How much do you pay a clean up artist?

[ScottFarrell]

Hi everyone, Im working on a short film and I'd like to hire a clean up artist in the near future. I was wondering if anyone could tell me how much to pay as I have no experience doing this before. Do some people pay per drawing? Paying per second of footage wouldn't work for me since some shots are on 2's and some shots are on 6's or 8's. Also what ou would pay a student vs. a professional would help too. Much appreciation for any advice!! Thanks! -Scott

[slowtiger]

You pay according to time. If the cleanup takes a month full time, you pay enough for a month's living. You know how fast you are, so you should be able to calculate the necessary time. We don't know how complicated your characters are and how clean your roughs.

I have an old list of payments for studio jobs, all paid per second, separated like his:
- key cleanup
- key cleanup and inbetween
- inbetween
all with different rates, depending on feature film or TV work, freelancer or employee, and sometimes an assistant would earn some more if he was paired with an especially "difficult" animator (very messy roughs).

[D.T. Nethery]

I would agree with everything Slowtiger said, and I would also emphasize that the number of characters moving in the shot and complexity of the characters (the amount of "line mileage") must be calculated into the pay rate. Obviously , if the shot has two or three characters it is two or three times more work than a one character shot. A simple character with minimal details vs. a complex character with high line mileage . I've worked on simple characters that take 15 minutes to do a clean-up drawing vs. complex characters that take 2 hours to finish a drawing.

Calculate how long it would reasonably take to clean-up your characters (maybe by doing a few clean-ups yourself ) ... and calculate a fair pay rate based on how many drawings a day could a clean-up artist reasonably be expected to produce in a normal work day. If a reasonable average number of drawings would be 12 a day , and you have 250 drawings that need to be cleaned-up you can calculate how many days it will take the clean-up artist to complete it. If I were a clean-up artist bidding on the job I'd quote a day rate for the job , and if you as the producer know how many days it will probably take me to complete the job then you know the cost to clean-up the drawings.

[ScottFarrell]

Thanks for the advice guys! It makes a lot of sense and Ill time out how long it takes to do each drawing! I would say the quality is similar to Tim Burtons Oyster Boy shorts and mostly of just one character. Out of 40 shots, about 7 have 2 charcters.