More About Disney’s New Shorts Program

From Business Week, this article offers a few new details about Disney’s shorts program. Among the tidbits:

* The budgets for these shorts are “$2million or less.”

* One of the six shorts in development, The Ballad of Nessie, is “partly an exercise in helping animators improve their skills at drawing fabric in a naturalistic way.”

* Another interesting item from the article:

There’s even a piece of this new program that’s aimed at employees who don’t draw for a living. By joining the “Shorts Club,” anybody from a secretary to a tech help-desk employee can gain access to a computer workstation in their off-hours to make a five-minute cartoon. These likely won’t make it to a theater. But they could help get everybody in the organization excited about what they’re doing.

And what would a mainstream article about animation be without poor research and misinformation. The writer of this piece obviously has no concept of animation history when he writes, “In the 1930s, Walt Disney pioneered the animated short as a way of keeping his animators sharp while waiting for the script for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to finish.” Wow!

(via Seward Street)