Status Updates 7 - Seismic Shift

Intro

This year has come with many nasty surprises. On one hand I’ve almost gotten sick or into an accident on an almost weekly basis since the year started. On the other hand, I’ve recently received bad news about my key production program, Toonboom. I’ve invested a lot of money and time into learning the program. It’s got a steep learning curve but it really is an amazing program, but the company has recently decided to make changes to it’s perpetual license system that would price me out of using it after next year. This is a big change and will have implications for my entire process.

The Standard

Toonboom is an industry standard animation program, powerful and very feature rich. It offers a lot and I am happy to pay for it to use its features. However the new pricing for the advanced features can only be expressed as insane.

The original pricing for a perpetual license (that you would own forever) was about $2000+. The perk that came along with that was the ability to update yearly for a smaller fee of about $350. This was a fairly standard pricing setup across software in the 2000s and I was perfectly fine with it. If you had stopped paying the smaller fee, you would not be eligible for the next upgrade.

Makes sense.

Now in order to do the same thing for the same version of the program (advanced), will cost you $1000 a year. Yes, that’s what they’re asking for. Effectively a $700 price increase for the same features. I’m still kind of in shock that they believe this to be a good idea. Maybe it is for them, but I struggle to understand who their audience is now and who will pay $1000.

But enough navel gazing. what I do know is that I have at least 1 more upgrade of the program for next year, and after that upgrade, I will be able to keep all of the versions of the program that I upgraded with. So I would own the instances of these programs, but if for some reason Apple or Microsoft change something fundamental in their computers, I am not sure if I would be able to use the program on those newer devices. Essentially, future compatibility will be compromised.

One Door Closes, Another One Opens

What does this all mean for my shorts? Honestly, it’s a very disruptive shift.

To start, currently, my production is very dominant in Toonboom. In fact, I was going to push the program even harder due to wanting to transition from adobe and after effects. That plan has been upended. I also had the intention of doing more creative hand animation in the program in addition to the puppets I’ve been using, but due to the prospect of compatibility issues (who knows if we’ll get proper support once this goes down), instead of leaning more into Toonboom I will have to find alternative means of production. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, and if done correctly, it could even be more liberating. It’s been my dream for a long time to produce these shorts fully on mobile hardware, and I now have an opportunity to explore what that might look like. This is something that will take a lot of time though.

A new challenger shows up

I’ll be honest. This news has been a massive bummer for me. I’ve invested so much time and money into their ecosystem for years, and the continued progress I experienced with the program is now in jeopardy. I can’t really express how many assets I have stored and backlogged into the libraries for the program. Fortunately, I do have most of these assets backed up in the form of illustrator files. Along with that, if there were a silver lining, it would be that this will dramatically reduce the costs of my production in the future. Sure, it’ll be at the expense of speed, most likely, but that money will make a difference in the long run. The other benefit is that, as stated previously I can focus on improving my mobile workflow and supplementing it with a desktop program like ‘Moho Animation’ (which actually has a perpetual license).

So ultimately it’s not all bad news, but the grapes sure are sour.

Outro

With this change, it may be more difficult to produce certain categories of shorts. It will take some time to research what is feasible for me going forward. It might mean a far lower production quality to shorts, or a more irregular update schedule, or whatever else.

It’s also deflated a lot of the excitement I’ve had for my aesthetic update. I have to question the purpose of locking assets behind programs that won’t get any stability or compatibility updates anymore. I’ve thought of some workarounds, by making all the raw assets in illustrator and exporting them as needed to whatever programs I eventually end up using. It’s too early to say for sure though.

Even though the future is uncertain, I do think there are still opportunities for growth. It’s just going to take a lot of time and patience to get through the hard times.

-Until next time-