Cost Per Frame

It's Sunday morning so let's talk movie budgets. I was catching up over at Variety and found this write-up on big budget movies by Diane Garrett. Costs are always spiraling but Diane brings us up to date on current costs:

"...there was much handwringing when "Titanic" doubled its budget to hit the $200 million mark. But it was clear that the old $100 million ceiling was shattered, as the mark quickly crept to $150 million and then $200 million.

This summer, despite studio chieftains' vows over the past year to cut costs, the threshold could well be $300 million."

Sure. These productions cost a lot of money. But, not the way they used to -- the money isn't spent the same way. In the good old days you paid location costs -- transportation, catering, etc., -- and production costs that mainly consisted of salaries/fees and the cost of film (buying and processing it, then the production of dailies, then post production). Sure. We all knew that.

Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) has changed all this. Most summer blockbusters are effects-driven and the CGI costs of producing effects sequences are calculated on a 'per second', or 'per frame' rate. Most movies are still projected at 24 frames-per-second, so it follows that, if you're using a per-frame unit of cost, you multiply by 24 -- then you have the per-second rate.

Garret quotes Michael Bay as saying on his blog that the CGI in 'Transformers' is some of the most difficult (read costly) ever done, requiring up to 38 hours per frame. Sure. Why not? You have to draw all those pictures, photograph the models, make them move around and do stuff, then insert the imagery into the footage (then add sound, etc). Sure. Costs a lot.

How much? How much does it cost to produce CGI sequences. Okay, I'll cut to the chase -- it costs millions -- but why?

ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) is the effects house behind 'Transformers'. So, purely for the sake of Sunday morning fun, let's say ILM has 38 people working a sequence (like the one the still above is taken from), and they each cost $1000 per day (what with their salary, the fancy computers they use, administrative overhead, the best snacks money can buy, et al). It would take this crew one hour to produce a frame. So, that's 24 hours to produce one second of final product. If the workday is 8 hours that means it would take 3 working days to produce one second of sequence. So -- 38 people x $1000/day = $38,000/day. Multiply that by the number of days it takes to produce one second of imagery and you get $114,000/second.

Sure. It costs money to make a Transformer chase a car down a freeway. Sure it does. If the chase lasts ten seconds our sequence would cost $1.1 million. One minute of CGI fun -- $6.6 million. Ten minutes -- $60 million +/-. And, that's just for raw footage -- the studio would then have to pay for sound, editing, and more high-end snacks. Sure they would.

And that's why CGI-driven movies cost so much. Right now, the (publicly admitted) budget for 'Transformers' is $150 million (of course, that depends on who you ask). No wonder it's called 'Runaway Costs'.

Okay, now I'm going to get another cup of tea and maybe make some toast. Figuring on an expenditure of about 1.25 cents per second and adding the price of materials the total projected cost for this production should be fifty cents, or maybe a dollar, or something like that. Sure it will.