I have worked with music video projects where the video was already storyboarded and having backgrounds and multiple artists working on different scenes, and the work totalled out to over well over $500 worth of work just for my portion of the workload, and I was only doing character animations for 1-3 second scenes at a time with no background or extra object, no storyboarding or animation planning sketches (the director had orchestrated all of this at great length by the time I jumped in). Unless you are going for a very simplistic and short music video, $500 would not cut it.
Any animator that would be taking this, taking it seriously, and who would end up with a video that was any amount of enjoyability to watch would have to take almost right up to the deadline to produce the work needed. Hypothetically, if they were to make this in 60 hours, they would be making $8.33 an hour. But if they (more realistically) spent a lot of time on it every day starting from this very moment and ending on the day of the deadline, it would have been created for $8.33 per day.
I will have to check your work out, because it sounds fun. I like me some metal, and I love me some games, so sounds worth a look.
But yes, the fun aspect of making videos aside, the $500 price tag is very cheap unless you were copping out and having somebody pull a funny video out of their ass by using ripped sprites stolen from licensed games and hastily put together by sliding things around in Flash. A more realistic budget would be more toward the $3-$5,000 range for a legitimate video. But every video is different, and I feel like I'm underestimating it here just to make the news not so hard to swallow.
Hope this helps put it into a more realistic perspective.