Motion designer · Lincoln, NE · Booking animation slots from three weeks out.
Motion design in Lincoln. Every portfolio in this trade opens with a reel and the word “storytelling”. This one opens with the number nobody publishes: what the same change request costs at each of the six stages, from one hour to forty-eight.
One change request, six moments
“Move the logo reveal eight frames later, and make the type a sans instead of the serif.”
The same sentence at every stage below — a 48× spread, and the client never sees the curve until they are already on the expensive end of it.
| Stage | Hours | Still open | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brief and references Still open | 1 h | Everything Locked: nothing | It is a sentence in a document. At this stage the request is not a change at all — it is the brief being written correctly the first time. |
| Style frames Still open | 2 h | Type, colour, the whole look Locked: roughly a day of exploration | Two or three static frames exist. Swapping a serif for a sans is a font menu and a re-export; the eight frames do not exist yet to move. |
| Storyboard Still open | 4 h | Order, timing, what is on screen Locked: the look | Panels get redrawn and the timing column gets re-typed. This is the last stage where "move it eight frames" is a note rather than an operation. |
| Animatic Closing | 8 h | Timing, within reason Locked: structure and look | Now the eight frames are real: everything downstream of the reveal shifts, and the sound design that was cut to the old timing has to move with it. |
| Animation Already paid for | 20 h | Almost nothing, cheaply Locked: timing, look, structure | Every layer after the reveal is keyframed against it. Changing the typeface re-flows text that has been individually animated, character by character. |
| Render and delivery Already paid for | 48 h | Nothing Locked: all of it, in eleven output files | The change itself is still twenty hours. The other twenty-eight are re-rendering, re-grading, re-versioning every ratio and length, and re-doing QC on all of them. |
Same sentence, same designer, same project file. The only variable is when it arrives. Nobody hides this on purpose — it simply never gets said until it has already happened to somebody, at which point it sounds like an excuse instead of a schedule.
Hours of work per finished second
A thirty-second video is not a quantity of motion work. These are hours of animation per finished second, and the spread between the top and the bottom of this list is why two “thirty-second videos” can differ in price by more than an order of magnitude.
120 frames · five seconds at 24fps
A 35× spread between “held title card, simple fade” and “simulation — cloth, smoke, crowd”. That is why the first question is always what is in the shots, and why a quote given before a shot list exists is a guess with a number attached to it.
Reviewing
"It feels slow" costs an hour of guessing. "00:04:12 to 00:05:06 — this hold is too long" costs four minutes. Every review link has a frame counter on it and using it is the single biggest favour a client can do a motion designer.
"Make the logo pop" is not a note; "the logo arrives before I have finished reading the line above it" is. The first one asks me to guess at a fix, the second one tells me what is actually wrong, and the fix is my job.
Three notes trickled over four days cost about twice one consolidated list, because each one restarts a render and re-opens a decision that was closed. If more people have to see it, wait for them.
Rates
$720
Ten hours. Most projects are quoted as a fixed price built from this and the per-second table above, not billed by the day.
From $5,800
Lower thirds, transitions, endcard, logo build, delivered as editable project files as well as renders.
From $8,400
Priced from the shot list, per second, per type. A flat quote before the shot list exists is a guess with a number on it.
Quoted, always
See the curve. It is quoted rather than absorbed, because absorbing it silently is how a project runs 40% over and nobody can say when.
Included
Yours at delivery, with the fonts named and the layers labelled. A tidy file is a deliverable, not a favour.
Common questions
Yes, and it will tell you what I can make rather than how a project with me runs. The curve on this page tells you the second thing, which is the one that decides whether you are happy in week six.
Because there is no photograph of motion design, and a grid of stock laptops would be this page arguing against its own copy. The reel is a link, sent in the first email, at the resolution it was made for rather than compressed into a website.
You get a quote for it, in hours, before anything moves — and quite often the honest answer is that the change is not worth what it costs and we should both say so. It is never silently absorbed; that is how a schedule stops meaning anything.
Both, plus Cinema 4D when a client already has a pipeline in it. This matters far less than anyone outside the trade expects — the software is the least interesting decision on any project.
Usually, and I will tell you early if the logo is going to fight it. Marks built with fine hairlines or tight counters tend to break up in motion at small sizes, which is a real constraint and not a preference.
Five to seven weeks, and the two review windows are most of the difference between the two numbers. The shot list decides the rest — see the per-second table.
Start something
Even a rough answer changes the quote more than the length does. Fields marked with an asterisk are required.