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Originally Posted by J Harker  While i completely appreciate you wouldn't be able to give actual costings. I was merely hoping for some ballpark figures to give some perpective on something I'm clueless about. |
The trouble is, this is a "how long is a piece of string?" question - and it also takes into account things like pricing and marketing, which have nothing to do with me: my job is to receive a budget from Arrow and spend it as efficiently as possible.
With regard to existing extras, the price is set by the rightsholder, and usually open to negotiation - in general you'd be talking three or low four figures for an existing commentary, documentary or short film. (The BBC once asked me for £10K for a 25-minute documentary, but that would have blown my entire extras budget and then some, so I went down a different route instead.)
If individual extras are created from scratch, costs are similar: three or low four figures per item, depending on the ingredients. The presenter can make a hefty difference here - a big name like Kim Newman will obviously cost more than someone less renowned, although he was such an obvious choice for the Poe and Lovecraft overviews that I was happy to stump up his fee. (And delighted with the results: he was an absolute pleasure to edit.)
A full-scale restoration from scratch will generally cost £10-15K and upwards, depending on the condition of the film elements. But it's hard to tell upfront what the final cost will be, which is why for security we budgeted £20K for the Kickstarter target for
Goto, Isle of Love, taking Kickstarter fees and contingency costs into account. But in the end the latter weren't necessary, so when we ended up with £26K we ultimately had a fair bit more than just £6K surplus. Which is why we were able not only to do HD scans of the five shorts that we said we'd try to scan, but we were able to throw in a few more - the short version of
The Beast, the on-set footage, the three commercials, the alternative cut of
A Private Collection and so on.