Thinking of creating an animation?
Good choice! Here's our little animation guide to walk you through what you might need to consider when commissioning an animation!
First we have what they call the 'discovery stage' where we get to understand your organisation or company and what message you want your animation to convey. We study the script (if you have one!) give you pointers and ask for any ideas you might have. Some people have lots of thoughts and ideas on how they want to portray their message and some have no idea at all. Once we have the final script and understand your budget we can start to mark up the script with animation ideas. At this stage we would also decide on the characters, draw them, and if you opt for a more complex animation we 'rig' them - this is where we give the characters 'bones' in order to make them move like a puppet, all the visuals would then be drawn up, and the animating starts!
This is fairly labour intensive with many hours spent staring at a timeline and making things move (good fun for us!) You'll be sent progress snippets to make sure we're on the right track.
We then source a voiceover artist(s) which means listening through a whole 'lodda voices to try and match a person up with your script. We've also gone out and recorded service user's voices as part of participation projects for a number of charities in the UK, which adds a pretty cool authenticity to the animations....and gets us out of our office(s).
Sound effects are then added, each animation is different and not all animations suit a load of sound effects. The most moving animations have very very little sound at all. Many of our sound effects have been engineered by ourselves and come from our personal library. You might catch me in the middle of the city or by a river in the dales with a mic stuck to the end of a bamboo stick making sound effects.
Music... the final bit, this either goes really really well or nothing feels quite right! We have also created our own backing music.
But you're thinking how much will it cost?!
Well, it’s all about the style of the characters, the complexity of the animation, the length of the animation, how quick the client needs it and the time it takes to create all of that. There’s probably a mathematical formula to figure it all out...but if we were good at maths we probably wouldn’t be drawing things for a living.
This is why we’ll usually ask if you have a budget in mind, this can guide us with the complexity from the get-go. Much like a car salesperson needs a budget to work with, are you looking at a fiesta or a Jaguar?! Each animation is bespoke. If you need more movement, detailed characters or your ideas and script are particularly abstract it takes more time and can bump the budget up.
STEP 1 - Tell us what you want to communicate, what is your message?
STEP 2 - Write your script. We can help with this, we just remind you that it needs to be as short as you can make it. Lets make it snappy!
STEP 3 - Give us an idea of budget
Our animation rates start from £800 per minute of animation, contact us to find out more or share your thoughts.
Characters
Here are some examples of our characters. If you've seen characters you like elsewhere we can create our own version for your approval.
How long does an animation take to make?
It very much depends on the length and complexity of the animation project, and ultimately how much time your team may need to feedback throughout the project. It can take as little as 2 weeks or a few months based on the length of animation.
The process seems a bit overwhelming..
It really doesn't need to be complicated. You can have as much or as little involvement as you want. We're more than happy to get on with it. In fact, that should be our tagline.
What do I do next?
Contact me with your basic idea and what you want from the animation. If you have a budget, great. If not I can email over a quick estimate. Just share your thoughts and we'll come up with something together.