My wife and I recently saw a showing of the 2008 Oscar nominated animated short films. Good stuff, I especially enjoyed My Love (Moya Iyubov) and Peter & the Wolf.
After the show, my wife was asking me, “How do these films make money?” My guess is that they don’t.
But I thought I would re-phrase the question and put it to the SDMB film community - what is the financing for these animated shorts? Do they make any money? Or is it all done ‘for the art’?
Short films often run the (ever-widening) festival circuit, where they may get a small cut of the b.o. proceeds from a show that includes that particular work. Festival exposure also helps films win awards, which makes good publicity when a distributor is looking for films to put in a compilation that they can release commercially. In both cases, the proceeds are probably nominal, at best, but can be enough to pay for production costs and salaries (since animated films still require crews).
Short films, especially animation, may also be funded through grants, fellowships, and government subsidies. For example, Madame Tutli-Putli, one of the other Oscar nominees you saw, was from the National Film Board of Canada.
And then, of course, there are short films like the ones from Pixar or Disney, which are developed in-house and serve as a quasi-farm system to nurture talent and storytelling abilities internally, often on the path to feature film animated production.
Of course, though, it should go without saying that given the sheer enormity of short films that are produced, most of them are created without any assurance of a guaranteed audience, revenue stream, or distribution channel. They are typically labors of love, first and foremost, and commonly involve an enormous amount of personal and financial sacrifice, especially for those artists yet to establish themselves.
Thanks, ArchiveGuy, I was hoping you might come along and shed light.
Oh, I don’t find them that horrible.