But we only budgeted £500 for a video!
Ok, but we can’t make you a 2 minute explainer video for that.
Well, I don’t see why…it can’t be that hard, it’s just a cartoon.
There’s more to it than that. We have 3 or 4 people working on these videos at a time writing scripts, recording a voice-over, storyboarding, animating…
Oh, come on…my Johnny could make one of those videos on his iPad for free! You quoted us 7 times our budget for 2 minutes! It’s not going on the TV you know…
If it were a TV commercial, a client would probably be paying 40 times that budget for 30 seconds and it would only be available for people to see when it aired…and they’d pay a small fortune every time it did. After a conversation like that, the contact either asks ‘Johnny’ to make them a video (and it looks like the video in the header image of this post) or they go and find someone who will work for £500 (and it looks slightly better than the video in the header image of this post). Either way, if you’re hiring someone to create something to represent your company, it needs to look good. If it looks amateur, then you and your company come across like amateurs.
I’ve had the ‘how much?!’ conversation more times than I can remember. Someone has been set the task of having a video created for their company and they assume that it costs practically nothing and that anyone with even the most basic editing software could make one in a few hours. I can almost understand why people think this way. If you’ve never toyed around with animation, how would you know how much work goes into creating even a few seconds of animated video? Most people just see a short 2 minute cartoon and give no thought to the fact that it’s made up of more than images. There’s the initial concepts, the script, storyboards, a voice-over, an animatic etc. All things that people never think about when they watch a video on the web. Once a person realises how many stages there are to complete before we can get anywhere near to production and how many different people are involved, the price tag starts to make sense. In fact, most of the ‘how much?!’ conversations I’ve had end with the contact changing their mind and recognising that they’re getting quite the bargain.
Having an explainer video created for your business is something worth doing right. It will often be the first thing a visitor sees or at least the thing that makes the biggest impression. Sure, it’s not cheap but it’s definitely worth it and I would say that if it’s over your budget, you’d be better off not having an animated video than having a poor one.
If you’d like to have an animated explainer video created to explain and promote your business, use the form below to contact us.
