Everything people ask before working with me, answered properly. If something here is not clear, ask me and I will add it.
This is the question underneath most of the others, so here it is first.
Anyone can generate an image. Almost nobody can generate the same character, forty times, from forty angles, in different light, and have an audience believe it is one character. That gap is the entire job.
The models have no memory. Each generation is a fresh guess. Ask for your product twelve times and you get twelve slightly different products. On one image nobody notices. Across a cut, everybody does. Holding a film together means building every character, every location and every object as a locked reference before a single frame is made, then generating against those references and rejecting almost everything that comes back.
You are not paying for the button. You are paying for the person who knows which one of the twenty two is the shot, and why the other twenty one are not.
Roughly one generation in twenty two survives to a broadcast-standard cut. The industry rule of thumb is ten attempts per usable shot for good work, and far more when the tolerance is zero. Every one of those has to be looked at, judged and mostly thrown away. A thirty second commercial can mean several hundred generations to deliver ten shots.
The same thing you buy from any director. Judgement, taste and accountability. The tools changed. The job did not.
What you are not paying for is compute. That part is cheap and it is not the difficult part.
Three things move the price, and length is not really one of them.
A fifteen second hyper motion piece and a fifteen second commercial are the same length and nothing like the same job.
Starting points for international clients, before usage and any extras. Rates for clients in Pakistan are lower. The estimator gives you a figure for your actual project in a minute.
Paid advertising, broadcast use and rush delivery sit on top of these, and each one is shown to you in the estimate rather than appearing on an invoice later.
No, and it is a fair question to ask, so here is the straight answer.
These are introductory rates. I am building out my client portfolio, and I would rather spend that on real projects than on spec work nobody sees. What is discounted is the rate, not the work: the process, the tools and the standard are the same ones I use on my own films.
The practical consequence for you is timing. Rates rise once the first ten client projects are complete, and anything booked before that is held at the price you were quoted.
You can, and for some things you should. If you need one image for a post, make it yourself.
Where it stops working is consistency and finish. Most people can get one good frame in an afternoon. Getting twelve frames that look like the same world, with the same character, cutting together with sound and a grade, on a deadline, is a different skill and it takes a while to build. If your time is worth more than the learning curve, that is the whole case.
Compared to a shoot with a crew, a location, talent and a post house, yes, considerably. You are not paying for any of those.
Compared to nothing, no. There is still a person doing the concepting, the design, the direction, the selection and the finish, and that person is what you are hiring. The saving is real, and it comes out of production overhead, not out of the creative work.
Top tier only, and chosen per shot rather than by habit. Different models are good at different things, and the right one for a character close-up is rarely the right one for a wide establishing move.
Every shot is usually run through more than one of these. It matters more than it sounds: on one of my own films, the identical prompt with the identical character reference came back from one model with the wrong coat and the wrong face, and from another with the character exactly right. Same instruction, same reference, different result. Knowing that, and checking for it, is part of the job.
Every recurring character is built first as a locked reference sheet: multiple angles, one lighting setup, one backdrop, with a written descriptor of the traits that must never change. Wardrobe or kit changes get their own sheet, generated from the first, changing exactly one thing.
Only then does shot generation start, and every shot prompt repeats those locked traits underneath the reference image. It is deliberate, and it is the difference between a set of nice images and a film that holds together.
On one recent character, the sheet and the shots that came from it took eighty nine generations before the work was usable. That is normal, and it is invisible in the final cut, which is the point.
The reason drafts arrive at lower resolution is not to save money. It is so that a change of direction costs an hour instead of a week.
Yes, if you send the actual files. Logos, packaging, a product, a book cover, a screen: anything that has to be reproduced exactly needs a real high resolution reference, not a description. Descriptions produce something plausible and wrong, every time.
On-screen text is the other one. Generated text is unreliable, so titles, captions and calls to action are added in the edit where they will be correct.
Concept, direction, design, shot design as boards, approved before anything is generated, generation, edit, sound and grade, plus two rounds of revisions and the delivery formats agreed in the brief. Nothing is billed that was not quoted.
Boards are not an upgrade. Nothing gets generated on a designed piece until you have seen and approved the shots on paper, because that is the only cheap moment to change your mind.
All of it is priced in the estimate before you commit to anything.
Because it changes what you are getting, not how hard I worked. A film running as paid advertising across a year is worth considerably more to your business than the same film on one organic post. This is how every part of the industry prices, from photography to voiceover, and it is why the estimate asks where the work will run.
You own the finished work, for the usage agreed in the brief.
Any character built for your project is yours. I do not reuse it, rent it out or put it in anyone else's film. It was made for you and it stays yours. There is no charge for that and no upgrade to buy, because it is not something you should have to pay extra to be sure of.
The one exception is the other direction. I keep a library of characters I built on my own time, and those are shared by default. If you use one and want it taken off the market so nobody else can, that is a buyout and it is priced in the estimate.
I keep the right to show the work in my own portfolio once it is public, unless you ask me not to. Nothing is ever shown before your launch.
A motion piece can be days. A designed commercial is usually one to two weeks. A film with a full cast of locked characters is longer, because the cast has to be built before the shots can start.
The honest answer is that the schedule is set by your approvals more than by my generating. Fast decisions make fast projects.
You will have approved the look, the boards and a draft cut long before there is a final version, which is exactly why the process is built that way. Two revision rounds are included. If the direction changes after the brief is locked, that is a scope change rather than a revision, and I will tell you what it costs before doing it.
Yes, most of my work is international. Everything runs remotely and rates are quoted in your currency.
Build your project in the estimator and get a real range in about a minute, with no obligation and no email required to see it.
Let's make something
Brief, collaboration, or a half-formed idea you need help shaping. All welcome, and I reply to everything.
hello@Or start here, and skip the back and forth.
