Quoting prices or finding prices for paid project work

Hey I got a couple of clients with a proposed project that they want to do a 3D animated short with live footage.

They want us to film it and do all the modelling and editing, it’s about 10 scenes and 4 minutes long.

There are about 5 characters we need to model and rig, they want it as professional looking as possible.

How do we go about finding a reasonable industry fee to quote them on? We have some ideas but looking for opinions on the going rate.

The clients have a general idea but want us to make it great for them exactly as how they envisioned it and will make a lot of money.

Knowing very little about the Project, your clients and your experience I only got some very general things to share I got to learn while working for business clients (we don’t do CGI but photo- and videography, which might not differ that much in most points). You may know all of it already but here we go:

  1. Your products pricing does not differ all that much from any other product. See what you have to invest (wages, electricity, rent, software…) and add a bit to earn something. They won’t pay that? Fine let someone else bleed out on that.

  2. Once you got a price where you are like “meh, that should work” - double that. Once you have your first shots out the door they will come back to you and want you to change some things here and there…a lot…and you will realize that the “general idea” they had might even be non existent.

  3. Don’t ever sell under price. “But we really want that job, they will come back with another project and we will earn big time!” - nope, won’t work. Unless you are very lucky you will have to keep that pricing or your client is gone. Doing work for business just does not work like selling meth (or cookies at a grocery store). The only exception is when doing work for your portfolio and beeing okay with never earning anything from that client.

It might be a little different depending on your clients but thats the general advice I’d give to anyone trying to get into this kind of thing.

4 min… about $100.000

Another way is to calculate your cost per day and person, this way you can plan the project in what we call “linear days”, so you calculate how many days will need one person in completing the full project and you multiply that for your cost-per-day, when I say cost I mean a number where you include your benefit margin, any kind of people or licensing cost (probably not the full license but some kind of percentage) etc…

Hope this helps a bit :slight_smile:

Cheers.

The late Herman Holtz (Hermann Holz) wrote a definitive series of books about Consulting Contracts, and you should make it your business to buy some and read them most carefully.

You may also wish to consider – I say this most seriously – becoming acquainted with a lawyer who helps small businesses with contract negotiations and contract writing. (Most of them are, in fact, “experts, just like you,” and, “small businessmen, just like you.”)

One European term for a lawyer is “Counselor,” and you do, in fact, need their counsel.

In my (unrelated to CG) business, the customer would first execute a General Services Agreement (GSA), under the auspices of which very specific Task Orders and Change Orders must be executed. Task orders were small and frequent, and, if I had to research something, that was a Task also. All of these ideas came from Mr. Holtz’s books and were vetted by my attorney.

I never regretted the dollars that I paid to my “Counselor” for his expertise. (It’s pretty cool to get a Christmas card from a lawyer who had also become a personal – albeit always professional – friend.)

More than one client later confided to me that they picked us because we presented them with a well thought-out, businesslike contract and order-structure. After two years, I stopped advertising.