Magic Dumpling Entertainment’s Tofu Boy is a model of a modern international co-production. To accompany our feature on funding independent animations in issue 155, we asked CEO Kevin Geiger how the studio found investors willing to put up the movie’s estimated $5 million budget. Read his top tips and the extended interview here…

As part of Indie Film Week we bring you this interview from Magic Dumpling Entertainment’s CEO Kevin Geiger who reveals how he poured in funds from his own pocket to get Tofu Boy started, before he found $5m worth of investment for the feature!

Tofu Boy is a modern Chinese spin on Pinocchio. It is planned as a $5m animated feature, plus accompanying TV series, social media and gaming apps. Find out how it all happened…

• You can buy an issue of 3D World featuring the interview and more information on how to fund your very own CG movie now!

Kevin Geiger interview

3D World: How do you find backers for a movie like Tofu Boy?
Kevin Geiger: We came out of the gate by introducing ourselves at [Italian animation festival] Cartoons on the Bay, and the rest of 2010 was occupied by similar opportunities.

We were also accepted into the project pitch sessions for the Shanghai International Film Festival, which was our big ‘coming out’ for potential investors in China and surrounding Asian territories.

I also participated in [US trade show] the American Film Market, and because I’m lucky enough to have executive-level contacts at most major studios, set up meetings with potential US distributors.

To fund Tofu Boy and its four other development projects, Magic Dumpling has entered negotiations with investors and distributors in the US, China and other Asian territories

3DW: What are those early discussions like?
KG: Financing is like dating: it’s a courtship process, and you have to find out who’s serious and who’s fishing around. We had to wade through a lot of people who came disguised as investors but were actually just casing the project, particularly in China.

Now we’re at the point where if everybody’s in, we can complete the financing : the next hurdle is getting all those puzzle pieces together. For example, US investors typically want to see a completion bond in place, but many Chinese investors are unfamiliar with the concept and question why you’re going to put up 2-4 per cent of your budget for insurance on the completion of the film.

• Read 10 Golden Rules of Animation Funding

3DW: What’s more important: the strength of your pitch, or that of your business plan?
KG: You can be great in the room, but at the end of the day, the business decisions are really what rule. The vast majority of films lose money, and there’s no guarantee of profit from quality. I’m not saying that quality is unimportant – it’s extremely important – but just because a film is good, there’s no guarantee it will do well.

Investors typically look for a slate of projects: just like a good mutual fund, they want a collection of properties that in the aggregate will give them a good return on their investment. That means you need a compelling business plan not only for your property but for your company. The research you put into leveraging ancillary revenue streams is very important to potential investors.

3DW: Once an investor is interested, how do you close the deal?
KG: You need to find their magic button, their tipping point. Of course, profit is paramount, but what else are you offering?

For example, a studio might be interested in a project to build their reputation in the industry. And there are some investors who are looking to have a little fun. If your budget is pocket change to them, relatively speaking, they often don’t mind investing in exchange for an executive producer credit and the chance to come by the studio and check out the work.

3DW: In order to get to that point, you need to be able to show investors the script and the concept art. How do you fund that development work?
KG: It’s a combination of angel investment, some from my own pocket, and work for hire. We do story work and design work for other companies where it’s just cash on the barrrel; and consulting worth, both for Chinese studios looking to become more international, and American companies who want to get involved in China but don’t know where to start.

One advantage of being in China is that we can work cheaper than almost anywhere in the world. Also, our executive salaries our deferred, so neither I nor my co-founders currently take anything other than the bare minimum we need to make rent. That focuses our start-up capital on our artistic talent and affords us the luxury of time to develop the project properly.

3DW: You mentioned ancillary revenue streams. Can you elaborate on that?
KG: Right from the start, there should be a co-ordinated effort to link the theatrical release of the film to other media.

In the case of Tofu Boy, we have a comprehensive ‘transmedia bible’ that shows how the storyline develops across three feature films, two seasons of a TV series and a variety of social media and gaming apps. As a producer, this exponentially compounds the planning you have to do, but it gives you a bigger sandbox to play in.

