I need some help billing for some iMovie/iDVD work

[number9]

Ok, so here's the situation:

We threw my grand parents a 50th Anniversary party this past weekend and I had been volunteered to make a movie/slideshow of pictures from their 5 years of marriage, covering everything from their wedding to all of us grandkids' births and big milestones, and everything in between. We scanned close to 300 pictures, and once that process was done I spent a good portion of 3 to 4 days putting them together, adding transitions, titles, effects, a soundtrack that actually fit the content, and all that good stuff. It wasn't by any means a cheap home movie thing, but a decent 10 minute movie with alright production value that look semi-professional. We then burned 5 copies to DVD, and also provided a projector, speakers, and the DVD player to show it at the party. 80 of my grand parents closest friends and family members thought we paid someone to do it.

There's a whole big year long fiasco about the cost of this party and the logistics that came out of my uncles acting like 12 year olds regarding money which I will spare you all the details of. So I need some opinions on how much what I did would cost if we had gone to your standard home movie production business and had it done professionally. I know there are a lot of graphic designers and artists here, as I've browsed a lot of the "help me with this logo design" threads, so if you could offer your two cents, I'd really appreciate it.

1 week of work scanning, editing, and piecing together the 10 minute movie
plus the "rental" of the projection equipment.


I appreciate the help!

 

[NotFound]

Cost of rental products + how ever much you believe your time is worth. I don't think I can really justify what I would charge because if it were my own family pay wouldn't be an issue. Then again, I don't know your situation there, but I don't have any hardships among family members.

 

[hobbbz]

Time spent X Hourly rate

A Junior graphic designer rate could be around $25/hr I suppose.

So, if you worked 80 hours it's $2000

 

[LeviG]

OK first off I'm UK based so please allow a slight variation for currency etc, I suppose you could say a straight £1 to $1 would work well enough.

If it was a solid week of work I would probably be looking at somewhere between £1000-1500 for the video work alone, now this does depend on how difficult the video etc was but thats a fair ball park figure in my view. Some would probably charge more and some less though.
Hire, depends more on where you are and I would say ring a couple of places to get a rough idea but I would say atleast a couple of hundred for the hire of said items.

So for ball park estimate (in dollars) I would say $1200-2000 all in.

Now I know it might seem high but you have to consider the field it is, not just that it was done in iMovie (thats irrelevant) and even if you only spent a total of 40 hours (stupid eu regs) on the video work thats still only $25-37.5 and hour. I've seen designers charging in the region of $60 an hour on some freelance sites.

I agree with andrewxps to some extent regarding family work, you don't charge for things for close family (parents, grandparents, brothers/sisters) but anything outside that I would probably charge for but I'm not exactly close with anyone outside my close family.
However I have a feeling that this is more down to a relative saying that your family didn't pull its weight in regards to the 'financial' contribution in which case it does make it a slightly more awkward situation.

 

[number9]

Thanks for the input. I'm not actually going to charge any family members for the work. Its more that of my grand parent's four children, they agreed that they'd spend a certain amount of money on the whole thing as some of them were in less of an ideal situation to be able to afford the details that my grand parents had hinted at. So here it is 3 days after the party and all of a sudden things that my uncles were supposed to take care of now cost hundreds of dollars more than everyone agreed they would, and they are then asking for money from my parents and my aunt, and not in the nicest way either. So basically they're being dicks about it and we're saying that if they really want to start being stupid over money they weren't supposed to spend, then hey, we saved you $2000 or however much the time we spent working on the video that we HAD to have.

So I'm not actually going to charge anyone, just looking for some leverage to keep my uncles from causing any more problems than they already have. Thanks again for the input!

 

[swwack91]

i work as a video editor for the hypothetical "home video production business" and i can tell you that for a 300 picture slideshow and 1 DVD copy of it, it would coast EXACTLY $572.00.

in the U.S. that is.

that's pretty much the barebones project, though. being that you made your slideshow for your family, you almost definitely put more glitter and glam into the movie than we would.