What should I learn to make something like this piece?

[Graham Quince]

Gosh, there’s a lot of different things going on. The big skill you need is patience.

I’d suggest theres:

• Animated shape paths
• CC Sphere for the spheres with textures from precomps
• Plenty of stacked glows
• There’s some puppet tool use in there with the plants

Thanks to it being on Instagram, every time I click off to add a bullet point it resets and being Instagram I can’t seem to scrub forward, so I gave up. Budget for something like this, pick an hourly rate you won’t drop below and assume 3 hours per shot/element. Spinning globe with eyes and cartoon-y background, that’s probably 3 hours. Add the hands and drop, another hour. Blobs attacking a sphere, 1-2 hours to get the look right, another hour to duplicate the blobs.

Once you’ve scoped it out, add 25% again for revisions. If your time comes in at 20 hours, add an extra 5 hours. But make it clear that’s what it is, e.g.

“It’ll take 20 hours, plus I’ve also budgeted 5 hours for revisions. These are for minor revisions, allowing for re-timing, colour changes of course. If you want new sequences or completely new sequences, that will need to be estimated separately”.

Storyboards, no matter how basic, will be your friend here.