I'll start with a blog about my experiences with freelance animation.
During my first year of University, after the release of The Safety Gnome I was contacted by someone online asking me to make them a pilot episode for their planned YouTube series. Due to being unemployed and a student, I jumped on the opportunity to make some money. I also got a classmate involved as a second animator.
I'll let a previous journal from my Deviant Art talk you through how that project went:
A few of you may know of the commission I took some time back. Seeing as I'm being made out as a bad guy for it, I just thought I'd post my side of things now that the project has pretty much come to an end.
First of all, as much as I brought it up, the creator of the show had some crazy goals in mind that I'm pretty sure nobody would have been able to go along with for long.
A bi-weekly, 4 minute long series with a team of two animators, who happen to be students with their own work to do as well.
I originally took up the job for myself, as being a student, I'm pretty damn poor, and some paid experience for something new seemed pretty good, although it was severely underpaid.
Anyways, after a while, I mentioned that the bi-weekly target would be pretty much impossible to reach on my own, even with the really crappy animation I had to adapt to to fit the schedule.
Enter animator #2, Mr.CurlyPanda. Things started to speed up a little, although we still weren't hitting deadlines any time soon as we were going through our finals, but the creator said this wasn't a huge problem seeing as this was a trial episode.
For a while, things were going ok, until the production started going a little... iffy.
I've already had to walk away from a project in the past due to it pretty much wanting to rip off a competing idea, so when we're given a picture of Derpy Hooves and told to shove a human version of her in the background, it starts to get a little annoying. There were a few instances of this, rip off the Adventure Time logo, dress someone like another pony, etc.
We decided to throw everything we had at the project to finish it and get it out of the way, we decided to quit the series after that, as we'd never be able to hit the deadlines, and the work wasn't worth the pay, or particularly enjoyable. This was fine with the creator, he went on his way, and as far as we were concerned, the project was over.
A few weeks later the animation is released and now has a soundtrack and a fundraiser campaign going. Asking $70 000 for a poorly written and animated show is kinda dumb...
So that's where it leaves us now, the project was cancelled, and we're all ready to go our separate ways. I just hope that this bad experience hasn't left a bad example for the rest of my work, CurlyPanda explained the scenario in the comments on the late video, and I mentioned that I don't wish to be credited for it as I really can't afford any hits against me at this stage in my development.
So hopefully that's cleared things up, long story short, due to a pretty much impossible schedule from an inexperienced client, the final product turned out to be a huge flop. At first I thought I was making a simple tester episode, the creator took things way out of hand by suddenly asking for $70 000 for it, so I really wanted to get out of the crashing train before things turned sour. I just needed to write this journal to tell my side of the story.
Safe to say I'm going to be a bit more cautious with commissions now, I have one lined up that seems a lot more reliable, and we have some smaller work planned too to make sure things can run smoothly, hopefully this experience won't leave anyone distrusting of me.
So that's a summary of a project that didn't quite work out, you can see an early version of the video here, in contract to my usual work, you can see how I wasn't happy with the result:
Aside from that, I've just been doing a few smaller commisisons.
They're severely underpaid, but help to branch out a little and at the moment, any money I'm bringing in is better than nothing, you can see some examples here, they don't quite meet my usual quality bar because they're experimental:
LiDia
Cthulhu
To sum up my overall attitude towards freelance work, I'd have to say that if someone has vision, and an idea that's actually thought out, then things can go well, the more heart they put into the proposed idea, the more vision translates into the final piece.
