seeking advice.

[sargumphigaus]

To the more experienced and established animators on this forum, I have a question for you all.

But first a little background. I collaborated on a video with youtuber Letsread! and Eden, both of which are narrators for things like Creepypastas, scary encounter stories, lets not meets, creepy stuff in general. My contribution was to animate the stories while they either acted or narrated the story. In addition, I worked out the sound design and editing in general on my end as well.



So anyways, the video was a fairly large success. Within 3 days, we've gotten 3000 hits, and the number continues to rise. The comments are overwhelmingly positive as well as the like to dislike ratio. Now I did this one for free, knowing that it would open doors to future prospects, opportunities and exposure. Since then, I've doubled my sub count. (which still isn't all that high, mind you)

I'm now receiving offers for more collabs from bigger people from all over the place. Some have offered to pay me, but some I'm willing to do for free due to the fact that they have so many subscribers, it would reach a lot more people than the one I just made, and would even draw more people to the aforementioned video as well. Right now, I'm just doing it all for exposure, but if this trend continues in my favor, we'll reach the inevitable crossroad.

Money.

I'm fairly certain that it's impossible to generate ad revenue off YouTube to a significant degree through animation alone. It just takes way too long. But as long as Narrators want to see animation on their pages, there's always a chance to establish.

I reckon that most animators charge based on hourly, like a thousand an hour...this is however unrealistic. My work approach is pretty fluid and straight forward to the point that it doesn't take me that long to animate things. For instance, the aforementioned video only took me a little over a month to complete. Which really isn't bad, all things considered. (number 10 alone only took me two weeks to do while juggling a 45 hour a week job in the mix) Now given my skill (which could obviously be improved in so many ways) and speed and efficiency, there will come a time where I turn around and start to charge people.

So! I'm wondering how much should I charge? I was thinking somewhere between 200 to 400 a video (this might be laughable for how high it is, or how low...i honestly don't know) I wouldn't be uploading them on my own you tube page, they'd be handed straight over to the YouTube client where it would be monetized and generative for their own revenue.

I'm sitting on one hell of an opportunity, but I want to make sure I go about this right. Any advice would be immensely appreciated.

[slowtiger]

If you work on something for a month full time, you should charge exactly what you need that month: rent, food, taxes, etc. Anything less is dumping, which is What We Don't Do.

[chucky]

That was really great Sargumphigaus. The storytelling was very good
If you could get your drawing up a little to match the quality of your story, direction and editing then it would be quite an achievement,
It wouldn't take much to make pieces like that amazing.
Maybe try some more freehand Techniques?
Use some scary brushes and losen it up, just make it less South Park " Not saying south Park isn'l good." You know what I mean ?
If you ever want any, help improving that part of your content, I for one would certainly be willing to give you pointers.
Message me and l could you a individual Skype tutorial to get the look that YOU really want.
I have no doubt that you have a very clear idea about that .
Thanks for sharing