Moho Forum

Not sure where to put this, but...

Out of curiosity, Let's assume I have a 24 min animated series and I want to hire 12 animators each would be responsible for about 2 min of animation each.

What is an appropriate pay schedule, i.e. how much $$$/min (or sec or frame) is appropriate?

9.000 $ per minute. And that's just animation.

$9k USD per minute?? I dunno- if it's to be animated in AS it would depend on the level of animation required. Also whether or not the artwork is all completed and the characters are fully rigged or not... and how much point animation will be required. I'm not saying $9k is too high (considering shows like Simpsons/Family Guy cost $1 million per episode to animate) but it's kinda hard to put a generic price on animation without knowing the details. Some of the stuff today that makes it to broadcast is pretty rudimentary...

Well, that was a figure based on pay-per-second of traditional pencil-on-paper feature animation back in 1993 ... so it had a connection to reality.

Yes, I know things have changed. The biggest change would be that clients expect animators to deliver flawlessly rendered final scenes. If you are not part of a reasonably big studio with an established workflow and defined roles of layout artist, background artists, character designers, character riggers, animators, special FX animators - but just your average animator-of-all-trades, then it gets very difficult to calculate your work.

It seems that most calculations are done top down: it's just a certain amount of money per film / per episode, and all involved have to make the best of it. The first thing which suffers from that is the artistic quality.

slowtiger wrote:9.000 $ per minute. And that's just animation.

$216K for just animation? That seems kinda high, maybe I'm wrong.

I think it's best to charge for the amount of time you expect it to take, not necessarily the level of quality they're asking for.

$216K for just animation? That seems kinda high

As I said, the wages I used had been paid for feature film animation - cinema quality. TV work seldomly gets paid that good.

But the whole calculation is a theoretical one. Nobody calculates a project by adding up what animators should get per second ... instead there's a fixed amount of money the client is willing to spend, and that's it.

I try to collect figures everywhere I can get them. Some are:
- short spots of about 3 to 5 minutes might get a budget of 40.000 €.
- music clips can get more, but only if it's a big record company or a big name.
- advertising could spend 10.000 € for 30 seconds, but that's first class payment.
- the longer the film, the lesser will be paid per minute.

Mind you, these are rough figures from Germany. If they look high to you, they do as well for me. Most animation jobs are paid significantly worse. And animation jobs are rare.

Maybe this is why the "Jobs" forum is full of free labor "jobs". There's no real guidelines for, "how much should I offer animators" to help me out? Of course, maybe I have no idea what I'm really saying , since I've never worked in the and I'm just a dreamer anyway!

Touched wrote:I think it's best to charge for the amount of time you expect it to take, not necessarily the level of quality they're asking for.

Well- by quality I mean the amount of work required. Like if they want it to look like Southpark- or if they want it to look more like traditional animation which would involve lots of point animation and such. I'm assuming the work is to be done in AS. So in order to know how long it's going to take to animate you'd need to know these things.

I think generally speaking- you can expect the animation to be much less expensive if done in AS rather than traditional frame-by-frame animation. I just did 2 very short animations that will air on Fuel TV in a couple months- I did it in my spare time (animating isn't my full time job- unfortunately!) and had them done in about 3 days- the client was thrilled with the results.

jhbmw007 wrote:Well- by quality I mean the amount of work required. Like if they want it to look like Southpark- or if they want it to look more like traditional animation which would involve lots of point animation and such. I'm assuming the work is to be done in AS. So in order to know how long it's going to take to animate you'd need to know these things.

Right, exactly. I always have to ask exactly what style they're looking for. Talking or action? Many locations? Many characters? New characters take a lot more time to set up and rig than just one, as we all know. Will there be physical interaction? All of this has an impact on the amount of time I expect it to take, and hence the price. Alternatively, if they have a budget already in mind, I can then enumerate what I think can be done in enough time to make that price worth it.

sour_jax wrote:

slowtiger wrote:9.000 $ per minute. And that's just animation.

$216K for just animation? That seems kinda high, maybe I'm wrong.

Hi for Anime Studio or Flash animation you are looking at around $120,000 per episode.

GK

Wow, thanks...

Out of curiosity when you have to hire freelancers how do figure out how much to pay them?

sour_jax wrote:Wow, thanks...

Out of curiosity when you have to hire freelancers how do figure out how much to pay them?

It's always best to pay per frame as it accounts to the exact work that has been done.

You need to break the total figure down by the amount of minutes you have in an episode. Then break that per minute figure by 1500 (frames in a minute) that gives the the cost of 1 frame. Then simply multiply that by how many frames the animator produces.

You have to be aware that $120,000 dollars is for the whole film storyboard, animation, comp etc. It's up to you as the producers to break that budget down into the different fees to cover peoples rates.

$120,000 per episode is based on a 26x24 pricing so an overall budget for the entire season would be around $3,120,000.

GK

Thanks for the insight.

BTW what does 26X24 mean?

Is it 26 episodes-24 minutes each?

sour_jax wrote:Thanks for the insight.

BTW what does 26X24 mean?

Is it 26 episodes-24 minutes each?

Yes thats right.

GK