Creating an indie animation studio

After graduating from college when the industry was facing both the actors’ and writers’ strike, I found myself missing producing fairly quickly. I reached out to some of my friends in college to see if they had a similar itch to go back to creating animation—and they did!

We formed A Couple Kids studio to begin making animation passion projects, and our first one was SnowBugs! There were a lot of learning curves we went through; this page helps reflect some new things I encountered as a producer of an indie film for the first time.

For this production we utilized a new program, Palette, which handles both file storage and production tracking.

As producer, I was able to be a Beta tester for this program and provide feedback to the developers to ensure there were features that could both benefit me and artists.

Production Guide

Taking what I’ve learned from previous projects, and taking into account the fact that our resources and time are more limited, I created this production guide to help establish how the pipeline for snowbugs would go and differ from school productions.

This guide also helped establish expectations and communication for this production.

Fundraising

Our goal was $2,400, and we exceeded it at $2,549! As the producer, I managed the crowdfunding campaign, with some responsibilities being the following.

• Scheduled engaging social media posts to boost awareness

• Communicated with donors on production updates

• Hosted an exclusive early screening for higher-tiered donors, which included a presentation informing them about our production process.

Check out our crowdfunding page here!

Film Festivals

SnowBugs has been accepted into over thirty festivals, along with being screened at the CTN Expo. View full festival list here.

As the producer, I managed our email inbox and was able to keep an up-to-date track of all things regarding our film festival statuses. I was even able to attend a few!

Creating a catalogue of videos for future social media posts and answering questions, and networking.

Check out my presentation regarding SnowBugs film festival journey here!

Animation Y’all Expo

We took a leap of faith and attended the inaugural Animation Y’all Expo! We approached this more with the goal to network and get experience over profit. It was such a rewarding and inspiring experience, which helped us let a large group of people know of SnowBugs, which had been in post-production at the time.

• Managed a booth in the artist alley

• Networked with students and professionals—and especially encouraging those to pursue a passion project!

• Scheduled and trained crew members to run the booth

Challenges

There was a lot of adjusting once I left school to continue animation. With a smaller amount of resources and limited availability of artists’ time, I am proud of the high-quality short film we were able to create.

• Establishing new systems and deadlines for a remote, indie passion project

• Managed crowdfunding campaign and projected a goal with a cushion for rendering the budget