Merchandising is unfortunately a necessary evil: "It may sound like heresy, but it’s a reality. Given the huge cost of production, you’re lucky to break even from the theatrical or DVD release alone," admits CEO Kevin Geiger

3DW: Is advertising revenue a consideration for Tofu Boy?
KG: Yes, we’re talking to major internet portals in mainland China. But you have to be careful, because you don’t want to be crass and clutter up the [online presence] with a lot of ads that reduces the suspension of disbelief which is essential for any project. And in my mind, outright product placement has no place within animated content . It’s very easy for an animation project to date itself by including advertising.

3DW: What about merchandising? Is it a necessary evil?
KG: Yes. Given the huge cost of production, you’re lucky to break even from the theatrical or DVD release alone, so in essence, the feature is advertising for the toys. That may sound like heresy, but it’s a reality. I can picture readers looking at that line and wanting to puke, but it’s something you want to address rather than avoid. You see many people whose ‘merchandising plan’ is a PowerPoint slide that shows their character slapped onto T-shirts and coffee mugs, and that’s just mindless.

3DW: How important is it to find global distribution?
KG: As an indie producer, you need to think internationally. Europeans have been ahead of the curve on this due to geography, and Americans now see that in order to maximise profits, international distribution should no longer be treated as an extra, but as an essential. You need to consider not only the size of each territory, but how it has responded to similar projects in the past. For example, although India has 17-18 per cent of the world population, it represents about 1 per cent of our projected revenues from Tofu Boy, because India has traditionally not embraced Chinese-themed content.

3DW: Are there any ‘don’ts’ when it comes to negotiating funding?
KG: I think the only ‘don’t’ is: ‘Don’t rule anything out’. It’s very natural to be protective of your creation, but it’s a mistake to hold on too tightly. Sharing control can actually be to your benefit, because the advice an experienced distributor has to offer can be quite valuable.

The bottom line is that copyright is something you should actually want to cash in at some point : just to the right person, and for the right terms. We all hear horror stories about how the creators of Superman gave up the rights for $500, and that’s not what I’m advocating., The conversion of copyright to cash is what enables you to stay alive to do the next project. It’s wise to stay involved in terms of some percentage of profit share, but you have to be careful that participation isn’t structured in such a way that you’ll never see it.

Actually, there is another ‘don’t’: ‘Don’t do your own legal’. Make sure that you as a producer can handle the main talking points of the deal, but when it comes to the actual contract, get aqualified lawyer, preferably one who understands international IP law, to set eyes on the paper.

Tofu Boy is currently in the final stages of development and is entering into pre-production. The movie is planned for a cinematic release in Asia and a DVD release in the West.

You can read the full article, including a guide to using crowd funding sites like Kickstarter and Indie Go Go to fund lower-budget shorts, in issue 155 of 3D World.

Find out how you can get finiancial support for your very own CG movie, and meet the artists who have won funding and brought their own visions to a global audience

Killer tips for indie producers distilled from Kevin’s experiences in the US and China.

01 | Build brand awareness
If you aren’t based on an existing book or game, consider giving away teaser content for free.

02 | Don’t hide your development work
The best insurance against having your work stolen is to let the world know it’s yours from the start.

03 | Learn from your pitches
If something falls flat when you pitch it to investors, feed this back to the creative team.

04 | Get to know your potential investors
Are they serious about the project, or just fishing? What do they stand to gain by investing?

05 | Don’t just think in terms of animation
Investors usually invest in other industries too – many of which offer higher, faster rates of return.

06 | Partner with other studios
It enables you to scale up more quickly. Illumination Entertainment did this for Despicable Me.

07 | Think ‘transmedia’
Don’t think about TV or web spin-offs once the film becomes successful: plan these from the start.

08 | Take control of merchandising
It’s better to plan your tie-in products creatively than to be forced into incompatible directions.

09 | Negotiate internationally
Overseas distribution and co-productions are essentials, not optional extras.

