Maybe you should consider charging by the second of final animation.
I know that for special FX are charging like that. Why should this be any different?
You might have very easy seconds of motion, but you might have complex ones like: A/V synchronizing, screen captures, embedded video. In the end, the simple stuff compensates the hard stuff.

I cant tell you a price, cause it wont be relevant to your country but flash animation especially with sound and captured video is expensive everywhere.
You could compare it with the price of a full flash website with bells and whistles.

Sorry, thats all i can say.

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always outnumbered, never outgunned

Unless your in a union or something, the magic number lies somewhere between how much you need to make for your efforts and how much they are willing to pay.

Toss the ball back into their court and tell them that you need a budget to work from. Are you using a pro studio for the voice-overs? Are you using canned-art or developing custom art for them?

The originality and creativity of the final piece is directly proportional to the amount of budget they are willing to allocate.

Terry Thornhill

e-zign Design Group

Cheers guys! Usually we try to work out the approximate hours it will take us and apply an hourly rate to that. However, since I haven't worked on stuff like this before it's harder to work out. Certainly working out a per second charge seems like a very good idea. Would you suggest that per second charge is just for the animation, with voiceover being above and beyond this?

I have this dreaded sensation that I'm going to underestimate the amount of work this is going to require.

Certain things about this job are areas that I can offer to cut their cost down. As I have all the sound equipment required to record voiceovers etc this saves on needing to rent a professional studio - however, that of course shouldn't mean I undervalue my ability to make that recording (I did spend €8000 on sound engineering college after all!!). The same goes for the background music, I can likely license a friends music to them (though again I don't know the going rate for this)

As far as the amount of creative art (for an intro section) goes, it's hard to judge. I would imagine using canned-art will be the most likely, beyond that it will mostly be made up of a lot of motion screen capturing with the creativity mostly going into the typography and the effects on said typography.

I'm going to do some more thinking about this.. I've also asked a local animator friend with whom I've worked on a few short animated films (though they were not really properly paid jobs!) - so i'll be intrigued to hear her advice too.

Thanks guys for the quick responses. Any other thoughts welcomed :)

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Business: www.pixelapes.com
Personal: www.ebauche.net

Ok.. I've had my coffee now and can contribute with a (somewhat) clear head. lol

Do a little research to find out what others charge for the same service. Using in-house equipment and (talented) friends instead of union-scale talent can bolster your bottom line, but that "savings" doesn't necessarily need to passed on to the customer. All they should care about is getting what they need and paying as little for it as possible.

If it were me, I'd ask them if they had given any thought to a budget and through discussion, get them to agree on a ballpark figure (an estimate). I always present it something like this:

I hate surprises as much as you do, especially when it comes to getting the bill. Plus, it's never a good idea to pay for something you don't understand. So, I want you (the client) to know what's involved, the associated costs, and then we'll determine if that's feasible for both parties.

By agreeing on a budget beforehand, this tells you exactly what you have to work with, and allows you to make better decisions with regard to production that can increase your profitability on each project.

Terry Thornhill

e-zign Design Group

Thought you might be intersted to hear a good friends advice to me:

Something like that would need a hefty enough budget. The design is very
slick, so a fair amount of time would need to be spent on that before you even
start putting it together. I'd say that you should split your quote into:
-design
-construction
-sound fx and voiceover

• The design is a 750-1000euro job if you ask me. There's a lot to figure out.
• Construction, I'd quote 500-600 euro a minute. Nice slick movement like that takes time. That may even be on the cheap side to be honest.
• Sound fx and VO obviously you know what to put for that.


Hope that's helpful
M

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Business: www.pixelapes.com
Personal: www.ebauche.net

A mate in Dublin did a Flash job recently of a similar length. He quoted 2500-3000 euro which involved his creating and animating the piece though he did use stock imagery and audio supplied by them. They were an international firm with reasonably deep pockets but that should only be a small part of the budgeting process.

afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration

He accepted €500-600 per minute with audio on top. I think it is going to be a hell of a lot of work, and something we haven't really tackled before. But hopefully we can do a good job and my own experience working on short animated films will stand to me (though I wasnt the animator!).

Thanks a lot for all the advice!

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Business: www.pixelapes.com
Personal: www.ebauche.net

congrats.
be carefull with internal organization of the flash.
you'll have loooooooong flash timelines.
maybe its a good idea to split it in smaller swfs and load them dynamically while the playhead is still runing.

eh, u know better.
nice budget :)
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always outnumbered, never outgunned

Thanks..

I definitely do not know better!
(i'm the coder, it's down to my business partner and design guru Donn to know better ;)

I have a feeling we'll be learning a lot and I may be back here asking questions in the near future. Like:

What is flash? How does work? Why is a banana?

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Business: www.pixelapes.com
Personal: www.ebauche.net