A lot of companies prefer outsourcing certain jobs, rather than invest into a specialization that is not the primary business of the company. In the most cases companies who outsource (and it’s not necessarily an offshore outsourcing), actually save a lot of money, because they give this job to people who can do it with higher quality, lower risk of mistakes and more quickly, than if done in-house.
You can outsource any function of your business, even if it is a creative, artistic job. In this article we are going to talk about this kind of outsourcing, and if being more precise – outsourcing of the animation and VFX. We are going to talk about some of the great companies that used animation outsourcing services to create wonderful products.
HBO
Let’s look into a motion picture business. HBO should be very proud of “Game of Thrones” show, but they have to admit it’s been made with the help of other companies. The show is full of various VFX and special effects, and HBO had to turn to outsourcing to make it all as great as we see it on TV. They have several service providers for VFX who made a great contribution to all the seasons of “Game of Thrones”, having completed numerous shots with photo-realistic CG environments and CG dragons.
BlueBolt – Game of Thrones VFX Breakdown from BlueBolt Ltd on Vimeo.
20th Century Fox
Outsourcing is used not only for saving funds. It is also about saving time, as it was in a case of the “Deadpool” movie. The film was planned to be realized in a short period of time. Many companies were creating animation for this movie, and it helped it to be released on time, on February 12th, 2016, right before the St. Valentine’s Day. The film was a great success, and it is extremely funny too!
Walt Disney Pictures
Sometimes, big companies entrust all the animation and VFX work to one studio as it was with “Oblivion” movie. Hard to imagine, that such a giant of the animation industry – the Walt Disney Pictures outsourced all the animation work to the external provider! Under the guidance of the director Joseph Polanski who had a stunning vision of a future earth, all these service providers created a full range of VFX and animation for the film – from planning the shooting approach to creating the CG drones, the Tet and other sci-fi elements, environment, digital doubles, drone vision, explosions, and full CG sequences.
Oblivion – Modeling Demo from Clara Coulter on Vimeo.
Warner Bros.
More often, big corporations give the animation and VFX job to different outsourcing companies. For, example, CineSite made only one scene in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”, and let’s be honest it looks awesome. You can check it by yourself.
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them: Cinesite VFX Bring the magic to the table from Cinesite Studios on Vimeo.
By the way, cute Dobby is a result of outsourcing too.
As you can guess, outsourcing is a great solution not only for motion pictures business, but also for video games.
Wargaming
One of the most popular MMO games, “World of Tanks”, outsourced creation of some models that you can find on the battlefield to 3D-Ace, a Ukrainian 3D development company. Outsourcing 3D animation is beneficial because, especially if it is a temporary resource shortage, you don’t have to hire more specialists in-house.
Ubisoft
Ubisoft has entrusted their “Assassin’s Creed” to a Chinese outsourcing company. And many other have followed this way. Chinese artists also created art and animation for Mortal Kombat X, Batman: Return to Arkham, XCom: Enemy Within, and many other titles.
GSN Games
Have you heard of the Wheel of Fortune game by GSN? Extremely popular all over the world, this game is now available on Android and iOS. The art and animation for a mobile version of the game has been created by CBS. GSN also outsourced a lot of game art work to the Game-Ace art department.
More than 75% of companies use outsourcing and almost all companies related to video games or movies outsource a lot of art and animation work.