10 | Get a good lawyer
Know enough about IP law to negotiate major deal points – then hand the contract over to the professionals.

Find out how special FX legend Aaron Sims propelled himself from creature designer to Hollywood director with the help of his sci-fi short

Aaron Sims is one of the most innovative and versatile concept artists working in films today. To industry insiders, he is revered for his multi-faceted approach to creature development and design. To audiences, he is the genius behind many of today’s most memorable movie monsters.

With the same adventurous spirit that fuelled his willingness to embrace digital technology, Sims founded The Aaron Sims Company to work on other blockbusters such as The Golden Compass, I Am Legend, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Incredible Hulk, Clash of the Titans, Sucker Punch and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

• Read our in-depth VFX focus on Clash of the Titans

Now, the rights for Aaron Sim’s latest sci-fi short, Archetype, have been picked up by top Hollywood producer John Davis.

We caught up with Aaron to find out more about Archetype’s production and his advice for other 3D artists…

“RL7 is an eight-foot tall combat robot that goes on the run after malfunctioning with vivid memories of once being human,” says Sims. “As its creators and the military close in, RL7 battles its way to uncovering the shocking truth behind its mysterious visions and past.”

“I have always been intrigued with the idea of how robots would evolve once they become self-aware, or exhibited human traits,” he reveals. “There are many films that have entertained this idea and I was influenced by AI, I-Robot, and Blade Runner.”

Aside from writing the short, Sims wore many hats throughout the production: “I produced and directed it, created some of the art for it, supervised the visual effects…”

For animation he used Maya, rendered with V-Ray, and composited using Nuke.

• Read a review of the software by clicking on the specific links above

Rather amazingly, out of the 63 shots, only nine of them didn’t have any visual effects. “From conception to the finished short, it took about a year,” Sims says. “It took a bit more time than usual because most all of the work was volunteered, but it was definitely a labour of love.”

“V-Ray was amazing for rendering the robots’ metal finish and creating a very real-life-like look. It’s also very fast.

“The project all came together in the end with compositing and Nuke was an amazing software and tool to get us through all the shots. Nuke is very customisable and we were able to create our own tools easily,” Sims continues.

The emotion and humanity in RL7 was a difficult part of the process: “This was the one thing we really needed to capture, creating a robot that was something the audience actually cares about,” says Sims. “Part of this was the actor, but it really came to life with the animation. This was a lot of work achieved by the lead animator Cameron Ward.”

Aaron's sci-fi short film, Archetype, has been picked up by producer John Davis: A production schedule hasn’t been created yet, but Sims thinks they might film it before the end of the year

When it came to the production, Sims found that working in CG was actually the easy part: “The greatest learning curve was working with the actors. Creating the look of the film or the world was the easy part, working and understanding the actor language was something I felt was the most useful thing I learned.”

“There were a total of 54 people who worked on Archetype. 32 people, including actors, worked on set and the other 22 people were all involved in the post-production.”

Whilst Archetype is an independent project without any studio involvement, Sims was fortunate to be able to draw on his contacts in the industry. “This short was all favours and friends; I wouldn’t have been able to make it without their help!”

Sims explains that it’s difficult to put a production figure on the short: “The exact amount is hard to say, but it was somewhere around twenty thousand. However, that only accounted for materials, camera rentals, random set costs, etc.”

Concept art for the feature film of Archetype: Sims was able to get the movie optioned without a full script so they’re currently in the writing phase

Sims found the transition going from creature designer to director quite difficult: “It’s a lot more work than just designing something, and directing a film; every decision made effects everyone’s ability to do their job efficiently and collectively to create something that tells the story.”

To market and distribute the short – “to get the word out”, Sims posted a teaser for the film in the Summer of 2010.

“I also decided to create a virtual campaign on my Facebook by posting stills and facts about the film every day for thirty days before the film was released in January. I used YouTube to host it and it just took off. Over 100K views within the first night!”

View Archetype

Archetype’s going to Hollywood

One of Hollywood’s most prolific producers, John Davis picked up the rights to Archetype in January 2012. We asked Sims to explain how this came about and what it means to him.

