SO the connection has been made, the company needing video content meets the animator with the skill and network to make it. Discussions happen, possibilities multiply, and yet they both dance around the make-or-break, mystery numbers - how much are you charging/paying?
Of course, no client has bottomless pockets, but equally no producer can make videos for pennies for long. The longer either of those facts gets ignored, the less satisfying the consequences for all parties.
So how do we work out an acceptable price together? What do I, an animator, need to know to work out your quote? Ultimately, I (like pretty much all people in positions like mine) charge by the amount of time a job takes to do, give or take a little for things like type of client, how fun it is, how beneficial it'd be to me in other ways, etc - BUT the main factors that affect the cost of a project are:
Obviously, a 10-second video takes less time to make than a similar 60-second one. Duh.
Need it yesterday? Buy a time machine. No budget for the time machine? Get it for tomorrow instead, but for an extra cost than if we had time to do it properly!
Animation comes in a huge variety of styles and techniques, which take varying amounts of time to create. This ranges from using templates, where a person like myself simply inputs some files into a program, presses 'render' and then submits the resulting file, to painstaking frame-by-frame work that can take months to do well. This could be a lengthy article in itself... [Note to self: do this article!] But essentially we'll discuss it, swap links to styles we want to use as references, and from there I can give a pretty good estimate where we're standing in terms of man-hours required.
If you've supplied me a signed-off final script, defined ideas of how it'll look, reference links, icons, vector graphics (logos, pictures etc) and all I've got to do is piece it together into a flowing whole and add a few flourishes, that's great, that'll be a rapidly completed job with minimal changes. That's the best value for you. If, however, I get a vague script, need to create all the art, and have to spend a couple of days sending mock-ups back and forth to get a clear idea of what you need, that's fine but it's going to take significantly longer and, you've guessed it, will make a bigger impact on your pocket.
If I've spent a few days animating to a set of vague instructions, and it's not come out how you'd imagined, we'll have to go back a step and re-do some of it. Again, that's fine, but it'll cost you for the time it takes to do the amends. So for your bank balance's sake, make sure your team is all agreed on a style (I'd be keen to work with you at the idea generation stage until everyone is happy with it) and script before I begin! Lovely.
Who could forget! The options for music are use Creative Commons, (free with attribution), pay a small amount to get some music bought from a library or composed, get a commercial tune licensed (£££!), or be music-less.
Decent basic-level sound effects can be sourced for free, otherwise for more complex/original things you'll need to pay a bit more again.
Similar themes apply for voiceover - do a basic, not-so-professional-sounding job for free, borrow some decent kit and record it yourself for free, or pay a small amount to get it professionally done. Again, the earlier these decisions are made, the easier it is for me, and so the cheaper it is for you! I will normally record a rough voiceover in the meantime for animation timing purposes.
Time is money! Videos can be done for surprisingly cheap, but costs quickly multiply when you start cranking up all the variables that increase the man-hours or external services required. Try and give your friendly animator as many specifics as you can about the project, including links to other videos you're looking at, to enable a meaningful quote. Also, having lots of key decisions made and assets ready before the animation process begins will save you money big time!
Possibly of interest: As a little experiment, I got the images accompanying this article generated by Artificial Intelligence, via the Dall-E tool. This took my short text description of a scene, with style hints, and generated an image from scratch using that text.
It very often comes out pretty weird but it’s fun to try!
Right-click > save image and read the image names if you’re interested in knowing the search terms used for each.