You may think whatever you'd like, but you'll be underbid while you're making your value proposition. Of course people pay for CG services but the money is in content creation+. If your offering is too obviously recycled then it will be devalued in proportion. It's worth thinking of every film as a startup spun off by a studio, with a correspondingly short-term view of revenue cs. expenses.
+ by which I mean every director and producer want something nobody has ever seen before, which is the surest route to $$$.
That leads to a very zero-sum approach to negotiations; if you do not have some sort of existing contract (eg by virtue of union or guild membership and the resulting standardized pricing agreements) then as a new entrant to the market you will be asked to work for nothing. Even if you're well-established this is a big problem. A good example of this was when highly-esteemed CFX house Rhythm & Hues went bankrupt a few years ago: http://variety.com/2013/film/news/rhythm-hues-bankruptcy-rev...
As a more prosaic real-life example, I once earned myself a nice cash bonus for recovering all the footage from a project after the primary and backup drives both failed (or so it seemed to the less technical people). Had I proposed making the same investment in data protection up front, I guarantee the answer would have been No. While you do expect to work with the same people again, often over many years, every individual project is its own financial entity and producers' primary job skill is to hoard cash and minimize obligations.
This isn't just because they're jerks (although being a jerk is a necessary job skill, which is why I'm bad at being a producer lol), but because when you're in production the scarcity switches from money to time. Actors have other commitments, the weather can't be controlled, locations are rented for very short durations with large overages if you exceed the rental period and so on. So the basic business strategy notwithstanding scale is to hang on to as much money as you possibly can until you go into production, at which point you start spending money like water and trying to save time instead. Obviously an unscrupulous person can exploit that phase transition profitably, but doing so deliberately will tarnish your reputation, and your personal reputation carries far far more weight than your work product, unless your work product is really world-class and people take the time to evaluate it. Of course I'm simplifying, but consider the thousands of people who have credits on a big movie. You can't exhaustively evaluate the quality of their individual contributions when you're hiring at that scale, and most producers have limited technical and even aesthetic ability anyway, so a thumbs-up from someone they've worked carries far more weight.
I'm not trying to scare you out of participating int he industry, because in many ways it's really great and really does function on a meritocratic basis - if you're smart and innovative you can go a long way in a short time. But don't bank on a rational strategy, because the film industry manufactures dreams. Our work product is literally an escape from everyday reality that can be easily reproduced and distributed. In that sense it's kinda like doing business with a drug cartel - you can make a lot of money, but you have to approach each deal like it's the last one you'll ever make.
That's why I got out of animation software. Either they're in development, and their credit card transactions bounce, or they're in production and they want a new feature yesterday.
I fully accept your take on this, I'm just wondering if the downsides could be mitigated by targeting a layer back from the production itself, and instead towards the graphics houses, and not making it a pay for work service, but a pay for access library, similar to scientific journal access (a loaded comparison, but imagine a less controversial system than Elsevier). If it's access to thousands of models of various levels of detail for a flat price, and it's always growing, then maybe it gets treated by Adobe CS or MS Office for those places where it's useful. You pay for it because it's cheaper than the alternative, and since you are doing paid work and running a business, pirating it isn't worth the risk.
+ by which I mean every director and producer want something nobody has ever seen before, which is the surest route to $$$.
That leads to a very zero-sum approach to negotiations; if you do not have some sort of existing contract (eg by virtue of union or guild membership and the resulting standardized pricing agreements) then as a new entrant to the market you will be asked to work for nothing. Even if you're well-established this is a big problem. A good example of this was when highly-esteemed CFX house Rhythm & Hues went bankrupt a few years ago: http://variety.com/2013/film/news/rhythm-hues-bankruptcy-rev...
As a more prosaic real-life example, I once earned myself a nice cash bonus for recovering all the footage from a project after the primary and backup drives both failed (or so it seemed to the less technical people). Had I proposed making the same investment in data protection up front, I guarantee the answer would have been No. While you do expect to work with the same people again, often over many years, every individual project is its own financial entity and producers' primary job skill is to hoard cash and minimize obligations.
This isn't just because they're jerks (although being a jerk is a necessary job skill, which is why I'm bad at being a producer lol), but because when you're in production the scarcity switches from money to time. Actors have other commitments, the weather can't be controlled, locations are rented for very short durations with large overages if you exceed the rental period and so on. So the basic business strategy notwithstanding scale is to hang on to as much money as you possibly can until you go into production, at which point you start spending money like water and trying to save time instead. Obviously an unscrupulous person can exploit that phase transition profitably, but doing so deliberately will tarnish your reputation, and your personal reputation carries far far more weight than your work product, unless your work product is really world-class and people take the time to evaluate it. Of course I'm simplifying, but consider the thousands of people who have credits on a big movie. You can't exhaustively evaluate the quality of their individual contributions when you're hiring at that scale, and most producers have limited technical and even aesthetic ability anyway, so a thumbs-up from someone they've worked carries far more weight.
I'm not trying to scare you out of participating int he industry, because in many ways it's really great and really does function on a meritocratic basis - if you're smart and innovative you can go a long way in a short time. But don't bank on a rational strategy, because the film industry manufactures dreams. Our work product is literally an escape from everyday reality that can be easily reproduced and distributed. In that sense it's kinda like doing business with a drug cartel - you can make a lot of money, but you have to approach each deal like it's the last one you'll ever make.