Finance
Invoice Template Document
One of the most important things to have as a freelance artist/animator is a clear and organized invoice letter. This letter will be used when you complete work for a client and will request the money due.
I created this invoice a while ago when I did client work for Mystifry in Microsoft Word. It includes information about the client, myself, a description of what work was provided and a table of payments with due dates. I included a reference page that shows previews of the work I provided to the client for transparency. I also included a terms and conditions to ensure payment is made.
Budgeting Sheet
One of the tasks I have done to help me understand my Animation role financially is complete a budgeting spreadsheet that shows my personal and work costs and how much it was cost monthly to sustain myself. I based the costs off of existing costs I already spend and hypothetical ones as there are some I am not sure about because I am still a student. However I researched average costs of certain things to help calculate. I then input my daily rate and it showed me the estimated amount of days I would have to work to be able to sustain myself. This sheet however may be subject to change due to outside factors.
Savings
When it comes to savings I thought up of two tiers of saving plans, short and mid term.
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Short Term (6 Months):
A week long trip to Japan: £1355
A new custom desktop PC: £2000
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Mid Term (2-5 years)
3 Months worth of Living Costs: £ 4,852.26
Salary and Pay Rates
I did some research using a couple of websites to see what the average salary of PreVIs animators are at different studios. I did this by researching on Glassdoor and PayScale.
Finding this out really helped out in completing the budget sheet. After finding this information, I was able to see on average how much income I would be gaining annually. I also researched certain taxes that would be applied to me.
After researching on the UK Government website I found out the income tax for salaries of average Pre Vis Animators would be at a basic rate which would be 20%. If I was a freelancer, I would have to pay a class 4 National Insurance rate which is 9.73%.
To determine my own daily rate, I took the average annual salary and broke it down monthly, weekly and then daily rates. I then took into account cost of supplies and general costs of living in London and determined that my estimated daily rate would be around £200