Need Animator to bring my script to life. (2 minute short film)

Hi there, I am a amateur film maker and want to explore more film options, so I would like to turn my most basic screenplay into an animated short film.
It is titled “Hacker” and is about a ‘freelancer’ hacker that is called to save a bank from being hacked.
The play time is around 2 minutes.
I tried to figure out Blender myself, but I failed quite badly.
I am willing to pay someone up to $40 upon completion of a decent short film.
I’m not expecting professional, perfect work. I would prefer this be a project where I try out the field of animation, rather then create a perfect piece of art. I would love it if the person who made it was more of a beginner as well, as it would give someone a chance to practice their Blender skills.
I am pretty flexible with style (though ‘frozen’ and ‘tangled’ would be awesome!) and I don’t expect a beginner to have this done right away.

Would prefer if anyone interested replies with an email address, as well as what they think they could get the job done for (please remember I’m asking for beginners and want to spend $40 or less)

Thank you!
Lorissa,
Eating Flesh Productions
([email protected])

Hi Lorissa, definetly you have not idea about what it takes to make a 2 minutes film and saying:

I am willing to pay someone up to $40 upon completion of a decent short film!

It sounds pretty much like a joke even for the real beginner. I would suggest to post it in the volunteer work as it sounds more realistic.

I can 2nd harris3d, $40 won’t even get most people to start up blender. So this project would be more of a volunteer collaboration for portfolio uses.

I am working on a stylized character right now (got a strong urge to after seeing Frozen) and was thinking having some sort of animation in my reel would be beneficial. I do modeling and texturing but no animating so if you ever do happen to put together a reasonable sized team I would be happy to do some character models, etc.

Firstly there is script review and revision.
The collaborative team go through the script to understand the tone, characters, locations, style, and scope of the project.
At this point things may be cut, added, or changed based on capabilities and budget of the production.

Next we have concept design. Various sketches are produced of the characters involved, the locations, and the set pieces.
If you don’t know what ‘set pieces’ are -and I’m guessing you don’t- that is the elements, objects, and props that are presented onscreen. Things like the computer terminal the ‘hacker’ uses, a telephone, his desk, the chair, a pencil, a potted plant… what have you…

After NUMEROUS concept artworks are produced and a style agreed upon, storyboarding may begin.
A drawing of every single shot / transition is drawn.

Then you have the 3D modeling of everything. Every single character, location, object is made polygon by polygon. That’s a lot of polygons.

Then you have to paint all these polygons such that skin looks like skin and wood looks like wood, etc…
‘Paint’ is a gross generalization. It’s much more complicated that that but I don’t want to confound you with technical jargon speak of UVs and shaders and baking and what not

Then there is ‘rigging’. That is creating the bone structure that controls the limbs and mechanics of the models. Ya know… people walking, drawers opening… Making a good facial rig can take days.

Do the characters speak? Going to need to build morph targets for every single phoneme.

Are we ready for animation yet? Nope. Lighting. I’s more complicated than it sounds.

I’m not even going to mention ‘animatics’. Oh wait, I just did. Look it up.

Now animation.

Next voice work

Lypsyncing

Music

Sound

Foley

Post

Compositing

I gave up explaining all this to you because I got bored of writing. And there is a crap ton more I didn’t even mention.

Creating a 2 minute film takes an entire team of people MONTHS to create. Realistically, $40 MAY buy you one character sketch from an eager amateur.

Good luck to you

– EDIT —

It’s quite possible I fell for some ‘troll bait’ here.
Oh well… I had fun filling out the forums and playing with the pencils on the bench…

When I first time read your post, thought you only need someone to animate already rigged characters and I thought “40$ for two minutes ? Probably someone dont know how much time, animator need to spend on 5 sec of simple move, but okay maybe you will find any desperate guy” then I noticed, you are looking for someone who will create whole animation and I just wringed my hands. For real guys, let’s try to respect each other work. I know that probably you had no bad intentions but sometimes it’s better to search for informations about the topic instead blindly go out with smth stupid on forum, otherwise you can meet with negative feedback. Sorry for my english but I hope you know what I mean.

Hey guys instead of ripping on the OP, why don’t you use your “vast experience” in the film industry to give her an idea what sort of dollar value is reasonable to anticipate. Its fairly obvious that the OP doesn’t understand how much work goes into a short film. Maybe if you provided a ballpark man-hour estimate, she might be able to look at getting more funding.

Yes, obviously I don’t know much about animation. I wanted a beginner to make it because then we could ‘learn’ together.
I know $40 isn’t much but I was thinking the job was more of a portfolio building job, so the $40 was just a tiny incentive.

But thanks to everyone who gave me some information on the world of animation, even if it was “ripping on me”.

Eh. It might just be a symbolic sum, but the offer to pay at all is a refreshing change from all the “hey, wanna do this for FUN?” project requests. I’m not saying it’s necessarily better, but at least it’s playing at a professional client/contractor creative relationship.

Those “it takes FOUR persons TWO months to produce ONE minute of animation” proclamations (exaggerated for effect) almost makes me wanna take it up just for the challenge. The points being made about what to expect from one animator on a 40$ budget are of course very valid, but one of my favourite aspects of the art of animation is creative cornercutting.

You should SOOO do this!
By all means, cut all the corners you like.
Remember, she wants it to look like ‘Frozen’.
:wink:

This qualifies as deferred pay.

Moved from “Paid Work” to “Volunteer Work”