Son of Awesomeness

Jeffrey K. and his troops are not letting the grass grow under their corporate feet.

AwesomenessTV, the YouTube multichannel network acquired by Dreamworks Animation last month, has bowed AwesomenessX, a new channel aimed at male teens and tweens.

New channel will be stocked with seven new original series, while five existing AwesomenessTV shows will migrate over. ...

(Maybe the goal here is to be a mini-conglomerate, yes?) ...

I spent a chunk of my morning wandering through DWA's Lakeside building. Happy Smekday! is well into work, (Release date November 2014) and Me and My Shadow, although "back in story," is still having some production work done.

How to Train Your Dragon II is going full tilt, which it should be, since it's ten months out from its release date.

There's a lot of empty cubicles around and about; a staffer told me:

"I don't know if management is going to go to a Disney/Visual effects model where they hire more staff at crunch time and lay them off afterwards. In the past, DreamWorks Animation spent a lot of time and effort recruiting people they needed for upcoming projects, and it was sometimes hard to get them. And they retained them.

"But now there's a lot bigger talent pool, and it's easier to recruit. Will the studio decide they can just hire crew on an "as needed" basis and not keep them after the production deadline? I don't know the answer to that, but I hope not." ...

Another employee said:

Management's working to get budgets down from $150 million per picture to $120 million per picture. This means that production heads have to say No to directors' wish lists. Some things will be possible to do, others not." ...

Artists are still being laid off as their assignments end, so more empty cubes. But morale is a bit better than a couple of months ago, though it's still way below attitudes of, say, a year back. (Big surprise.)

One ray of sunshine: DVD and Blu-Ray sales are up.

Mr. Katzenberg cited the surprisingly strong home video performance of "Rise of the Guardians," which was a box-office disappointment in theaters last November. The movie has sold 3.2 million copies on DVD and Blu-ray, well ahead of DreamWorks' prior expectations. ...