Blog 1 A.Cadieux


The 2D independent animation Cairns of Apeiron is budgeted at 11,000 dollars. This includes a 3,000 dollar budget line for computers and software since so much of the film is created in just a handful of programs. The other budget items are listed below:

Budget
Item	Expense	Details
Computer and Software	$3,000	64bit system, Adobe CS6, RAM, GPU, Monitor, 256G System SSD, 8T HDDs, Misc./Plug-Ins
Web design and programming	$2,000	Website, Hosting, SEO/Best Practice/Indexing
Sound	$3,000	VO, Foley, Music
SEO/Advertising	3,000	Google Dollars, Ad-Words, YouTube, Negative Word and Negative Placement Research, Reddit, Paid Discovery, Bing, Yahoo

The animation and website will be funded entirely out of pocket. The computer and software have already been purchased and the remaining costs are accounted for.

After the central web pages are in place we will launch tutorials exclusively on YouTube. These tutorials will be the only content provided in exchange for advertising and will be our most important attraction aside from the animation itself. If we recoup any money it will be through YouTube Partners. This is contingent upon substantial viewership but making a return is not crucial to the existence of the project. The great thing is that a quick search of YouTube for keywords “Flash tutorials” reveals that some very low-tech easy Flash concepts are getting clicks in the millions. If we can make a comprehensive full character animation tutorial series we could get a fair amount of click-throughs and hopefully a few thousand subs. Since we own the channel we can link back to the central website where the animation is hosted.

As of now, no audience exists for the project and we will not be launching any campaigns before the first two episodes are completely finished. The only exception is the possibility of the Flash tutorials being available a little earlier than the launch of the site. The reason for this is to avoid spending too much time between an announcement and the actual launch of a social media campaign promise. Small studios who must dedicate resources and money to simply finishing a product may not have the proper resources to run an engaging social media campaign unless they have content that garners attention or they can demonstrate huge overhead investment. Our only bargaining power is our content or the promise of future content. Without content or a huge overhead investment it is nearly impossible to get people hyped about a project and you stand a far greater risk of annoying and alienating early and easy prospective gets (which are usually your friends and family to start). This overhead could be demonstrated in artist assets rendered or a beautiful studio or through a piece of spec content but at the end of the day winning campaigns are showing immense time investment and the promise of content is evident in a number of things. A great example is the independent studio Double Fine, who despite overwhelming confidence and over 87 thousand backers still fell 8.34% short of its 400,000 thousand dollar goal onKickstarter. But when you look at their Kickstarter you can see the work they’ve done and the potential for them to move forward.

For Cairns of Apeiron I will control all of the Internet and marketing because so much of it is dependent on my ability to produce the most essential parts, mainly the tutorials and webisodes. Updates and blasts will be controlled through the WordPress engine. The website programmer will semantically link any relevant social media channels to update with single WordPress updates. Marketing blasts will be as simple as a video upload and an accompanying blog post with links to the webisode and tutorial channel. The central posts will trickle to whatever subs or channels any given audience member has enrolled in.   

A centralized website with tutorials, in conjunction with the paid advertising, should act as a fishing net for anyone intrigued by indie animation or industry standard, free Flash tutorials. Most of the budget for social media will be soaked up by SEO and targeted advertising during a 90 day marketing campaign boasting the tutorials and webisodes. Although we will simply have to launch to get some relevant research we will likely begin with Google’s AdWords at a daily budget of $10 with a maximum Cost-Per-Click bid of $0.25. If we actually pay $0.25 then that’s 40 clicks per day. If we get a lower average, say 0.20, then it is 50 clicks per day. We will target adds with California and New York listed as Negative Placements to start for the tutorial videos only. After we see what’s happening with Orlando I may place them as Negative Placement. We will also add some obvious words to the Negative list. Words like flash and camera for example would be omitted. As for alternative networks we will consider Bing and Yahoo. Facebook will probably not be used except maybe using a Wildfire contest platform if we have enough viewership for people to be excited about a contest. Reddit looks attractive because of its use of DuckDuckGo and we will probably advertise In-Search and In-Display ads on YouTube.

The Internet today puts all the bargaining power in the users hands which can make the Internet seem like a gift economy. It can be counter-intuitive to give something away but it’s a big part of getting clicks. On the Internet when a person clicks through and tolerates an ad or even bad content they have given a piece of a finite resource, their time. I think many projects launch campaigns prematurely when further development is necessary and I would just like to be extra cautious and not talk about my project online until I have something to show.