Re: Blade II language: The price of conlanging

Matt,

I for one am on your side.  They will spend several hundred thousand
dollars if not more on this movie.  $3000 for your creative work is
insignificant in comparison.

I troubleshoot and design software.  As a consultant I $1300 a day plus
expenses when on-site.  Working at the office I charge $110 /hr. with a
two hour minimum.   Usually, we will not ever start a project utill we
have $XXXX.XX up front to cover the research we must.

What you were doing is not much different. It takes the same sort of skill
to decode and create a colang as it does to puzzle thru old softeware code
and reconstruct something useable.

I seriously doubt the producer will get anyone halfway professional to
touch the project for less than about $10G.

I for one am behind your decision.

Levi

Spirit Bear (ShinZui Guma)

===============================================
Naturally of course... as our Creator intended!

Levi Caddell
levica@one.net
w3.one.net/~levica
ICQ: 19541914 (PapaBare)

On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, J Matthew Pearson wrote:

> Well, this is just to announce that my association with "Blade
> II" (the sequel to the Wesley Snipes movie of a couple years
> back) has ended.  As you may recall, I was being tapped by the
> makers of the sequel to revive the Vampire language from the
> first "Blade" movie, which was originally designed by Vicki
> Fromkin, a professor emerita in my department, now deceased.  As
> it turns out, the producer and I were unable to come to an
> agreement on the price, and so I suggested they find someone
> else.
>
> The whole thing has left me feeling very ambivalent.  I'll tell
> you guys how I decided to proceed, and you can tell me if you
> think I did the right thing or not:
>
> Faced with the daunting task of putting a monetary price on a
> conlanging project, I consulted some of my friends who are
> self-employed in various arts- and entertainment-related
> industries (e.g., graphic design), and who are thus used to
> negotiating fees for creative work.  They advised me to treat
> myself as a full-fledged professional/creative consultant, and to
> charge accordingly.  After all, they reasoned, creating an
> internally consistent language from scratch--and in such a way
> that it matches the vampire dialogue from the original "Blade"
> movie--is a highly developed skill, requiring considerable
> expertise.  The fact that I have a PhD in Linguistics and years
> of conlanging experience should count for *something*, they said.
>
> So I thought long and hard about how much time and effort the
> whole project would take, and what I what I considered the
> 'value' of the end product to be.  After much debate, I arrived
> at a lump sum of $3,000.  I quoted my price to the producer and
> she was, to say the least, dumbfounded--even outraged--at my
> audacity:  She was expecting to pay no more than $500 for what
> she assumed would be just a couple hours' work.  We haggled for a
> bit, but once I realised that she was only prepared to go as high
> as $1,000, I said no thank you.  And that was that.
>
> Now I don't know what to think.  On the one hand, I'm proud of
> myself for having stood my ground, and for having the
> self-respect (as a linguist *and* as a conlang artist) to charge
> what I thought my product was really worth, rather than what the
> market would bear.  But on the other hand, I'm disappointed at
> having thrown away the opportunity to see "Vampire dialogue
> created by Dr. Matthew Pearson" in the closing credits of a major
> Hollywood movie.  I'm also wondering if I wasn't being a wee bit
> arrogant in asking quite so much for what was really only a few
> hours of work (and very entertaining work at that).
>
> So what do you guys think?  We all agree that conlanging is an
> art, but was I right to charge as much as a portrait painter or
> graphic artist might charge for a comparable amount of labour?
> How do you put a price on conlangs, anyway?
>
> Matt.
>
>