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By the time you are going to meet your first client you should make up your mind about how much to charge for your 3D work.
Stick to the going industry rates. That is:
- US$50.00 - US$150.00/hour creative time
- US$15.00 - US$35.00/hour rendering time
If you are skilled and doing professional work, be it your first or last job, you will do the community of 3D-professionals a major dis-service to charge way under the free prices. Further you will never be able to get good money out of that client because they think of you as free or really cheap. If you are competent you should start at around US$50 an hour.
Free work creates much more free work. Most of the time you perform pro bono (free) work this will never get you into any market. Do "free-of-charge"-work only as a 'pet' project you do in your free time that you might like to have in your portfolio. Many designers have done a lot of free work to try to get into the market. It gave them a great portfolio, but they almost never got paying work from those clients, only promises that they'd be able to pay for it in a couple more jobs. The best clients to deal with have been the high-paying ones. They have no time to haggle, and believe that good work deserves good pay.
Overhead in a successful animation firm is high. There must be sufficient cash flow to make software/hardware purchases for specific jobs, and also enough to make the payroll before you receive that final check for the completed job. If you want your company to expand you must meet these expenses.
Good clients are interested in quality and reliability and turnaround time. Do not compromise your client base by attracting the wrong customers with below market prices.
Further hints:
- Separate the design and production phases of your project. Ideally, you shouldn't be designing and producing at the same time (Also refer to: "Each modification of your scene takes longer than estimated earlier.")
- Respect the sacrifices you've made to get to whatever level you're at, don't sell yourself short! Nobody is doing you a favor by "giving" you work.
- Some projects have both a spoken and unspoken agenda. Deal with this by brainstorming the most unlikely and ridiculous ideas as sketches, magazine clippings turned into crude collages, etc. then presenting them as though you think they are reasonable and very close to completion on your part. You will want to understand what your clients don't want. You will also want to get them involved in the creative process in a way they'll feel less uptight expressing themselves in a decisive manner. In many cases you can't expect your client to have a concrete vision of what they really want. In a lot of cases what they really want is for you to tell them what they want, but make it seem like their input. At the very least it's up to you to educate your clients and previsualize for them. Tell them up front what's possible, what's trivial, and what's decidedly non-trivial.
- Insist upon a cutoff date for changes. Clients don't inherently know how changes made on a whim can ripple backwards through your design and totally screw up your estimates. Insist upon a signature stating that additional revisions to the design beyond the cutoff date will be considered as billable work in addition to the work you bid on.
- Use a filing strategy involving meaningful file names allowing for easy indexing of multiple iterations. Save a new version of files after meaningful changes. By looking at a file name you should have a clear idea where that file fits into your ongoing development. And of course, you're archiving all your work as you go. Should your system go down, how many hours of work can you afford to lose?
- Communication is everything. If you ever find yourself unsure is there a contact number you can call? A little delegation can go a long way. Some people respond well to daily communication and involvement with the pieces you're putting together. But that should be happening primarily during the previsualization for the most part. You've got to keep this fiasco under control! Let the client feel like they're making choices, but be strategic about when those choices are offered. Specifically, during the production phase you shouldn't have to think like a designer; at that point its all about execution, consistency, and inevitability.
- Take care about who owns what. What rights do you have on the models / files / images you designed after the project is finished? Are you allowed to reuse them or not? Make sure you get this written down in the contract. If your client has to deliver certain graphics / items / equipment / software pp. necessarry for you to get started on the job, make sure this appears in your contract aswell together with a deadline for the delivery.
- Be extremely carefull when calculating deadline-dates. When cooperating with professional clients this might become a matter of cost for you. Sometimes you might encounter terms of "liquidated damages" linked to deadlines. This means you got to pay if you exceed this date...
- If you want to be on safe ground for the legal terms, here is one way you might want to go:
- Stage 1 - Scope. If a client already has a technical scope or RFP (request for proposal) don't recreate the wheel. Most of the small projects don't need this stage to be formalized and it wouldn't be clever to charge for it. Larger projects will most certainly need this done and this is where consultation fees apply. There is no question though how many "images" or "anims" are in the project because you have agreed to the project scope. The scope budget is finalized before the actual work begins. "Scope Creep" is addressed so that if the client changes the agreed upon project scope they understand that they will be billed separatly for these items.
- Stage 2 - Flow & Content. If we performed the scope we would produce a project flowchart from it. If a RFP was presented we would have created the design flow from this. At this stage we outline client deliverables and developer deliverables. The bulk of the client's static and database content is also gathered here. Once the flowchart is agreed upon the client is faxed the signature form and the hardcopy of the flowchart to sign and return.
- Stage 3 - Design. Using the signature from Stage 2, the designers create a design sample for the client to approve and post it on the web in a secured area of our site. Both an entry page and a coordinating backpage sample are posted. Once the client approves the web sample they are faxed both the
signature form and the design sample hardcopy to sign and return.
- Stage 4 - Programming & Scripting. The designers will do the models, create the other backend graphics and do the animation and stuff. It will be tested and then release it to the client in the same passworded area on our server. The client is allowed to make any corrections that are in keeping with their agreed upon scope. We are totally responsible for correcting anything due to our error. Client verbally accepts site and is faxed the same signature sheet along with a completion certificate to sign and return. Once this is done we deliver the whole thing as fixed in the contract.
compiled with hints from:
Gary Boodhoo <gboodhoo@mindspring.com>,
Ed Giandomenico <egiandomenico@swales.com>,
Patrick Lichty <voyd@raex.com>,
bayard <bvocal@mindspring.com> and
Michelle <poptart7o4@aol.comet>
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