Advice needed for pricing 60 second walk through

[danb4026]

My work has always involved stills in the past. My client has asked me to do a 60 second walk through of the space indicated below. The image also has the camera path indicated. The cam will tour the grand room & recreation lounge, then onto the fitness center and model apartment.

 

This is a typical render job in that I have to create furnishings, textures, lighting, etc...normal stuff for the entire space. The difference is that I have to do the 60 sec walk through.

 

How would you advise me to price out the animation? I have no idea what a 1 min animation should cost.

 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xdygi5nq1m0xsiq/walk%20through.jpg

Edited January 25, 2014 by danb4026
add image

[TomasEsperanza]

Hi mate, I haven't done any commercial animations yet, but I do have an animation degree. The first considerations that spring to my mind (and forgive me if these are obvious) are:

 

1) 'Animating Objects and Cameras',

2) 'Rendering',

3) and 'Post-Production'.

 

These are the extra tasks that will need extra time. Not least of the three is the (approx.)1800 frames you will need for one minute of animation. Even at low quality this is a lot more rendering time than your average still. (Pre-rendering your animation's GI at a smaller frame size may be a good idea).

 

So on the basis of "time is money" I guess that's a starting point. Hope this helps, although I expect some folks with more field experience will chime in.

[erkutacar]

here is how i would charge it: assuming that u charged 1000usd for the whole thing, i would charge 5usd per frame X number of frames(24fps) = 7200 + 1000 for the initial work

[erkutacar]

oh and if they want the animation delivered asap, u could offer them using online render farms of course u should add that to the cost

[danb4026]

Thanks for the input. That's very helpful

 

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[Nic H]

cant give you specific pricing but i will mention that this is where you can make some decent money by getting some leverage on that asset you have spent a lot of time preparing. i would charge 5- 10 times what the still images are costing you to make, plus include a cost to have it rendered on a commercial render farm (unless you have your own)

 

its pretty tough to make money on a one, two or three images as they scrutinised to a much higher degree than moving imagery.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Are you sure your client understands what they are asking for? 60 seconds to transverse this amount of space is more than likely not going to capture the essence and understanding of the space in the way that they think it will. The camera is going to be moving very fast and you are not going to be able to see the space long enough to comprehend it.

 

The likeliness that this will be effective is low, and it is time consuming to produce a project this way and not get the results that you need.

 

I would pitch them on the idea of breaking the animation into a series of slow push, pan, dolly, rack shots. Shots that have the camera barely moving so that the space comes to life, but shots that also allows the eye to rest long enough to take the space in and understand what is going on. At the end of the day they will get a lot more out of a film of this nature than they will out of a classic architecture walk through.

 

You also make no mention of people so you should be clear to state that there will be no people in this animation when you are assembling your fee proposal.

 

You should plan on buying a soundtrack for the piece and a stock sound library that has the sounds of people talking, billiard balls cracking, someone running on a treadmill, etc... layering in sounds like this will bring life to the animation even through there are no people present in the scenes.

 

I would also get to the editing part as quickly as possible. Do a rough animatic with massed out spaces and shaded renders. Get this cut in front of your client for approval. This will allow them to understand the pacing and speed of the final piece as well as what they will actually be seeing. After they sign off on the rough cut then it is locked into place. Any changes to it will result in additional fees or timeline extensions depending on the complexity.

 

As for pricing I like to break things like this down into separate spaces. Your spaces might be:

 

1) Reception / Grand Room

2) Recreation Room

3) Corridor

4) Fitness Center

5) Apartment Kitchen / Living Room

6) Apartment Bedroom.

 

If you work on stills you should be able to wrap your head around what a still rendering would take for each of these. Add somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-50% on top of those numbers combined to cover items outside of what normal still work would require. That will probably give you a good figure to put on a proposal. If I were going to ballpark what that number should be I would guess that you will want to be in the neighborhood of 35k on this piece given the parameters above.

 

But again.... I know nearly nothing about this project, how far along the design is, what the intended use for this is, what resolution you are producing at, etc..

 

If they insist on a film of this type then I would suggest discussing a real-time environment rather than a film. Realtime does not have the quality that a film will but it will allow them to navigate and look around the space in the way that allows them to understand the space better than what a fly-through would.

Edited January 26, 2014 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[danb4026]

Thanks for that thorough explanation. The deadline for this is end of February and they do want a few people.

 

Based on your input, I am going to advise against an animation. The fact is, I am not set up to produce a production quality piece in such a tight schedule. The time frame is tight for even quality stills.

 

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[Scott Schroeder]

You can do an animation, just advise them on a different approach. You can certainly do the Ken Burn's style with moving stills. We do this all of the time as our animation timelines just don't often give us the space for nice, smooth flowing cameras like Travis mentioned.

 

This one by DBOX is a good example:

 

Though I would have not just moved the final frame, but keep some of the foreground elements on their own layer so you really get that depth of movement feel.

 

Though, I still don't think you can capture the essence of the project in 60 seconds doing this way either.

[hockley91]

Yeah, don't say you "Can't" do it. You can do it, but with the time constraints, let them know what is and is not possible. You can of course do a 60 second animation and it won't look the way they want it to. It's just the nature of the situation. What I always do when I'm asked to do an animation is I "block" out in Mass the space. Then I do a quick "Pre-Viz" approach so they can see what they can get in the time frame they want. Once they actually see something, then they start to get it.

[Nicolai Bongard]

One tip to add to the panning idea that Scott mentioned, is to render out a dome/sphere image from your camera, map it to a sphere and place a camera in the center, then render out the animation from that camera. Each frame will go significantly faster than rendering every single frame seperately, as you are basically just rendering an image allready rendered. You are of course still limited in the sense that the camera cannot move, but based on one dome render that probably takes a while, you then have the freedom to change the angle/tilt up and down on the camera as well as from side to side. And it should negate some of that feeling of images sliding by.

[Tommy L]

If its tough job then quote it high with an option for something more manageable (like the stills) at a more attractive price. If they go for the high one you have budget to hire help.