Re: Blade II language: The price of conlanging

What did they want from you? A fully fledged lg, a la Klingon,
plus your time in training actors, dubbing, etc.? Or just half
a dozen sentences compatible with the original film?

$3K is, I think, about a month's gross salary for me & what
you described doesn't sound like a month's work.

It seems a shame to abandon the project, especially because no
way will the producers be able to find anyone else able to do
as good a job; they could contact me for a recommendation, but
I'd tell them you're the best!

I'd suggest pricing yourself at a rate equivalent to the rate
you're paid as a professional linguist. Then get back in touch
with the producers and offer to sell them $500 or $1000 worth
of your time. The product they get is whatever you can achieve
within the time they're willing to pay for. If they get less
than they were expecting then that should show them that
they underestimated what they were asking from you. Hopefully
this arrangement would be more transparent & the producers
could see they weren't being chiselled.

(I don't think it makes sense to place a monetary value on
the end product. The monetary value of things is what the market
will bear, which, by the sound of things, is $1000, not $3000.)

--And.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU]On
> Behalf Of J Matthew Pearson
> Sent: 08 February 2001 04:41
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: [CONLANG] Blade II language: The price of conlanging
>
>
> 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.
>