“It’s really a great feeling to know that all the hard work in creating a short that means so much to me was so well received by John Davis,” says Sims. “John has produced so many amazing films and I’m excited that I’ll be making a feature film with him, and that the film is one I came up with.”

For the feature film, Sims will be directing and overseeing the writing of the screenplay

“I was able to get the movie optioned without a full script so we’re currently in the writing phase,” Sims says. “A production schedule hasn’t been created yet, but I think we’d film it before the end of the year.”

We simply can’t wait to see it!

Aaron Sims interview

3D World: How did you break into the industry?
Sims: I started in 1985 working as a makeup effects artist, where I was hired to design creatures for a film called ‘From Beyond’, then shortly after Evil Dead II, and many more as I’ve been in effects and design ever since.

3DW: What first inspired you to become a creature designer? At what point in your life did you make the decision that that’s what you were going to do?
Sims: Alien was the first film and creature that truly inspired me as a child, as well as Star Wars. When these films came out that’s when I realized I wanted to design and create films one day.

3DW: When designing creatures and characters, where do you draw your inspiration from? How do you avoid cliches?
Sims: It’s always a challenge to create something new and original. My inspiration always comes from the material and the project itself.

3DW: What is the most enjoyable project you have worked on so far in your career and why?
Sims: I’d have to say that Men in Black was my favorite film to work on. I’m such a Sci-Fi fan. This was the first real film after many years of working on horror films.

3DW: What’s your favourite character design?
Sims: Again, I would have to say the comical worm guys in Men in Black. I designed, sculpted, built and saw them come to life.

3DW: What advice would you give to aspiring creature/character designers looking to break into the industry?
Sims: My advice to anyone wanting to become a designer in the film industry is to just work hard in making your designs unique, create your own voice, also create a blog, or website to show your work. Post some of your work on popular concept sites if you can, and you will get noticed.

3DW: What’s next for you?
Sims: Making my own films. I’m hoping Archetype is just the beginning.

Visit The Aaron Sims Company

Discover how Shane Acker’s student-created short was made into a full-length feature film backed by the mighty Tim Burton

We kick off 3D World’s Indie Film Week with this inspiring rags-to-riches story.

In 2005 a student at UCLA by the name of Shane Acker released an 11-minute CG animated short called 9 (that had been produced in his spare time over four and a half years). Four years later it was developed into a Tim Burton-backed feature length film…

• We’ll be bringing you more articles on indie filmmakers all week along with advice on fund raising, so remember to check back!

KICKSTART YOUR OWN CG FILM

If you’d like to know how you could get financial support for your own dream movie, you can buy issue 155 of 3D World where you’ll find:

• Tips for creating a successful fund drive
• How to secure major funding for big films
• How Hillary Yeo got his epic short, Godaizer, made

In 9, Shane Acker creates a gritty, textural world inhabited by creatures composed of scraps of fabric and broken machinery. Here the artistic 6 shows off his inky, pen-nib fingers...

THE MAKING OF SHANE ACKER’S 9

VITAL STATISTICS
Title: 9
Lead: studio Starz Animation
Budget: Undisclosed
Project duration: Four years
Team size: Around 150
Software used: Maya, Fusion, mental ray, custom tools

Is the Shane Acker short 9 the least likely candidate for a feature-length CG film yet? Starz Animation and the creatives behind the big-screen adaptation think not. Ed Ricketts finds out what it’s been like to work with legendary director Tim Burton

If the story of 9’s evolution from a student-created short to a full-length feature film was itself the plot of a film, it would probably be canned for being too unrealistic.

Things just don’t happen this way; not even the most starry-eyed animation student would ever dream that his work would one day become a film produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, and featuring the voices of Elijah Wood and John C. Reilly…

Except, in the case of Shane Acker, it really did happen.

