I know a lot of factors can play in this. But sometime next year I was thinking about hiring a blender team to make me a 60 second animated video as a prelude to my website. I know some people buy pre-made models and others create new ones. But roughly how much would it cost to produce a video including sound and voices?
I am hoping someone has done this kind of work and can chime in. I am sure there is a difference in price between Disneys Pixar quality and realistic quality.
Just need to know if I need to budget $5k - $7k or more like $15k - $20k
it all depends on the scope of your idea, do you want a ball bouncing for 60 seconds, or do you want a city with hiper real people walking by while a dinosaur attacks it, with tanks and planes and a spaceship suddenly drops a bomb and kills everyone in slow motion?..
60 seconds is a lot, so you can do a whole variety of things which may cost vary a lot.
Something like a couple of dragons flying or walking around, a knight and archer killing a monster, etc. It’s more of a medieval/fantasy thing. It’d be like a cutscene but for the front page of the game as an intro.
That would probably cost a lot. The Sintel movie had a budget of 400,000 pounds. Divide that by 15 (minutes) and you get roughly 26,000 for one minute. 13,000 for 30 seconds.
Now obviously it depends on the team making it, you could probably find a team that does it for a lot cheaper but if the end product is cheap. More time will be required to make it or quality will suffer.
You can’t really divide cost like that. Most animated commercials are in between $50000-100000 range for 60’. The initial cost of resource building and setup is a big part of the final price and is not directly dividable by animation length in seconds. If one can build Sintel quality animation for $13000/30s please contact me asap with your portfolio!
It might be better for me to use real actors and add 3D models into the video. Like a guy jumping onto a dragon and the dragon flies into the air. Just like they did with space jam.
That brings its own costs. You now need an on-set crew, and probably a larger cast (not just voice actors). Compositing becomes vastly more complex when you need to mix real footage and CGI. Things get especially messy when real and CG characters have to interact. There’s a lot of things involved you wouldn’t notice from the finished product.
You might think: “ok, we make a dragon and drop it over the actress, no big deal”. Except there’s a problem. There are a number of shots in this scene where part of the dragon covers the actress while another part of the actress is covering the dragon (ex, arm over the dragon while cradling it to her chest, wing going behind her hair while it sits on her shoulder, etc). The way to get around this is to cover the actress in tracking dots, make a digital double of her, track and match her motions where she covers the dragon, and render a mask with that.* THEN paint out the tracking markers because Khaleesi’s jewelry does not include sticky markers. Oh, and don’t forget to track and matchmove your camera too unless you want it locked the entire time.
*alternately, you could just rotoscope the arm, but if you have a lot of complex motions, this starts becoming more work than just making the mannequin.
Yeah, I would just roto. While I’ve never put a dragon on a girls shoulder, I’ve definitely integrated CG into live action many times before. I’ve always roto’d out the pieces that go in front of the characters. It’s not as hard has it sounds. Especially when you use planer tracking to track a bunch of solid matte shapes and then do the rest by hand. Sometimes of there are enough stark color differences, you can use multiple keys to pull mattes and then just roto the rest.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there…
The only way you are going to be able to figure out how much it might cost is to do a breakdown. First you are going to need a very specific idea of how many shots there are, what you are going to see in each of them, how many characters, what the fight moves will be, etc. You really can’t give someone a rough estimate like that because it really is that specific:
You need to think of all the objects, characters, sets and effects and list them out along with how much time you are willing to let them each one take. Then figure out how much time it will take to do the animation and finally how long it will take to render (the rendering can be estimated into the budget later because it’s machine time and not necessarily human time). Then you take all that time and add it up. Then you can divide that time between the number of people you want working on the project. this then becomes your schedule and you can then multiply those numbers by a day or weekly rate for each person and that’s how much it will cost… Roughly… Oh and of course, rendering comes with it’s own cost.
writing up a budget is an art form . Everything has a cost to it but somethings you can do yourself, while other things need to be done by other people. If you know how long it takes you to build the exterior set of a castle or model a character, you can subtract these assets from the budget and fudge things a little. Another thing to consider is that maybe you don’t need to have the full team running all the way through the project. For instance, if you know people who can animate but don’t do modeling, you can just bring them in at the animation stage and you only have to pay for that time. Likewise, someone who only does compositing isn’t going to be able to do much until you get the rendering is done and there probably isn’t any modeling that needs to be done during that stage. So people can come in and out of the project in order to save money… Or, you could just hire generalists.
But there’s an entirely different approach to this too: How much money you have to spend? Sometimes people can work around your budget. Esspecially since it sounds like you don’t really have a clear idea of what you want to do just yet. If you came to me and said, “Hey I want to make this movie but I only have $5,000, what can you do with that?” I’d be in a better position to figure out what could be done and how long it would take. You would have to be incredibly flexible at that point though. But in this roll, you are more like the advertising agency hiring an animation studio to excite a commercial. I work with people like this all the time. It’s more creative for me but it’s also kind of a haste. They usually want to have their cake and eat it too.
Ive done roto work with humans before, and even if you make a digidouble, they wont ever be exactly the same as the actor/ress… so its very hard to generate a perfect mask with one… The reason is because theres a lot more that goes on with the actor/ress then is possible to model up… such as slight weight changes during shoot, or how the muscle and fat falls… pretty much you can get a base mask but the edges are never exact… which is one of the reasons why I usually roto everything when doing that.
Actually I was talking about £13,000 so that would be about $20,000. It’s still dirt cheap though but you can find studios willing to work for that, Indian studios for example.
But yeah, you can’t really calculate costs like that I know. It was a rough estimation in a best-case scenario.
I run Theory (LordOdin’s comment) and I have to say: yes we’re a volunteership, but we have spent over a year+ developing assets and story. Then actual production has taken 4-5 months; with each episode getting shorter and shorter.
Fayt I think it would be useful to see artwork, storyboards, etc of what you want. The more info you can provide to artists, the better they can objectify their response. For now it’s all just up in the air guessing NinthJake has a decent estimate on money/time.
Here’s something to consider: The cost to setup animation is always the same. If we did a 15 minute episode, or a 1 minute episode, we still have to take all of that prep time. Obviously the longer the project, the more sets, props, costume changes, armatures etc are needed. However that setup never goes away with it being just a 30 second project, or even a 1 second project.
Thank you all for the helpful tips. When I am ready to move further than just an idea, I’ll create a very detailed list of exactly how it will play out, including characters, dragons, scenes, etc with detailed descriptions and also the words for the voices. Also probably some reference photos or graphics. So it seems with all of that, it’ll be easier to move to production.
Yeah totally! This is something Ad agencies just don’t understand. I always hear, “We cut 3 weeks off the schedule so we’ve cut it down to a 15 second spot. It should be a lot easier/cheaper to produce.” Yeah, but you still have the same number of characters,props,sets and effects! All they did was cut down on animation time. And ironically, they are always the cause of animation taking longer than it should in the first place. Drives me nuts actually now that I think about it.
Everything has a cost to it but somethings you can do yourself, while other things need to be done by other people. If you know how long it takes you to build the exterior set of a castle or model a character, you can subtract these assets from the budget and fudge things a little. Another thing to consider is that maybe you don’t need to have the full team running all the way through the project. For instance, if you know people who can animate but don’t do modeling, you can just bring them in at the animation stage and you only have to pay for that time. Likewise, someone who only does compositing isn’t going to be able to do much until you get the rendering is done and there probably isn’t any modeling that needs to be done during that stage. So people can come in and out of the project in order to save money… Or, you could just hire generalists. 