“Do you know what Disney’s secret is? Conduit. And I’d like to see that, considering they spend three million dollars per minute of animation“, he reveals Wired with a sardonic tone Andrea Iervolino, CEO and founder of the company produced by the Ilbe Group. PUSH conduit? Yes the production process that guides the work of creating an animation project: series development, writing, asset creation, animation, layout and animation, lighting, rendering, compositing and finally post-production.
The underlying theme is that every production company – big or small – is extremely jealous of their pipeline and doesn’t lease it. And unlike other sectors, it is impossible to understand from the final result what the underlying game plan was. After that, it is a key element to make the process successful affect costs, final quality, times, in short, everything. “It’s been 13 years since I opened my first animation studio in Canada and even back then my technicians were telling me we needed to have our own pipeline. Now after 104 films producedincluding the last one Ferrari, I admit I was right when I listened to them then. And so today we offer our licensed animation channel to the market” explains Iervolino.
A solution that enabled the studio to create 1,700 minutes of animated content over three years. In 2022, the group recorded a total production value of approximately €161 million, of which 70% was related to animation.
The value of the Ilbe pipeline
To fully understand the value of pipelines, an excellent starting point is that provided by film Founder, where the main character played by Michael Keaton builds a McDonald’s chain bit by bit. Pipes are o personnel, organization, hardware, software, technical means, payments and others.
A notable example of this method and subsequent success is the animated series Puffins which were concerned Johnny Deppand is available on Apple TV, Prime Video and Chili TV.”Instead, we invented series-based pipelines shot after shot. In practice, the artist can change elements, from writing to delivery, at will and at any time“, points out Iervolino.