What to Know Before Buying an Animated Video
Prepping For a Meeting
Before you step into a conversation with a studio, here are three tips to prepare for that initial meeting:
🎯 Establish a clear goal
📝 Plan your video early
📅 Understand the scope
🗺️ Budget for experimentation
Let's dive in!
🎯 Establish a clear goal for your project
What do you want your audience to take away from watching the video? Is there a specific emotional tone you're looking to achieve? What essential information should you convey to your audience? Answering these questions will make it much easier to determine the goal of your project, which in turn informs style choices from color to design to motion.
Here are some sample goals for your animated video project:
I want to run through a product demo (typically for SaaS products)
I need to explain my product or service to my potential customers
I want to introduce my audience to my new brand identity
I need to train my new employees for compliance
I want to quickly show our donors how much impact we had on the community this year
Bonus Tip: At this stage, you can also gather motion references that reflect your brand's movement for additional direction for the animation team.
📝 Start planning your video early
Consider the time it takes to complete an animated video: A custom animated video can take anywhere from 1-8 weeks, depending on style choices, length, number of characters (if any), number of assets, established branding, and the number of people reviewing or providing feedback.
Once you establish the goals for the video, get that script started. Even with a rough outline, an animation studio can help translate your message with expert guidance on how your story should move your audience.
📅 Understanding scope (and its changes)
Many aspects of a video's production can change the scope of a project, so you want to avoid being in a situation where unexpected costs pop up.
Here are the top three reasons scopes change during animation production:
❗ Style direction changes after the concepts are approved.
❗ The script is updated last minute, requiring the voiceover artist to re-record.
❗ Additional characters are added after a storyboard is approved.
Style is the primary cost driver, so your initial style choice may impact the overall budget due to the number of steps it can take to achieve the final look. Therefore, studios should always provide detailed information and transparency about the cost of the tasks for a specific style.
Animation is the last stage of production in our pipeline. So if the team decides, after the animation is completed, to go back and redesign the characters, you've just added days to your production cycle, which likely impacts the final delivery times.
We help avoid additional costs by providing other helpful steps throughout our creative pipeline, such as an animatic, which helps clarify timing and script choices into perspective before animators move anything.
🗺️ Budget For Experimentation
(When Appropriate)
When you start to plan your budget, think about leaving room for experimentation and exploration of style, especially if you need guidance on what style you want to achieve or if you have (limited) brand guidelines.
With a tight budget, developing creative ways to expand your project's stylistic capabilities can take time. That's where talking with an expert creative at a studio can help you find the perfect solution for your video within your price point and provide different ways to stretch your dollars effectively.