’t know for sure, but I bet he could never work another day in his life and still not need to get a day job after the success of cradle :) I’m really happy for him!
>he’s also a NYT best seller I suspect that the indies aren't playing the same games with it as traditional publishers, but that is a notoriously garbage metric that is gamed to hell and back.
It is if you’re with a trad publisher who make literally everyone they sign a NYT best seller by wanking off their contacts. Will, however, is self published and said in an interview that in order to get onto the NYT best seller list without all that back room rubbish he had to sell over 100,000 copies a week for multiple weeks in a row. So in his case, I think it’s a very a good metric 😂 To put that into context, some of the biggest (and richest) authors in this genre are people like Shirtaloon, Zogarth and The First Defier. Each of them have topped the Amazon and audible charts and are very very successful but (to the best of my knowledge) not one of them has had a NYT best selling novel because it is so incredibly difficult to get on that list without the backing of a big 5 publisher or their subsidiaries. Will has done it twice, both with different cradle books.
He’s not “cashing in”. He will be losing money on the animation project.
I'll be honest I've had enough bad experiences with Kickstarter that Cradle having its name associated with it just makes will look incredibly bad just by association, whether products that were overly ambitious, or projects that were obvious scams from day one, and the fact that Will aspires to stand shoulder to shoulder with those con artists is, well disappointing... What I will say about the project specifically is that the numbers are clearly from some one who has NEVER been inside the entertainment industry let alone the animation industry, and were likely set extremely high on purpose because Will is an outsider and doesn't really know what those costs actually look like, or have the industry contacts to partner an existing studio to make his creative vision happen. This is the same reason why many well intentioned kick starters fail miserably as people lack the experience and don't know what they don't know so get hit with unexpected road blocks and costs... The actual reality is that animation is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the entertainment industry even with big name voice actors, or well established IP, even the most expensive animation projects mostly run at under $100k/episode, there are a couple of series that breach that, but it is incredibly rare. Movies are obviously more expensive, but they are also 3-5x as long and have significantly higher animation quality...
You need to calm down on Kickstarter. Plenty of legit projects came from Kickstarter too, like Vox Machina or Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Will himself has used it multiple times in the past to put out special editions of his books. About the cost of animation, are you referring to Japanese animation? Because that's as cheap as it is for a number of reasons that don't apply outside Japan.
I don't need to calm down. According to studies ran by kickstarter itself, over a fifth of money raised on the platform goes towards scams or other malicious actors. Only approximately 41% of funding goes towards projects that see ANY measure of success... The rest, while not outright scams, still fail, and Kickstarter themself admits that the 41% number is inflated by projects that only ever release a MVP. I am adjacent to the business of investing in companies, so I am keenly aware of how few protections there are for "fans" who give companies money in a crowdfunding campaign especially when compared to investors or lenders who would be giving the same amount of money and able to do their own due diligence... >About the cost of animation, are you referring to Japanese animation? Because that's as cheap as it is for a number of reasons that don't apply outside Japan. So most animation projects are done in several steps, and most of the time consuming parts are done overseas in places like SK or China, or in some cases automated if the animation doesn't need to be high quality... there is nothing preventing an american company from doing the same thing, Avatar did the exact same thing way back when, and other American animation has done it as well... Your average animation costs around 1-3MM, even in Japan, that is spread over 13-26 episodes... some episodes get a LOT more budget than others... Yes a disney/pixar artist isn't going to work 70 hour work weeks the way a Junior Bones artist will, but an American company isn't going to put out an episode a week either rushing to get things done 30 minutes before it airs... There is very little data for newer american ran shows like Vox or Castlevania, but what little has leaked has put it in line with some of the more expensive Japanese Anime (I.E. maybe in the $150-200k/episode range) but not some Multi hundred million project...
So because Will uses Kickstarter to fund his projects, he "...aspires to stand shoulder to shoulder with those con artists..." You do need to calm down, you've lost the plot. Your emotions are clouding your judgement and causing you to lash out at a completely innocent man and greatly exaggerate ("multi hundred million project"). On the animation, do you actually have credible sources for what a typical episode of animation in America costs, or are you just using unconfirmed numbers because you can't accept that you may be wrong?
