Pixar Animation Studios is definitely onto something. Toy Story? $191 million in the U.S. A Bug’s Life? $163 million. Toy Story 2? $246 million. Monsters Inc.? $256 million. Finding Nemo? $305 million in the U.S. and counting. That’s five movies with a combined gross of more than $1.1 billion in the U.S., alone.
Factor in worldwide box office sales – animated movies translate really well into foreign languages – and video sales, and you’re probably looking at a gross two to three times as huge.
Factor in all the video games, board games, plush toys, and more and you can see why Pixar Animation (www.pixar.com) is sitting so comfortably.
How about DreamWorks SKG (www.dreamworks.com)? Shrek made more than $260 million in the American box office and Shrek2, due out in summer of 2004, should smash that mark. Antz was less popular, but still broke the $100 million mark.
Another 3D animated successes is Ice Age by 20 th Century Fox, with $110 million at the box office (www.foxmovies.com).
On top of the list of animated money earners you can lump a wide range of mainstream movies where the main characters were at least partially animated, like Stuart Little, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Star Wars I and II, Terminator 3 – the list goes on and on.
For all of the billions of dollars these movies have made, some of my favourite computer animated features are still crude and low-budget.
Take South Park for example (www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/southpark// or www.southparkstudios.com).
The short film that got it all stared, The Spirit of Christmas, was five minutes long and featured a battle between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. It is rough animation, featuring characters that were cut out of construction paper, and animated using stop-motion photography. You can check it out at www.killfile.com/soxmas/.
When creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone created South Park, they were offered all of the cartoon expertise in the world, yet they still insisted on using their own "crappy" brand of animation. Seven successful seasons and an Academy Award nomination later, the formula still works.
Although the South Park scenes aren’t made out of school supplies anymore, thanks to the miracle of scanning a lot of the South Park surfaces still appear to be made of construction paper.
The original characters were put together in Corel Draw (www.corel.com), and then animated using Alias Wavefront and Alias PowerAnimator 8.5 (www.alias.com) – a 3D animation program for a glaringly 2D show. The irony is that it takes an incredibly sophisticated piece of software to keep the show looking so cheap.
Another program that gets some play in South Park is Adobe Photoshop (www.adobe.com), which is used mainly for Mr. Garrison’s classroom. The chalkboard is all Photoshop, as are the cheap looking posters hanging around the room.
Providing you have the right software, a little creativity, and low standards, all the tools are out there to make a cheap looking cartoon of your own.
Another low budget gem you might want to check out is the new Odd Job Jack (www.oddjobjack), another Comedy Network special. There are only six episodes in the can, but I predict this show has a bright future, even if the animation is substandard.
Produced by Smiley Guy Studios of Toronto, these shows are produced entirely using Web-based software by Macromedia (www.macromedia.com), including Shockwave and Flash.
Because the cartoons are so simple, the creators of Odd Job Jack have created Flash games to go with every episode – sponsored by Molson Canadian with more than $25,000 in prizes.
Shows like South Park and Odd Job Jack prove that as long as the writing and concept is good, you don’t have to be a Pixar to entertain.
Running out of Web addresses?
It seems unbelievable, I know, but the world is down to fewer than a billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. That means about 3.3 billion of a possible 4.3 billion Web addresses have already been taken, and with the Internet just starting to bloom in populated countries like China and India, experts believe the pool of addresses could run dry for many nations.
IP addresses are like phone numbers. Only a limited number of combinations are available in one area code before you have to start adding more numbers. More than a decade ago, when the IP system was created, different countries were assigned a finite amount of these available addresses. The majority went to the U.S. and North America, which now holds about 70 per cent of all addresses. The remaining 30 per cent were distributed around the world, and now countries like India, which was allotted just two million IP addresses, face a shortage in the next three years.
The obvious solution is to add a new set of numbers with more combinations that is compatible with the current set, but it would require some reverse programming – kind of like adding a new area code to an existing phone number. It wouldn’t cost much, but North American companies have so far been reluctant to act unless they absolutely have to.
It seems that they are playing the waiting game. While Asian countries squirm, North American companies are going to wait for the software to catch up before they do anything. For example, the new versions of Apple OSX and Windows XP are compatible with the new address system, but various server and database programs still use the old IP system. Some experts are predicting five to seven years for the changeover – two to four years too late for India, South Korea, and other countries. For more information, read the article at www.cnet.com.
