eli5: Why do great animations and cgi need a big budget?
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This process is not easy and requires collaboration of many experts as well as computers to produce good looking results. You will need:
Water specialist,
Hair specialist,
Face specialist,
Face animation specialist,
Movement specialist,
Weather effects
…
And rather than one, it might be a team of them
Finally when all is done you need to render it, at that time hundreds of comuters (server farms are needed to generate the good looking images). Put all this together, suddenly the costs are very high
You basically need to be paying hundreds of highly-skilled people a full time wage to be working on it. Watch the credits for a movie that uses a lot of CGI and count how many people worked on it. Then imagine how much it would cost to pay all of them to work on the film for a year, possibly more. That money adds up.
Watch the credits for any Marvel movie. Iron Man 3 had 2031 VFX artists, according to IMdB.
Nowadays there are more pre-vis and whatnot, but 6 months is not unusual for the time it takes for a blockbuster. Let’s just assume those 2000 people make $80k a year, so $40k for those 6 months, that comes out to **$80M just in salaries**.
Salaries are just part of it, the VFX studios need to make a profit too, especially considering all the programs they use (some they create themselves!!!) and the cost of running their server farms (tons of computers connected to speed up the processing; the black hole scene in Interstellar took **100 computer hours per a frame**, that’s 100 computer days per second).
If you construct a set in real life (for a live action movie), there’s obviously a lot of construction work that needs to be done, but the universe/nature actually takes care of a lot of the work for you.
You don’t have to create your own wood grain: nature does that for you.
You don’t have to add your own imperfections into every pane of glass: nature does that for you.
You don’t have to create your own skin for your actors: nature does that for you.
You don’t have to define what a “smile” looks like on your actors: acting school and just being human will have that covered.
You don’t have to define how the lips move when you say the letter “p”: just being human will allow your actors to figure that out by themselves.
You don’t have to define what “walking” looks like: your actors are human.
You don’t even have to define what a car looks like when it drives: physics has that one covered.
Not so when you’re doing a CG animation.
Every freckle, every eyelash, every uneven floorboard, every droop of a flower petal, has to be created by an artist.
And they *all* have to be there, because if you leave them out, your scene looks too “perfect” and viewers won’t be able to suspend their disbelief, even in a cartoon.
When a character smiles, there are hundreds of muscles and contortions that have to be created by an artist.
It takes a *lot* of artistic manpower to recreate the world from scratch down to the sub-millimetre level.
This is, incidentally, why Disney and other major studios are some of the biggest contributors to graphics, modelling and animation tools that help automate parts of this.
[For example, here’s just one of a myriad of research projects Disney did and presented at SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest computer graphics academic conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0kyDKu8K-k).
That project of simulating snow cost several hundreds of thousand dollars in research to complete.
But it’s worth it, because it will ultimately end up saving them *more* money by not having artists work themselves to death simulating snow for their Frozen series of movies.
Computer simulation and computer aids help a lot, but at the end of the day, there still have to be human artists that take that and keep molding it until it looks like a real world.
It takes a lot of work.
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