Building An Animated Feature Budget?

[LugofilmLtd]

Hi all! I'm in the very, very early planning stages for trying to get an independent animated feature off the ground and I need advice from people who know what they're talking about.

To maximize my chances of obtaining funding, I was planning to have the animation done in Flash 1) because it's inexpensive and 2) because Equestria Girls proved it's possible to do a feature film using Flash and have it look good. However, this is all entirely new territory for me and I haven't the slightest idea what the costs are going to be. I was hoping to fund the film via Kickstarter or IndieGoGo since there have been other animated features successfully funded through those sites, but I need help to figure out a workable minimum budget that might conceivably have a chance of being met.

 

[LugofilmLtd]

Alternate idea: I'm on another forum populated by voice actors, animators, musicians and other creative types who mainly do it as a hobby and if I can get some of them to help me on the promise of getting paid when the film is finished and released, I might conceivably be able to get all the dialogue and songs recorded temporarily-for-free so all I had to do was raise money to do the animation. At that point, I would see if it might be possible to hire a professional contract studio like Smash 5 to do it. Do you think that's a feasible plan?