how to create an animation budget

So now the film is finally finished, I have been busy researching which are the right festivals to send it off to. I want to avoid sending it off to every festival, not least because of the massive costs implications but some are not really relevant to the piece.

All in all looking back at the film, yes there are certainly some things I wish I could have done differently. But overall I would say that given the animation time and animation budget constraints that I was under I’m very happy with the way it turned out.

Speaking of the animation budget I thought I would use this blog entry to show you the animation budget I put together way back in Nov 2009 when I started making the short.

Putting a budget together at the start is definitely a useful (if not wholly inaccurate) exercise. It helped me plot out what I needed to do, all the tasks that would be involved in making this happen. And there were a lot of tasks that needed to be done.

Some of the tasks listed below didn’t happen either, like the fur and hair, originally I wanted to digitise the fur, such that it would be like having the Dodo and Mammoth covered in glowing-pulsating fibre optic fur. In the end we went for a premiere plugin to do the job for us.

Looking back at it now, I think that I would at least quadruple the amount of time spent of the concept stage and add an animatic into the list. Putting the prep work in here will save loads further down the line.

All values are in £ sterling.

Fig. 1 Budget as I estimated costs, date Wednesday 11^th November 2009

I’m not a producer, well not a producer who’s ever had a budget to play with, I think the cost of £30k would be around the ball park. I did the whole project for zero.

I set the producer and director costs to zero. I figured if I was to ask for funding the people putting money in would not be too impressed if I asked to be paid a full producer and director wage. Although it is justified to be asked to be paid, right?