You can rent render time with these farms, prices are stable but the calculation powers of the farms increase monthly, so it takes less time(cheaper!) and the machines can run 24/7
I like how you didn't quote a figure there.
Let's talk shop for 2009. Avatar cost $237 mil. Up cost $175 mil. Transformers 2 cost $200 mil. Ice Age cost $90 mil. That rounds out the CG blockbusters for 2009.
On the less CG dominated end of the spectrum you have Sherlock Holmes at $90 million and The Hangover at
$35 million.
Oh, and the best film of 2008 (Slumdog Millionaire) apparently only cost $15 million to make. It wasn't a CG film by the looks of it.
actors, make-up, agents, writers however keep getting more expensive, as their paycheck increases(for instance, in the later seasons of "airwolf", Jan Michael Vincent got payed $200,000 for each episode, Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and Tom Wilson probably also asked more money to reprise their roles after WC3).
"Garage projects are cheaper than AAA talent!"
Thank you for pointing that out. AAA render houses are exceptionally expensive... just like AAA talent! Wow!
Meanwhile no-name actors fresh out of drama school and looking to end years of eating boxes of Ramen are willing to do the same job for nickles. And then television networks discovered the ultimate solution! Take attention addicted, self-important people and put them on television. You can then do something silly like offer them a grand prize that values what they'd pay actual actors, writers, and crew to do a single episode. Nobody will notice and your ratings will go
up! Pure genius.
And they didn't have to use any CG at all.
Caprica, "V", Doctor who, Merlin, SGU, are full with Sh!tloads of CGI, just because it saves on animatronics, locations, studiosets and make-up.
I already knew the Syfy channel used bargain bin garage artists for everything that couldn't be solved by buying a humvee and driving it through a national park on Sunday. However I would like to point out that one channel is not what we'd call a... umm... trend.
But TV CG still looks terrible, and they aren't getting that for free. What the TV networks see in CG over other methods is reusability. When you want to stretch a series over as many seasons as possible you don't want to blow up or otherwise destroy REAL props and models that could be recycled later. Why? Because with real ones you can't just reload the scene. CG you can blow up the same monsters billions of times.
Yet nobody is using CG exclusively at all. It's just like everything else: it's part of the toolkit, not some savior of entertainment.
I also don't understand your self censorship.
Space is pretty much the easiest thing to render; Lot of darkness, some stars and constellations, maybe a nebula, and no-one can ever tell you it does not look real because just about nobody has ever seen it with a naked eye, and those who have probably prefer the idealistic, more romantic version seen in sci-fi series.
I wonder why everything isn't in space if it's such a budgetary no-brainer.