Anyone care to share how you go about pricing an animation? a price for the construction and materials, then a price per second of animation? It is only my second animation of free-lance work (others I did not have to price being that they were done in another studio). I think I underpriced the first one I did. Any suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Hi,
I just go by the following parameters and charge a daily rate:
How long will it take me to model?
How long to texture?
How long to animate?
How long to light?
How long to render?
How long to edit and composite?
Add it all up, add a little to cater for any hiccups or changes and done 
Same here.
animations are funny sometimes…I have this one now that I actually OVERPRICED in the beginning…and Thank god…ran into a bunch of problems in the ned with memory and crashing. Not the clients problem of course, but yeah, you need to work in a little fluff if I may…I tried to come up with a PER SECOND price, but it can vary so much…I mean most of the animation is computer time and frankly with a render farm…it is a just a couple of more clicks…so to speak…Recently I had a client want another 30 seconds on the animation and we ended up charging an additional $1000. Which seems very high, but after the additional IR mapping, editing the png Premiere file and then back to dvd again…it was about right
Eric,
Could one say as an average, then, $1000.00 for 30 seconds? 3 minutes, then, would be $6000.00? Would that be including all work…model building, materials, lights, people, trees,etc?
Is that 30 seconds of a camera moving around a teapot without reflections, or 30 seconds flying thru a town with hundreds of buildings, terrain, moving people and animated water complete with reflective caustics and displacement?
True…tough to come to a concrete solution.
It’s best to come up with a per hour you think your time is worth, then learn to itemize how long you think something will take. If you worry too much about something passing the “sniff” test, you’ll likely undercharge for your work.
kind of a dated article but it relates to what you are asking…scroll down to where he talks about animations:
http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/article3\_DW.asp
-joe
YEah…Did not mean to infer that the 1000 bucks was a set in stone price…Scott is right…apples and oranges…or is it kiwi…Not really sure…But…Every job is different…pay the bills, perhaps give out a couple of bonuses, take the clients out for lunch and if you have money left over…Sweet… 
“Man makes Toy Story 3 for $185’000…”
That would be an interesting comparison. Not useful for quoting of course, but I wonder if there is a way to find cost/second of actual CG for feature films (both fx and cartoons).
im working on a 30 minute animated film for 30k usd but thats a suuuuuuper cheap budget
good question. i have no idea but i did read an article covering the production of pirates II at ILM. they said at one point the had 350 fx ppl working on the project. They prpbably bill at least 100$/hour so…
350 people x 40 hours/week x 100$/hr = 1.4 million dollars/week. Lets say they can produce 4 minutes of shots in that week. 1.4 mil/240 secs = $5,833/second
The big variable is how much they could produce in a week…or any given time frame. Seems expensive buts I guess its an fx driven film and will make hundreds of millions over time.
-joe