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Animation video sharing website Aniboom has announced they’re launching a “virtual animation studio.” They’re unclear about how their business model works, but as I understand it, Aniboom intends to create productions for corporate clients by cherry-picking crew members from the large pool of animators who have uploaded videos to their site. On one of their pages, they advertise to potential clients that the 9,500 artists who have uploaded videos are ready to create animation of high-quality in a fast and cost efficient manner.

How can they do high-quality, fast AND cheap? A clue can be found in this section where they describe how animators who participate in their virtual productions will be compensated with “a variety of potential monetary benefits that include revenue share, employment offers and payment for series development with Aniboom.” Note that their ideas of compensation do not include any of those pesky line items that other studios have to contend with like salaries, health insurance, vacation time, retirement benefits, maternity leave, and learning and development opportunities.

Aniboom has been indoctrinating young artists for years through a savvy and systematic use of contests that encourages users to create work for corporations on spec and without any expectation of pay. We’ve warned readers about these contests on mutiple occasions. Now they appear to be pushing the exploitation of young artists to an entirely new (and more profitable) level, and for a company with millions of dollars in venture capital backing, that’s exactly what we’ve always expected them to do.

UPDATE: Aniboom rep Shira Abel says that their website posted unclear info and that artists will paid in cash via PayPal or Payoneer. They are in the process of updating their site. Developing…

(Thanks, Chris Sokalofsky)

These are some of the illustrations from the storyboard that illustrator/animator Mark Deutsch and I have been working on the last few days for the Aniboom Radiohead contest.

Radiohead is one of our all-time favorite bands (we’ve liked them since their Pablo Honey days when we were still in grade school hehe) so we really wanted be part of this. We chose the song Nude from their latest album In Rainbows. What we submitted isn’t the final artwork and animation yet, only the draft storyboard. It’s a mix of pencil sketches, acrylic drawings and washes and digital art and was animated using Adobe Flash and Premiere. In the final animation, the artwork will be better :-) and it will be fully animated and the descriptions, of course, will be removed.

The submission is a bit late but, as they say, better late than never and we had a lot of fun making it. You can view the video at the Aniboom website.

In the notebook I left on the plane from China was also my introduction to something for Mark Evanier. So I am going to spend this afternoon recreating it, which is reason enough for not blogging, and instead posting the kind of thing that Mark puts up on his blog.

This is a Youtube video of Raymond Crowe at work (http://www.raymondcrowe.com/). I've seen him do it live and it's astonishing. He's really funny and amazingly skilled comedian and magician and mime and, er, maker of hand shadow-bunnies...