Animation for the things a camera cannot film

AED 12,000 to AED 90,000 covers most of what we are asked to build. The number moves on length, technique, whether characters need rigging, how many languages, and whether the script and voice-over are included. Anything quoted before those are known is a guess. We scope first, then price, and the scope document is yours whether or not you proceed. These are market ranges rather than a fixed rate card — the proposal carries the real figure.

Ranges enormously with technique, and that is the whole answer. Clean 2D motion graphics with a voice-over sits at the lower end of our range. Character animation roughly doubles it because every character needs rigging and performance. Detailed 3D product work is higher again. The single largest cost driver is not length, it is how many unique scenes the script demands.

Less per second than a sixty-second one, because the fixed costs of scripting, style development and sound are spread further. Whether it should be three minutes is the better question: completion rates fall sharply past about ninety seconds for most business audiences, so a longer video often costs more and gets watched less.

Usually because they are not the same brief. Check whether script, voice-over, sound design, revision rounds, additional formats and the source files are included. A quote at half the price with none of those is not cheaper, it is smaller, and the difference appears later as change requests.

You can make something with a template tool, and for internal use or a quick social post that is often a sensible decision. For anything customer-facing the limitation is not the animation, it is the script. Template tools do not fix a script that tries to say four things, which is what makes most explainer videos fail.

Film it if you can point a camera at it and if a real person would be more convincing. Animate it if it is invisible, abstract, unbuilt, or dangerous to film. Mixed is frequently the best value: a real person on camera, with animation only where it is actually needed.

Pick the one that suits the subject rather than the one that looked best on a showreel. Process and comparison want clean 2D. Products want 3D. Anything emotional wants characters or real people. We will show style frames before committing, which is the cheap point to change your mind.

Yes, and we would rather. The script decides the length, the complexity and therefore the price, and it is the single highest-leverage part of the project. Where you have a script already we will review it honestly before quoting against it.

Four to eight weeks for most projects. Roughly a third of that is script and storyboard, which feels slow and is what protects the schedule. Projects that skip ahead to animation reliably arrive later than ones that did not.

Two, written into the scope, at defined stages. Unlimited revisions in a proposal are either priced in already or a source of friction later. Being specific up front is better for both sides.

You do, including the project files and the assets. It is worth asking every studio you speak to, because keeping them is common and it makes every future update a new commission.

Yes, with Arabic voice-over and right-to-left layout handled natively. It needs to be in the plan from the storyboard, because Arabic changes text length, layout direction and timing. Adding it to a finished English animation means rebuilding a large part of it.

Completion rate first, because an animation nobody finishes has communicated nothing. Then whatever it was made to do: enquiries from the page it sits on, support tickets avoided, or sales team feedback on whether prospects arrive understanding the product.

Only if you have the project files. Without them a change usually means rebuilding the affected scenes from scratch, which is why we push so hard on file ownership. Send us what you have and we will tell you honestly what is possible.

In rough order: the number of unique scenes, whether characters need rigging, whether it is 3D, and how many languages. Length matters far less than people expect — a ninety-second film with six scenes costs less than a forty-five-second one with twenty. If the budget is fixed, the most effective lever is simplifying the script rather than shortening the runtime, and that is a conversation worth having before the quote rather than after.

Yes, and it usually improves the result. Working from your real illustration style, icons and colour system means the animation looks like it came from your company rather than from a stock template. Where the brand has no illustration language yet, we will develop one that can be reused afterwards rather than one that only exists inside this video.

Yes. Lottie files are vector-based, scale cleanly, weigh a fraction of a video file and can be recoloured in code, which makes them the right answer for interface animation, loading states and icons. It is a genuinely different discipline from producing a film and we handle both.

A clear statement of what the animation is for and who watches it, access to whoever knows the subject properly, your brand assets, and one named person who can approve. The last of those matters more than it sounds: the projects that overrun are almost always the ones where approval was distributed and nobody could say yes.

Wherever the decision is being made, which is frequently not the homepage. Product pages, sales follow-up emails, pitch decks and onboarding flows usually get more value from an explainer than a homepage does, because the viewer there already has the question the animation answers.