Hi all,

I’m not sure this is the best place to put this, but it is specific to Max. Mods feel free to move it if it needs it.

A friend and I have been pitching an animated tv show around Hollywood which includes a 4 minute sample done in max. The first thing the development execs ask me is how much per episode and how fast can we turn them around. So far, I’ve done everything myself for nothing but time and any answer I give them is speculation. Now I have to come up with a budget.

I have a good handle on the skill sets we need covered, but I’m not sure exactly how these translate into personnel and I’ve been working independently for so long, I have no idea the going industry rates.

The show will likely be 11 minute episodes, though it could be 22 (and they may want 2 11 minutes every week). We’ll get a reasonable amount of time to get up and running, and it will probably be a 13 episode order. It’s purposefully simple in its look and the movements as well, but it’s more than just people sitting around talking a la Space Ghost. We’re looking at a small, fast moving team (hopefully not more than 10 people). One of our potential selling points is that we feel we can keep production costs down, but still deliver a slick 3d show.

So far, I’m looking at:

- a character designer - good drawing skills required, the further they can take the designs into max models, the better.
- a modeler - good with making low poly models ready to skin and smooth to match our stylized character designs.
- a rigger / skinner - preferably someone with a few years under their belt (Brad, Paul, someone in your league).
- a character animator - we’re using some biped, but mostly Brad’s skeleton rig (probably end up using our our own rig similar to Brad’s).
- possibly a second animator to focus more on facial expressions (using rigs and scripts I built)
- a set designer - we have a highly stylized, simplified look so this might be ideal for someone just out of school.
- a lighting / rendering specialist - the preview was done using the scan line because of time constraints and we may end up sticking with it because I’m thinking that adding Mental Ray or finalRender to the pipeline will slow things down too much.
- a compositor / editor - not necessarily a max user, but familiarity with max’s rendering quirks would help.
- a td - building maxScript tools to help the team and keeping the boxes and render farm up and running.

I can fill in a lot of places as needed (but not the lighting / rendering or compositing seats), but I’m also a co-writer / director so I may not have much time.

My first question is: am I crazy thinking I can make a (cable) network show with this small a team? Secondly, any idea people could give as to what the going rates are for people in these roles would be great. I know people don’t like to talk about money here, so if you want to contact me privately, I’ll understand.

Thanks for any help (and fingers crossed),

James

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James Kelly
fo co mo so

This might not help at all :D , but in terms of cost, here in Mpls, if a cable company does your t.v. commercial (30 secs), it can cost $27,000 to $60,000+ (depends on LOTS of variables).  That = 1 to 3 months of work for getting the production done (which is a VERY tight deadline, -and that always seems to be the case for some reason). *josh mutters,* most times the producer(s) will say, “lets have a really cute furry character!  Just like in Happy Feet, with dancing!”
>ahem< Pardon, but probably the most important question is, “WHO is paying for it?” Then, estimate your production time and triple it (and don’t do furry characters for your first show :) ).
Anyway, here in Minneapolis if you can get a freelancer to work at $34 to $50 / hr. that seems pretty reasonable.  If you can get people to work in-house, for the company (where work done is covered by a ‘work for hire’ contract -the employer, not the employee, is considered the legal author), then you can probably pay a lot less per hour ( $10 to $18 an hour ). 

But, I support paying freelancers TONS of money! :D Indeed, TONS and TONS of money!

And, I have no clue, so don’t trust anything I have to say on this :D .  BUT, Good luck!

I am sort of in the same boat.  I just finished a 26-minute pilot episode and am trying to see if there is a home for it.  As far as rates, you could probably get rough estimates from the various job surveys that float around.  ( I found a few with a quick google search).

Typically, it is usually harder to get senior people for a small-unknown project.  With that said, I hope that some of the key people would be willing to do a freelance job that has flexible hours and good pay.

How much ramp up time do you think you will get?  It would seem that an aggressive timeline would raise the cost because you would need to create resource redundancies to avoid bottlenecks.  For me, it took me 8 months (6 months if I would have only worked on this one project).  Based on the frequency of episodes, it would really change my resources and my role.

Guy Galer
http://www.twist-edgames.com

Wow, ggaler, a 26 minute pilot on your own. That’s ambitious. We only had the stomach for 4 minutes before we took it out. If it happens, it will be small, but the network will be known so that could help.

Josh, everything will be done in-house, work-for-hire, but they’ll still be freelance positions. I suspect the rates are a bit higher here in LA. The trouble with the “who’s paying for it” route is that no one’s going to buy a show unless they know how much it’ll cost. I need at least a ballpark figure. The people we’ve been talking to have their own production people, but the more of the package we have in place going in, the better.

--
James Kelly
fo co mo so

Here’s a form (.XLS) from the Austrlian Film Commision that gives you a good idea of all of the budgetary concerns for a project. Fill in the blanks and see what you come up with..

http://www.afc.gov.au/filminginaustralia/azbudget/animation/fiapage_78.aspx

Another good source of info is the book “Producing Animation” ISBN 0-240-80412-0 which really explains it all. As a decent guess, in LA you’re probably in the 300k-400k range fro a 22 min episode with a 12-18 month turnaround per. With a small team like yours it may be difficult to accomplish the task in that amount of time. Rent some videos of 3D animation and check the amount of staff required to produce an episode.

Thanks for the link, kevnich and the book recommendation. We’ve been hearing 300-400k per episode as well, seems to be the standard for a 3d show, but we’re not doing a standard 3d show. The characters are highly stylized and ridiculously simple and they don’t really even walk, they sort of glide/bounce around (a la southpark) and because we’re writing the episodes, we can be smart about not creating situations we know will be hard to pull off. We actually think that having such a small team will speed things up. Much less overhead and bureaucracy. But, maybe we’re crazy.

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James Kelly
fo co mo so

Sounds like you’ve been getting good info, and Thank you for the reply James.  Hope it’s going well.  I’m guessing you’ve seen this before, ‘ payscale.com ‘ but, for those who have not seen it before, it has some interesting numbers to look at; http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Animator&#x2c;_3D/Salary (3rd chart down, you can see Minneapolis at the bottom… :) ).  I hope you keep bumping this thread with updates on how it’s going, and more power to you!

Edit:  And there is this thread over at CG (which I bet you’ve already seen.  Maybe kevnich knows Rob Mack? :) ); http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=614289
-"8 Steps to Funding and Producing a Cartoon Animated Series ”

Actually, I missed that thread on cg talk, thanks for that. I have had a look at payscale, but I’m not sure I trust the numbers. It the areas I’ve worked in, they tend to miss the mark.

We’ve just hooked up with an established producer which should help us get more concrete with our numbers (but there’s always the issue that established producers work with established numbers which we’re trying _not_ to do).

We’ll see.

--
James Kelly
fo co mo so

focomoso 13 April 2008 07:01 PM

We’ve just hooked up with an established producer which should help us get more concrete with our numbers

Cool, and Congrats!  Glad to hear it (and Thanks for the update :) ).