I see posts all the time talking about the million dollar special effects and such, but isn’t it just a team of people using software? Why and how do (decent) special effects have such a high price?
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One seat of software licensing runs about $10k/year. Each employee is good for at least 2 seats, so there’s $20k/year there.
Plus they need a high-end workstation and a company-shared cloud processing setup. Easily $5k/year per user.
Each artist needs to be a college grad with some serious experience. By the time you pay for their healthcare, benefits, overtime, bonuses, and other stuff it’s no less than $100k/year on average.
That’s $125k per worker of direct cost. A standard rule of thumb is to double that cost for overhead (Rent), sales, and management expenses with some profit baked in. Now we’re up to $250k/year per worker. Back calculate this and you have a billable rate around $125/hr per tech. Minimum. More for the A-Team. Probably double.
The Avengers had [261 people](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4154756/fullcredits/art_department) in their art department. They were kept busy for a solid 2 years at at least $125/hr, working at least (50wksx40hrs/wk) 2,000 hours per year.
All told, that’s an estimated GFX budget of $130 million. According to [this](https://www.xpathmedia.com/avengers-endgame-costs-breakdown/) it would seem they got a break, but I’m not too far off given that I’m pulling numbers out of my ass.
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