Interested in some opinions about hiring an animator

[Francis Seven]

So I have a 5 minute animation short I want to get done. I'm come from a hobbyist/traditional animation background and I'm new enough to ASP that it still confuses me on occasion. I got to thinking, what if I hire an animator?

This led to my question: What if I provided the animator with ALL the assets and only needed the actual animating done?

I'd provide them with:
Script, Storyboard and layouts
All 5 Characters drawn in ASP and already rigged, with phoneme mouths
Fully designed backgrounds
Edited sound file

The complexity of the animation would be no worse than the average "Peppa Pig" or "South Park" episode.

How much would it be fair to offer? I was thinking about $2000. Please let me know is this amount would be fair or insulting for when I post the job offer.

[jahnocli]

I'm not a professional animator, but this strikes me as a reasonable amount of money.

[slowtiger]

This is a totally OK amount of money, and you can expect professional work for it. Thank you for spending some thinking before posting!

[synthsin75]

Wow, that's the first reasonable offer I've seen posted here. I assume it reflects the passion and dedication to the project that you've done your homework and built your own assets.

[Francis Seven]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. Yes I am passionate about this project. The reason for hiring a more experienced professional is that for the direction I want the project to take, I need to have something really well made to show around. I'm currently reading Animation Development:From Pitch to Production, and what I get from the author, and the people he interviews, is this: Don't show your animation if it's not professionally done. They will judge your IP on what you show them. So if it doesn't look like what would air on the TV, don't use it in your pitch.

It's a lot of money but my hope is that it would probably help me land someone who has actually worked on preschool shows like what I want to do.

I just hope the artist doesn't mind tweaking my rigs as I'm new to ASP. On the plus side, there wouldn't be any head turns, I think, because characters are mostly shown in 3/4 view, as in for example, Peppa Pig or Ben & Holly. I looked at "Joe and Jack" and they use head turns.