New Machinima - Hit Series!

The title will be called "Breaking Ground" It hasnt been produced yet. But it will be in the making soon enough. I will be the main writer for "Breaking Ground"

I havent yet decided should it be one show or a monthly 10-20 minute series. When my ideas are finished and clear, I will get in touch with Machinima pros to tag along with me and produce "Breaking Ground"

However soon when everything is planned out we will need to gather actors and such. So be on the lookout for this Machinima Title.

Its based on a Mafia Family, or more like a crew. A modern day mafia ( The Sopranos would be a example). It focuses on their struggles and what the Mafia is like. We will make it realistic as possible.

But this is few of the many details I feel to express now, as for it hasnt really been decided on.

If you are a Machinima Producer Please Contact me in SL - Rico Roizman. Or on aim - R80 Roizman. Or on Skype - legend_42rt.

Please post and tell me what you think about this.

If I had made a movie it would be at least two hours long. But its always better to break it down into series.

So I guess Ill make it a monthly series probaly. But if things are going faster than expected. And I have the time, It become a weekly series. But a weekly machinima series with all of this interesting action and suspense will take effort. Butr we'll see. Its possible.

Can we presume that because you are specifically requesting machinima pros that you have an appropriate 'pro-level' budget with which to pay for their services?

If you're looking to hire someone to do this, you're talking about $35 - $50 USD per hour. Thats about the going rate for most of us right now.

We (WBA-Advertising) have done some short movies showing gang type shoot outs. In my estimation, 20 minutes of finished film takes around 480gb of raw data (assuming everything is planned right and goes smoothly, no continous retakes), this would be converted into a movie of about 120mb to get 100kbps data rate for showing in SL.
However we don't 'play' at making machinima, like many others here, it's not a hobby, its a core business. 4 streaming servers with 7.6tb bandwidth doesn't come cheap.
If you are interested, and have a real budget, feel free to contact me in game and I'll show you round some of our work and technologies. BTW, we also have a modelling agency with actors, within our group of companies, also set builders, but would welcome working with other groups/skills and talents.

Rico,

I've been promoting and educating about machinima for over 13 months now. If you have any questions, please feel free to find me in-world. The going rate for machinimists is 30-50 USD per hour. Anyone that tells you higher will be trying to rip you off, or their name is Pierce Portocarrero or BuhBuhCuh Fairchild and they command that much because of their excellence. When people quote those rates, it's because they were established long before most of them even started making machinima.

Machinima is very time intensive. You want a 2 hour movie broken up monthly? Let's say you divide it by 20 minutes. It could come out to be less, but just to estimate, that's at LEAST 20 hours of editing, not counting filming time. It's going to turn out to be a 1200-1500 dollar project at the bare minimum. If that is something you're still interested in, please contact me and I can refer you out to someone whose work I know to be excellent.

~moo

Do you mean 20 hours editing per 20 minute episode or 20 hours for the entire 2 hour project, moo? Even 20 hours per episode sounds overly optimistic for a frame-perfect fine cut. I would have said 40-50 hours per 20 would be a more reasonable figure if you're looking for something that isn't riddled with glitches, synced with your soundtrack and is generally professional (if not broadcast) quality. That's not including time needed for sfx or motion graphics. Once you start getting serious with them your time can really blow out. Some of the shots in Mine! took 6 hours or more to do and they last less than a second.

Always depends on the project, amount of footage, producer, and/or editor. A short project with a lot of footage and quick cuts is going to take a lot longer then a straight foreward - scripted - 4:1 shot ratio episode.

I've done 2 hour docs that took a better part of a year to cut and commercials in under 4 hours (including synching sound). A couple of years ago I was churning out 15 1-2min interview bites for a music channel per 8 hour day.

A professional editor can do frame-perfect final cuts surpizingly quick. That's what happens with years of practice, your eyes see where to cut and without thinking it's already on the timeline without a single glitch. And more specifically without adding a trasition effect to cover it up. If you expect to get 30-50 USD per hour (or more) you better be that quick to give more time to the important bits like story, pacing, structure, and visual emotional ques.

Personally, I've never liked the 1 hour per min budgeting. Mostly because we get paid by the day/week and tight deadlines means 18+ hour days. It should be based on the complexity of the cut with added time for indecisive producers.

To the OP: Just be sure to look at previous work prior to hiring. Don't let anyone push you into any decision before knowing if they are qualified. The quality of previous projects is a lot more important then the amount.

It can take more time than 1 hour per minute or less. It just depends on your storyline. It would possibly take double. It just depends. Ahh I'm tired and probably not making any sense. I'll leave it to the rest of yous. Good luck with your project though, Rico!

Yep, me too. Drama tends to be a different kettle of fish tho, which is what the OP was about. Heck, I've spent a week (50 hours) working with a sound editor on a 7 minute short I was directing. The picture edit took us another 50 or so hours. This is with top-class multi-award winning editors (picture and sound). Great work takes time. You need to budget for that if you expect great results.

Actually, where I live $US50/ hour is about entry level for a freelance editor. Most go for around $US150/hour. Motion graphic artists it's up to $400/hour.

The fun bit is trying to convince them that they're being indecisive and you should be paid more =).

Yep, I agree. The only reason I commented because I didn't want a client coming to me and saying mooMoney says a 20min film will only take you 20hours to edit, I'm only paying for 20 hours. I know you said AT LEAST but clients can be funny critters when it comes to time and money. Once had a client that told me that it would only take 4 hours to edit her 4 hours of raw footage into a 48 minute show. Love it when they do that.

I read your blog. I know why you're tired. You're making perfect sense.

It's true many people don't realise the time spent in post production, sorting through the clips for quality and useability of the raw data, especially if the scenes are made out of sequence to reduce setup/actors time.
My own ratio is somewhere between 5 minutes studio shooting time, to 2 hours post production time resulting in probably less than 1 minute of viewing footage, and thats without syncing to music/sound bytes. Add to that rendering, data rate balancing and ftping to the servers before previewing ingame. Sometimes I'll remake a shot/scene when I spot something over halfway through post production that will enhance the end product.

It is not clear what exactly is the requirement here for this project, and we would need far more information before comitting to any rate/costs. We have a scaleable set of rates to cope with the wide range of projects we take on.