How To Find the Right Animation Company to Meet your Video Requirements

Whatever your video project and whoever you are, hiring the right animation studio isn’t an easy task. Animated business videos or explainer videos are a great way for you to connect with your audience and increase your reach, but your whole project will be in another company’s hands that will be representing your brand or project so it’s an important decision to get right. So how do you go about choosing the right company and what are the factors that should be considered? Read on and let’s find out together…

budget

This is probably the most important factor and where most people would start. While cheaper than live action videos, animated videos aren’t always cheap. Depending on what style and needs you have they can be very expensive so it’s hugely important to align your budget with what’s possible so your expectations are met.

The following are common factors that will drastically affect the cost of your video.

• Originality
• Duration
• Complexity
• Audio
• Constraints

You generally get what you pay for and there are no magic shortcuts, but at the same time, expensive doesn’t always mean better. Talking to your animation company and coming up with a plan will allow you to get the most from your budget.

portfolio

When studying animation studios your first port of call before contact should be their portfolio pages. Nearly all great animation studios will be proudly displaying their work for all to see with categories, descriptions of the brief, dates and team members etc.

Things to consider and ask yourself from their portfolio:

• How large is their portfolio? The larger means the busier and more experienced
• What is the quality like? Quantity alone is no use if the results don’t look good across all brief (and therefore budget) types. Were they interesting, did they hold your attention, did they look professional, did they look up to date?
• What was the audio like? Audio production is a huge part of animation, the best visuals in the world will be let down by poor music, bad voice acting and terrible sound effects.
• Was the story or message obvious? Was the brief realised? Did it achieve its goals? Was it understandable and was it likely to work?

customer service

At this point, you probably have a short list of companies you want to approach. You will be able to tell a lot by how they deal with you and how your project is likely to go and what your results will be like. A buzzing company that thrives upon challenges and new ideas that can’t wait to meet you to discuss your ideas in more detail should tell you everything. A company that doesn’t seem enthused, interrogated you over your budget or just wasn’t interested should also tell you everything you need to know!

testimonial

Looking at their reviews and testimonials should tell you how happy their clients were with their work and what they were like to deal with. Again, a great video might not be worth the hassle inflicted upon you by a poorly organised and hard-to-deal-with company.

After contacting a company and factoring all of the above you should have a very good idea of who is going to be best placed to deliver your animated video in the best possible way.