How to read a VFX bid

A VFX bid is a set of beliefs about your production with a number attached. It believes your greenscreen was lit evenly. It believes the plates will arrive clean, that you'll take two rounds of notes and stop, that delivery means one version in one format. The number on the last page is those beliefs, priced. So when a bid lands, don't start with the number. Start with what it believes.

This is worth doing slowly on your first VFX-heavy production, because a hopeful bid and an honest one look identical from the outside. Same layout, same confidence. The difference is in the detail, and it's readable once you know where to look.

One number, or one line per shot

A serious bid is built shot by shot. Every shot gets a line: what it is, how hard it is, what it costs. Studios grade that difficulty in complexity tiers. The names vary, but the idea doesn't: a sky replacement and a full digital environment are different jobs, and a bid that prices them the same wasn't built from your script.

The alternative is the lump sum. One figure for all the VFX. That figure should worry you, because it means one of two things: the breakdown doesn't exist, or it exists and you're not being shown it. Either way you can't manage your own show. You can't cut a scene and know what you saved. You can't compare vendors line against line. You can't see which shots carry the risk.

Budgets tighten. When yours does, a shot-by-shot bid lets you trade: drop this, keep that, know the difference. A lump sum turns every change into a renegotiation you enter blind.

The assumptions are the bid

Somewhere in a good bid is a section listing what it assumes. What condition the plates arrive in. How the greenscreen was shot. How many revision rounds are included. What delivery means: resolution, format, how many versions. Read that section more carefully than you read the numbers, because the numbers are only true while the assumptions hold.

A revision round, in plain language, is one full pass of feedback: your notes go in, a new version comes back. A serious bid says how many rounds each shot includes and where the line sits between a revision and a new brief. Adjusting the thing we made is a revision. Asking for a different thing is a new brief. You want that line drawn before the work starts, while everyone is still relaxed.

The assumptions a bid doesn't state are the dangerous ones. An unstated assumption doesn't fail on day one. It fails in month two, when the greenscreen turns out to have spill, or the cut changes, or the plates need a week of preparation nobody priced. That's where overages live: in the beliefs nobody wrote down.

There are two ways to price the same job. Bid it best-case, where every assumption goes your way. That produces a smaller number, and smaller numbers win work. Or bid it worst-condition: assume the plates need prep, assume the spill, assume the cut moves and every round of notes gets used. We bid worst-condition, so the number you plan around is the number you finish on. If your material comes in cleaner than we assumed, the schedule breathes and delivery gets calmer. Nobody invoices you for the gap between hope and reality.

Episodic work teaches this quickly. Across shows like The Chosen and Testament, plates arrive in every condition a production schedule can produce. Bids that assume perfect material meet reality eventually, usually in the middle of post.

Overages, change orders, and the cheap bid

Plain definitions, because these words do a lot of quiet damage. An overage is work beyond what the bid described. A change order is that work priced and agreed before it happens. Both are normal. Productions change, and a change order is the honest way to handle it. What matters is when you hear about the money: in a conversation before the work, or on an invoice after it.

Which is why the cheapest bid often costs the most. In bids we're asked to look at, the low number usually comes from convenient assumptions, not from a cheaper way of doing the work. The gap between the cheap number and the real one doesn't disappear when you sign. It comes back mid-post as overages, when you have no time to change vendors and no leverage left. You don't pay less. You pay later, at a worse moment, with fewer options.

Six questions to ask any vendor

Including us. A studio that bid honestly will enjoy these questions, because every answer is already written down somewhere.

• Can we walk through this bid shot by shot? If there's nothing to walk through, that's your answer.
• What does this number assume about our plates, our greenscreen and our delivery specs?
• How many revision rounds are included, and where's the line between a revision and a new brief?
• Is this priced best-case or worst-condition? Which single assumption, if it's wrong, moves the number most?
• What would trigger a change order, and when would we hear about it?
• Which shots in this bid carry the most risk?

Straight answers to all six and you're probably holding an honest number. Hesitation on two or three tells you something the number doesn't.

And if there's a bid on your desk you can't quite read, bring it to a planning session. Ours included.