• Read The Director’s Cut: Shane Acker’s account of 9′s journey on page 2

Acker’s original animation thesis short, 9, was certainly visually arresting. Set in a strange post-apocalyptic world modelled after post World War I Europe, it features odd, tiny characters made of hessian, surviving as best as they can by scavenging parts from the ruined environment.

There’s no dialogue and no obvious back story, and yet it leaves the attentive viewer with an overwhelming desire to find out more about this odd universe.

9 takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are gone, and only nine mechanical ragdolls, named 1 through 9, remain. The clever use of found objects in the environment is vital for their survival as they struggle to survive against killer robots

TIM BURTON’S BLESSING

Five years on, the full-length feature film 9, directed by Acker himself with Burton’s blessing, is set to expand on that original vision.

While Burton might grab most of the movie poster acreage, it’s Acker, his team of creatives and the crew at Starz Animation in Toronto who are largely responsible for this labour of love.

“I was in a unique position on the film in that I actually met Shane at UCLA and worked on the short with him,” says animation director Joe Ksander. “So he asked me to come and join him on the feature. The story process was all about how to flesh out the short. There’s kind of a back story there, and that’s hinted at in the short version.

“We knew that 9 was a young character who was the closest to perfect that the world would have – although not quite, which is why he’s 9, not 10. The appearance and roles of 1 to 8 changed right up to the final script as part of the story process.”

The feature retains the moody atmosphere of the short – a design element that initially posed some problems with muddy shadows and a general lack of clarity

OUT WITH THE OLD

While the short provided a blueprint for the visual style and a basis for the extended story, Ksander and Acker decided fairly early on not to use any of the actual assets they had created for it.

“One of the only things that remained from the short is the skull of the cat-beast,” explains Ksander. “Shane did that model in a really high resolution, so we could still use it.”

There were several practical reasons for starting over, not least being that both artists’ aesthetics have changed in the last four years, and that from a purely technical standpoint, some of the assets are now fairly primitive by comparison.

“There were a lot of really talented artists on this project, all with their own ideas, so we didn’t think that technically we should stick to what we had before,” Ksander says.

“Aesthetically, we wanted to make it feel like the sort of film you could make in your garage, but we were also making the character design a lot more balanced and appealing.”

• Read about the break from conventional methods on page 4

ADDING EMOTION

The main characters, now expanded to the full complement of nine from the original short, were a primary focus of the design phase. The short was dialogue-free, but for a full-length feature the characters inevitably had to engage in dialogue, and thus emote, which is no mean feat when their faces contain so few features.

At one stage, Ksander experimented by adding more facial features to improve the characters’ emotional range – even making 9 looking more like Elijah Wood, the voice actor – but the results looked incongruous.

With few facial features to work with, the 9 team invested time in making sure that expressions were clearly understood

“It just didn’t fit the world – these guys are simple characters. So we did as much facial acting as we could, but when these guys look at something, they actually turn their whole body, they emote with their whole body. So the acting is a little more pantomime than you might see elsewhere. The riggers at Starz Animation did a really good job for us.”

STRONG SILHOUETTES

Much of the acting relied on maintaining a strong silhouette, no matter what the character was currently doing. Their bodies are made of hessian, but a decision was made not to rely on render-intensive cloth simulation for each and every frame.

“Instead, the guys at Starz used [Michael Comet’s Maya plugin] Pose Space Deformer,” Ksander explains. “It’s kind of like a muscle system, but it’s a lot more designable – it’s not just based on anatomy.

“If a character lifts his arm, you get a nice clean S-curve from the wrist to the ankle. That meant that no matter what pose we put the characters in, we could get a nice shape and a clean silhouette.”

Initial designs focused on imbuing each character with a distinctive silhouette to make them easily recognisable, given their lack of identifying facial features

NINE CHARACTER TRAITS

Using PSD enabled the animators to imbue each character with its own personality – for example, 1 is older and made out of leather, while 7 is made of linen and is much more athletic.

• Meet the stitchpunk heroes on page 3

“We wanted to be able to control that and not worry about how linen looks when it moves, for example,” adds Ksander.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Another aspect of the original short that proved complicated in the transition to the big screen was the sheer amount of darkness it contained. “It was so dark that it would have been very easy to create imagery that was muddy and had no detail,” says Jeff Bell, visual effects supervisor.