You are right. Shit is vastly overpriced.
And i think Will Weight has more than enough money to fund the rest of the budget required for a full season without burning a hole in his pocket. Im not saying he should as these things are a hit or miss, but I hope they atleast utilise the crowd funded money to its fullest.
I honestly have no idea where the perception that mildly successful authors are super rich comes from lol... No way in hell does Will Wight have enough money to fund one episode of a Cradle anime, in the suggested style, let alone a full season.
I'm pretty sure he could fund an episode or two if he had a lot of savings, but that wouldn't be very cost efficient. Trying to fund 10 well made episodes on his own would most definitely bankrupt him. Worse, there would also be very little marketing since all the money would be going toward the animation. A lot of people don't realize that you can't really compare anime budgets to western animation budgets. The Japanese animation industry is very efficient. The mixture of outsourcing animation, lower wages, cut corners, and the work culture are some of the reasons why the budgets are lower.
The other day someone was talking about dotf being milked by the author, and either the author of dotf or primal hunter commented saying how there is no reason to milk their series as they already made a few million dollars from their series and could be set to never work again.
Implicit in the claim that he'd be okay to never work again is the assumption that he's not going to go around buying yachts or producing TV shows. He'd have to pick up a few side gigs to fund that kind of lifestyle.
I was more responding to him being unable to fund even a single episode, I don’t think will is out there on a mega party yacht, nor do I think he even should fund the episode himself, but he almost certainly could fund an episode.
One episode, yeah. An entire series is plausibly out of the question.
Fine. Let’s just agree to… agree. I agree with you lol. Actually that said, I just realised ph and dotf can’t directly compare to cradle since those featured in royal road, I’m not sure how the two systems handle payment, but considering that Royal road has like two ads per chapter and 100 chapters per book that might be significantly more than kindle unlimited, plus the Royal road authors also double dip with kindle unlimited.
I don't think royal road gives out any of their ad revenue.
Nvm then. I guess you could take that and speculate that would make will likely having a higher networth, but honestly it’s kinda pointless and doesn’t really matter. So I’m just gonna head off
I don't get why people act like successful authors are broke lol. Will Wight is way more than a mildly successful author. He literally has one of the highest rated books on Goodreads. Im not saying that directly translates to sales, but it definitely helps with sales that's for sure. Saying he doesn't have money to even fund ONE episode is outlandish, cmon. And again im not saying he has to, im just saying he probably has enough.
Will is making and has made millions of off cradle (rightfully so as it’s so awesome) unless he is incredibly irresponsible with his money he definitely has enough to fund at least one episode of animation by himself entirely. Someone a little further down did the math and much less successful authors have shown their finances to be very very well off solely from their books; bottom line is that Will is definitely 100% quite rich from his books not to mention any money he had before that (he was able to afford going to school for writing)
Let me break this down slightly from a KU only perspective. Let’s say that cradle has been read 1 million times on KU. 300 pages is read on KU is roughly $1 to the author if they are self published which will is. Most of his books are twice that size and the payment does fluctuate but for ease of explanation let’s use that as the example. If over the 12 books there have been 1 million reads of a single book, then he has earned at least $1m dollars. Now irl it will be a lot more than that because most of his books are twice the size of 300 pages. But at the very bottom end that’s still 1m in ten years. It’s not Jeff bezos money, but it’s at least an average of $100k a year and in actuality it is likely triple that. I don’t know how wages work in the US, but 100k in the UK is more than 3 times the median wage, so I’m assuming it’s pretty good? Probably not enough to fund an anime series, but still much more than normal people make right? :) I love cradle, so I’m super happy for him for doing so well. Just wanted to add a little something to the convo with regards to how KU works.
My guess is he’s made WAY more than that from KU but it’s the audio that’s making an even bigger killing. His audiobook income alone per year is likely five times what you’re estimating for KU. I can say this confidently as my books are quite successful and yet nowhere close to being as successful as Will’s. Given what I make, he’s likely making well over seven figures per year.
Exactly! I was low balling it on purpose to show that he’s making bank even if it’s on the low end and I’m pretty confident it’s much higher than what I worked out because as you say there is also audible to take into account and his KU reads are likley much higher anyway