Quoted from Scandell:Actually. Marvel is notorious for underpaying their artists.
I’ve worked for Dreamworks for 8 years and Sony Pictures Animation for 6 years. And now I own my own animation studio here in Salt Lake. Certainly the TMNT animations costs a pretty penny especially when compared to this Avengers work we see here.
Avengers is using “after effects animation” and TMNT, interestingly enough was “rendered” in a real-time game engine. Each separate animation only seems to utilize two or three different poses and doesn’t actually have any transition animation on the characters themselves. Very cheap and relatively safe to do. I imagine Stern did this as a scheduling strategy more than anything.
The cost of producing after-effects animation of this caliber....would come in around $10-$20 a second. (And that’s considering the 2D artwork I already drawn and colored) That’s a rough estimate.
TMNT. Different story. Most of the costs are in the 3D asset creation and not the actual per-second footage.
And to think at one time I thought spending $400.00 bucks for a color DMD was high.