12/13/2024
Sadly, The Promise: Birth of the Messiah didn't pass the Angel Guild. Our final score was 52 percent, quite far from the 70% needed to pass. We plan to resubmit The Promise to Angel early next year with some changes.
With re-submissions we are able to address the audience and explain what we changed -- which is something we need to do, because:
1.) most don't realize The Promise was made for a fraction of the cost of The Star and Angel's animated David film.
2.) it was created with old technology that was even costlier to produce then.
3.) given our budget and schedule, we had to rely on motion capture to speed the animation process along -- again, older technology.
This isn't meant make excuses for our work on The Promise. But the practical reality is there is no way The Promise can compete with the $35 million that The Star had, or the $60 million David has.
Animation is incredibly expensive, and at the time, we incorporated motion capture to reduce costs and build a more cost effective pipeline for animation. The Promise was our first projects to come out of that pipeline.
So, it wasn't that we were cheap animators, it's that we were trying to work out a new and affordable pipeline for animation.
But to do that you need a team that learns with you, that you can sustain. Unfortunately, our project had a high turnover rate because our film was motion capture based and was a Christian film. The Promise was a project artists came onto temporarily until they got hired onto another project. That was very frustrating.
Aside from that history, the one mistake we made in our Angel pitch is that we opened with the opening scene of the film, Simeon singing "How Long O Lord" in the Holy of Holies -- not the most exciting part of the film. Most viewers who rated the film clicked off in the middle of that scene and didn't watch the rest. Hence, one of the flaws of the Angel Studios system.
This experience has reinforced my hesitancy of making independent animated films. Independent filmmaking, in general, is a hard road. Independent animation is exponentially harder because the budgets have to be 10 to 20 times higher. This is why the big studios own animation.
Can it be done? Of course it can. David did it. Light of the World did it. But for most it means either taking a vow of poverty or working one full time job to pay for the second full time job.
That's the hard truth, sad to say.
We'll give it one more shot on Angel next year.
