Short answer: A production sends vendors a bid package: the shot list and reference, plus any footage and camera data that exist. Each vendor breaks every shot into tasks, estimates the days each task needs, and returns a price with written assumptions and exclusions. The price only holds while those assumptions hold. When the work changes, a change order adjusts it.
Most people who ask how much visual effects cost are really asking how a price gets made. Nobody prices a shot in the abstract. A vendor prices a description of a shot, under a list of conditions, and the conditions matter as much as the number.
This page walks through that process from both sides: the producer sending shots out, and the studio answering. It does not give prices. There is no public rate card for this work, and a figure quoted without its assumptions would mislead more than it helps. What moves the price of an environment shot in particular is covered in what sets the cost of a matte painting shot.
What goes in a bid package
A bid package is everything a vendor needs to price the work without guessing. Most contain some version of the following.
- The shot list. One line per shot, with an ID, a description, the work type and whether the camera moves. This is usually called the breakdown, and what a VFX shot list is covers how it is built.
- Script pages and boards. The scenes the shots sit in, plus storyboards or previs (rough animated versions of a sequence) where they exist.
- Reference. Images that show the look the director wants, so "an old city" means the same thing to every bidder.
- Footage, if there is any. Before the shoot there is none and the bid is an estimate. After it, sample frames or a cut of the sequence turn guesses into counts.
Those four describe the work. The next three set the terms it is priced under.
- Technical spec. Resolution, colour space, file format and the number of extra frames either side of the cut.
- Schedule. When the plates will arrive, when the first versions are due, and when the work must be final.
- A response format. Often a spreadsheet the production wants every vendor to fill in the same way.
That last item is the closest thing to a standard VFX bidding template. Duncan McWilliam, founder of Outpost VFX, told VFX Voice that the breakdown is "often supplied by the client so we're filling in their spreadsheets". A production that sends its own template gets bids it can lay side by side. A production that sends a loose email gets bids in several formats and spends a week translating them.
How a vendor turns a shot into a price
On the vendor side, a bidding producer and a supervisor read the package together. The supervisor proposes a method for each shot. The producer turns that method into time and cost.
The usual unit is the artist day. Each shot is split into the tasks it needs, and each task gets an estimate in days for the department that does it. An environment shot on a moving camera might carry lines for tracking (recovering the camera's movement from the footage), roto (cutting the actors out by hand), the painting itself, projection setup and compositing. A locked-off sky replacement might carry two or three of those lines. Days are multiplied by a rate per department, and supervision and production management are added on top.
Anything shared between shots is bid once, as an asset. A digital building that appears in twelve shots is built once and then used twelve times, so the bid shows the build as its own line and each shot carries only the work of placing it. Shawn Walsh of Image Engine described his studio's approach to VFX Voice as "assessing CG builds, shots and management personnel expenditures" to find the cost first, before deciding what the work is worth in the market.
Bids also go through rounds. The first pass is often rough, built from the script before anything is shot. Claire Norman of Milk VFX told the same feature that vendors "often do alternative bids for the same shots", so the client can see where the money goes under different options. Expect the second or third round to be the one that matters.
Assumptions and exclusions are the contract
The price is the line people read first. The assumptions decide whether the price survives.
An assumption is a condition the vendor priced against: the camera is locked off, the plate is delivered with lens data, the shot is 120 frames, notes come in two rounds. An exclusion is work the vendor has not priced at all: roto on hair, stereo conversion, rebuilding a plate that was shot without a clean pass.
McWilliam put the logic plainly. His company bids to the script and then caveats it "with a document that goes into the bid contract" stating which assumptions each shot was based on. When the work grows, the vendor bills for the overage. When work drops out, the client gets credit for it.
For a producer, the practical rule is to read the assumptions before the totals. Two bids with the same number can describe different jobs. For a vendor, the rule is to write assumptions specific enough to point at later. "Standard complexity" protects nobody. "Locked-off camera, no hair edges, two rounds of notes" does.
Revisions and change orders
Most bids include a set number of review rounds per shot. Notes inside that number are part of the price. Notes beyond it, or notes that change what the shot is, are not.
That difference is where change orders come from. Wikipedia's definition from general project management applies here unchanged: a change order is "work that is added to or deleted from the original scope of work of a contract". In effects work, the usual triggers are a shot that gets longer in the edit, a camera move added after the bid, a new shot in an existing sequence, or a design change after painting has started.
A change order is not a penalty, and it doesn't mean the vendor bid low. It keeps a bid honest when the show changes. It becomes a problem when it turns into the main way a vendor makes money. Kathy Chasen-Hay of Skydance Productions told VFX Voice that when picking vendors, her team asks whether a vendor delivered on time, whether the work was strong, and "Did we get change-ordered to death?"
Both sides avoid that the same way. Agree the change process in the contract before work starts: who can request a change, how the vendor prices it, and who signs it before work begins. A change priced and signed in a day is routine. A month of unsigned changes, presented as one invoice at final, is how relationships end.
How do you compare VFX bids?
Put them on the same footing first, then compare.
1. Line up the shot list. Check every bid covers the same shots. A cheaper bid that dropped three shots is not cheaper. 2. Read the assumptions side by side. Look for a vendor that assumed a locked camera where another assumed a move, or that excluded roto the others included. 3. Compare methods, not just totals. One vendor may plan a 2D projection where another plans a full 3D build. Both can be right. They are not the same product. Once the scope matches, look at how each vendor plans to do it and what you get back.
4. Look at the asset lines. A vendor that builds a location as an asset will be cheaper on the next shot in that location. Meg Guidon of Freefolk noted that the vendor who builds custom assets usually keeps the later work that uses them, "due to the 'ownership' of the asset across the series". That is worth weighing on a long show. 5. Check the review rounds and delivery spec. Layers or a flat frame, how many rounds, which colour space. 6. Ask about capacity. Pieter Luypaert, a visual effects producer, told VFX Voice that one question in choosing a vendor is whether it "can commit to delivering a specific number of shots by a set date".
The term "open bid" is used loosely in this field. Some people mean a bid that shows its working, days per task per shot, rather than one total per shot. Others mean a package sent to any vendor who wants to respond, rather than a short list. If a production asks for an open bid, ask which one they mean. The first kind is the easier one to compare.
What the producer and the vendor each own
The production's visual effects producer owns the package, the template and the comparison. The vendor's bidding producer owns the breakdown into tasks and the assumptions. The two supervisors own the methods behind both.
Most bidding disputes trace back to one of those parts being left vague. A package with no camera information, a bid with no assumptions, or a change made by phone and never written down. Each one is cheap to fix at bid time. The questions to ask a VFX vendor are a good test of whether both sides have done it.
Bidding an environment package
Chumak Studio, in Toronto, paints environments for film and television and answers bids for digital matte painting from productions and from other studios. If you have a package with environment shots in it, send the breakdown and the assumptions will come back written out, shot by shot, before any total.