“There were a lot of challenges in trying to keep detail in the darker areas. We didn’t want it to be totally black, so we were playing in the 0-25 per cent black range. That made some of the rushes interesting; our colour calibration had to be spot-on, and it was tricky all around.”

Unlike in the original short, the characters face far more than one foe – and a variety of other dangers

At some points, the team was tempted to throw in some ambient lighting simply to lift the overall levels, but this made the whole image too muddy. “Instead, we played a lot with values, depth of field, saturation and a number of different things,” says Bell.

“In terms of lighting we needed very specific bumpers and kickers in certain areas, so we would do an initial pass in terms of getting the location and set lighting right, without making it all look too CG. Then we would put the characters into that lighting and develop it from there.”

Lighting was developed in mental ray using frame-by-frame caching. While it largely relied on standard off-the-shelf software, Starz did develop its own caching managers and mechanisms to try to speed up the process, together with custom tools for asset and project management.

This was as much a budgetary consideration as a practical one. “For the most part, Starz tries to ensure that the third-party vendors provide as much value as they can, so the development that went into the pipeline was on top of those products rather than replacing them.

“We were creating efficiencies to allow the artist to concentrate on the image rather than on the more mundane aspects,” Bell explains.

Many of the original environment models were too detailed and couldn’t be used, so 2D paint fixes and texture projection were used to fill in gaps

THE FISRT ANIMATOR TO USE MAYA

The rest of Starz’s pipeline revolves around Maya, with Fusion at the back end. Maya happens to be a program with which Bell is very familiar, having worked on the original version at Alias Research.

Indeed, as he modestly points out, he was the first animator on the planet to ever use the program, and is also responsible for the design of the Qwerty-based keyboard commands. “Every artist has me to thank, or curse, for that,” he smiles.

In comparison to the original short, 9’s production budget was vastly expanded, but in commercial terms it wasn’t considered a costly feature – and this fitted well with the team’s vision for the project. “The mantra was that we weren’t going to try to do anything too expensive,” says Ksander. “Now that we had more time and money, we didn’t just want to throw everything at it. There’s no skin or human hair, for instance.”

One example is perhaps the film’s most complex scene in terms of visuals, in which a horde of mechanical spider-beasts chases the characters. Instead of opting for a full-blown crowd simulation such as Massive – costly both in time and money – Bell developed his own hybrid techniques.

“We came up with some clever techniques to simulate crowds,” he says. “It was a combination of the animation department creating appropriate cycles, and then a little bit of development work to make a simplistic crowd system. Again, that was a last-minute creative decision and it turned out really well, so we’re proud of that.”

Similarly, a lot of the original environment models developed in an earlier production phase in Europe turned out to be far too detailed and overly render-intensive. It simply wasn’t practical to use them in some shots, which meant that occasionally parts of the set or background were simply missing.

The film’s sets were largely modelled on the destroyed vistas of post-World War I Europe

“Fortunately, art director Kevin Adams was able to do a lot of paint-overs and 2D paint fixes for missing parts of the sets, and we were able to get a lot more visual detail that way,” says Ksander. “They used texture projection as well, so we could have depth and parallax and so on. Even the rain at the end –
a lot of that was done by hand. It was just enough to tell the story – we weren’t trying to do a Siggraph paper on water simulation, after all…”

‘Just enough to tell the story’ could well be a motto pinned to the wall of every animator’s cubicle. It may have taken him four years to do it, but Acker told his own unique story in less than 11 minutes of animation. Then five years later, that story came to life on the big screen.

Still from the Academy-Award winning short. Tim Burton says: "The short was among the most extraordinary 11 minutes of film I’ve ever seen. Shane’s conception was and is a stunningly detailed and hauntingly beautiful universe that resonates not only visually but emotionally”

Click Next to read Shane Acker’s account of his 10-year journey in ‘The director’s cut’

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