I studied animation in Japan and am currently employed at a studio here, haven’t started working full time yet but I do know prices for most things, including studio work and freelance stuff so I tried calculating a real price for the MV.
Alice is still an amateur and their sakuga is choppy at best, and off model at worst. LO is okay I guess, there are a few cuts which could have a lot better composition but it’s fine for someone at their level.
I counted approximately 42 cuts, at current industry rates (max. Around 60-70$ per cut for genga), animated in 3’s or maybe even 4’s as there’s some choppy cuts we could do 12$ median per cut for douga, same for shiage/coloring. As for compositing price varies but as it’s a one-man project I’d just add 800$ on top of everything (around 100$ per cut). That would be around 3500 + 800 so 4300$ as a base price. I’m not taking into account 2gen, enshutsu and a whole lot other stuff as those usually don’t happen in a 1-man operation.
Since Alice did it alone and it takes a lot of time to work on a large project on your own (and they have done the story boarding/character sheets/settei, etc by themselves) I’d say realistically maybe 10k-15kusd. If they were more experienced and a better artist it could go up to 30k+ and if they hired other people to help I’d say maybe 50k+ but at the moment I’m comfortable saying this project is worth anywhere between 10-20k usd. I wouldn’t pay more than that for that quality. Take into account Marine’s MV, the one where she’s in the pirate boat with her crew, was around 50k, and that was professional work (I’m sure MariBako was a lot more expensive though).
Now, it’s completely possible Alice took less money due to being a fan and the work being more of a passion project than anything, but we can’t know that unless Bae or Alice talk about it directly.
