Producing : Price point for animation company by Corey Lehman

How do you come up with that rate??? Unless you are at the most rudimentary level, it's somewhere around 10% of what I would expect it to cost in a reasonable commercial budget.

I calculated this against the costs of contracted freelancers going rate + my own to produce & direct. How would an animation cost $30k?

On the rudimentary bit this is definitely that as I have no contracts signed yet and our first production (to show skill, quality, creativity) Will conclude in September. The drawback at this price range is a small team and a longer turnaround of 4-6 months

Don't really know much about animation costs. I recall producing instructional and corporate shorts for $1,000 per finish minute. Unfortunately it would be $2,500 in today's market - I'm old and work by myself.

Just my opinion, but it seems to me that the modern animators, in general, are the most financially exploited group of creative people out of all of them. Many "average" illustrators can bargain for about 30 thousand dollars for a relatively simple illustration made in a couple of hours. At the same time, you can technically order a full-fledged traditionally animated short for a fraction of that cash.

Just based on that alone I want to say that to reference the rates of many freelance animators will be just absurd unless you want to work purely for an idea. From my experience, I can say that many freelance animators are either living in very low-cost countries or are simply financially incompetent. Especially for a studio, it would be just an unsustainable way of living within such a low income, unless you have some kind of conveyorized way of production with a lot of shortcuts.

Not only that, but it also perpetuates this kind of cheapening by setting up a new market standard, thereby enabling the capable clients to pay you less by referring to the same exact standard that you yourself and other creative people have set. This price drop just won't stop, it will keep going lower and lower and lower until we all start working for lunch.

So what I'm saying is that it's better to set your prices on the case by case basis, instead of setting in stone a fact that you're willing to work for ten bucks when the client was keen on paying you a thousand...

Oleh Holyzov I have to disagree on this group being the "most exploited" group. Honestly, IMO it's a function of where you are working and what you have to offer, as well as the general lowering of respect people have for creative activities while simultaneously fantasizing that mega-budget animation and effects can be done by one artist on the cheap. In fact it often works the other way around: naive film producer has $20K and inexperienced aspiring animation company assures him they can do a full production for that... they burn through it without knowing how to manage the production and get only part way done and decide not to finish without more money. The producer now is $20k out of pocket, with an incomplete project which, by it's nature, can't easily be completed by anyone but the original animation team (who still can't say they ever completed a real production). I hear this story again and again.

Shadow Dragu-Mihai, Esq., Ipg Well, what you described are some kind of victims of circumstances ahahaha... That's why I specified above that I was talking about CAPABLE clients. I was more referring to the situation where, for example, a small but talented animation studio consisting of Chinese students gets an assignment from Disney and away we go... Of course, this will work both ways. But I think all such problems can be easily resolved if we (God forbid) start to be more ethical and realized about given cases...

You get what you pay for. You want the high end animation, that cost money. often times, inexperience directors will cost a project money cause they don't realize that all the changes they are requesting cost money. If they knew how to organize their ideas, the cost could be minimize.

A good animator spends years honing their craft so they can make a good living at it. People who complain about animation being expensive don't see the hundreds of hours these people put in the get the work done, It's tedious and mind numbing at time. I often tell people pay up or learn to do it yourself. I'm also an animator, I took the route of "learn to do it myself, so I wouldn't have to complain about prices :-)

Let me clarify, I have a team of 8 animators should I quote higher than their asking price?