Here is a curious little crowdsourced project from Sony Pictures which got my interest upon learning that Steve Vai is in it.

The animated short is called Live Music, watch the teaser above.  Sony used facebook to network 51 animators around the globe to put this project together.  It's an interesting model that fans have been doing for a while.

The disturbing part is unlike the fan projects Sony Pictures budgeted one million dollars for this project!  One of the advantages of using a crowdsourced project is it's ability to keep costs down and to recruit people who have passion for the project to the project.  One million dollars is a staggering amount of money.  What did they spend it on?

They paid each animator $500 for their part which is cool but that is $25,500.  There are editing, distribution, and advertising costs but where did the rest of the money go?

(via CinemaTech)