this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
59 points (96.8% liked)
Television
1405 readers
299 users here now
Welcome to Television
This community is for discussion of anything related to television or streaming.
Other Communities
- !casualconversation@piefed.social
- !movies@piefed.social
- !animation@piefed.social
- !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Television Communities
A community for discussion of anything related to Television via broadcast or streaming.
Rules:
- Be respectful and courteous to all members.
- Avoid offensive or discriminatory remarks.
- Avoid spamming or promoting unrelated products/services.
- Avoid personal attacks or engaging in heated arguments.
- Do not engage in any form of illegal activity or promote illegal content.
- Please mask any and all spoilers with spoiler tags.
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
i.e. no desire to pay artists what the work is worth
This might actually be a materials issue, outside of very few working artists still being trained on it. Animation cels aren’t used in the industry anymore, so it’s become a high priced specialty art item. $1/frame when animation is usually done with 8-12 frames per second adds up fast. That number is a guesstimate based on the bulk supplies I can find online, but even half that price would still be huge just for materials.
That adds up to $1200 per episode
$14,400 per episode just for the celluloid sheets; not to draw anything on them, not to have extra to replace bad/damaged/revisions, not to scan/photograph them onto film or digital; not to clean them up, not to store them, categorize and organize them, and not considering that they’re usually drawn and photographed in layers of more than one.
Or you can license Toon Boom Harmony Premium for like $133/month per seat and it renders full quality straight to a file you can drop into your NLE.
My husband has also reminded me that rarely was any given frame of animation a single cel; characters, eyes, mouths, anything moving often got its own cel to make it easier to make changes to.
Math gets hard here because it really just depends on what’s going on for how many cels will be used at once, but let’s lowball it and multiply that figure by a 2.5 average for $36k/episode.
Math is hard and Blender is free
That would be if there was 1 frame per second. You need to multiply it by 8-12 per episode.
Also assuming perfect 1:1 cel production:finished product, which is highly optimistic.
I’m not saying the cel animated seasons or cel animation in general isn’t beautiful or worth doing, but as long as they’re making a commercial product at a big studio they’re going to be dealing with management having a stick up their ass about the fact that nobody else does this and it easily costs the same as a skilled storyboard team or several animators to pay just for cels.