Explainer and promo video that people actually finish

What this actually solves

Two different people arrive at this page and they have the same symptom for different reasons.

The first is a founder whose product takes ninety seconds of talking to explain and who has watched people land on the homepage, read two paragraphs and leave. Nobody gives a website ninety seconds. The video is not a marketing ornament here, it is a compression device — it takes the explanation the founder gives on every sales call and makes it repeatable.

The second has a launch date. A trade show, a funding round, a product page going live, and a gap where the film should be. What they are buying is not creativity, it is certainty that something finished exists on the day.

Both of them are paying for the same underlying thing, which is that one good explainer has to work in more than one place at once. Sales sends it in email. Paid media cuts it into ads. The founder plays it in a pitch. That is what justifies the cost, and it is also why the format of the delivery matters as much as the film — a single 16:9 master only fits the places that play 16:9, and the feed where it has to stand upright will crop it badly.

The thing that ruins these projects is almost never the animation. It is the order the work is done in. What costs money on an explainer is re-doing something that was built before it was agreed.

How the work runs

Each stage ends with something written down that you have approved. Nothing downstream starts until the thing above it is settled.

1. Kickoff and the six questions. Where the video will play, what the viewer should do afterwards, what footage and brand assets already exist and in what condition, who is writing the script, who signs off, and whether there is a real date behind the deadline. Every one of those changes the quote. Half a day.
2. Script, in two columns. Picture on the left, audio on the right, timed against the words-per-minute maths so the runtime is real rather than hoped for. The first three seconds are written last and hardest — they carry the result, and they cannot be a logo animation or a greeting. Two to four days, including your rounds on it.
3. Storyboard and sign off. Twelve to eighteen shots, each with its number, timing, what is on screen, how it will be built, and how it leaves. It does not need to be beautiful — a text-only storyboard is enough for most corporate work. It needs to be approved. One to two days.
4. Voice before picture. Voiceover is recorded or generated first, with two or three sample reads for you to choose from. This is counterintuitive and non-negotiable — the voice sets the length and rhythm of every cut, and editing first means editing twice. One day.
5. Assets and rough cut. Illustrations, icons, screen recordings, stock and animation built shot by shot, then assembled into a rough cut with no music, no colour and a visible watermark. Three to five days.
6. Two revision rounds, then finish. Round one on structure and length, then sound design, music with the voice ducked underneath, colour, round two for the small things, captions, three aspect ratios and the delivery folder. Three to four days.

Tools, so you know what is behind it rather than a black box — DaVinci Resolve or Premiere for the edit, Fusion or After Effects for animation, ElevenLabs or a human reader for voice, Epidemic Sound or Artlist for music with the licence in your name, and Frame.io so your feedback arrives attached to a timecode instead of as the sentence something feels off.

What moves the price

The range is $300–$6,000 across 2–6 weeks, and three things decide where a particular project sits inside it.

What kind of animation it is. Clean motion graphics — type, shapes, icons, data — is a known quantity. Character animation, where a person has to move believably, is a different discipline and takes far longer to build for the same runtime. This is the first question we settle, because it is what separates the bottom of the range from the top.

Who writes and who approves. A script you have already signed off removes the least predictable phase of the job. At the other end, a project where approval runs through a committee genuinely costs more to make, because the work shifts from making frames to reconciling and chasing the rounds.

Whether the assets exist. Vector logo, brand colours, fonts, usable footage, clean product screenshots. When those arrive in good condition the project starts on day one. When the logo turns up as a JPEG lifted from a website and the footage was sent over WhatsApp — which re-compresses it and drops the resolution irreversibly — somebody has to rebuild them first.

What usually goes wrong

Animation begins before the storyboard is signed. This is the classic and it is always expensive. A character or a scene gets built, and in week three you decide he is wrong. Nothing on the timeline is touched until there is approval on paper, because paper is cheap to change and keyframes are not.

The script is longer than the runtime and nobody does the arithmetic. A script written to fill the page does not become the runtime you asked for; it becomes a voice artist reading at an unnatural speed, or a film that quietly runs well over. The word count is checked at draft stage, in front of you, before anyone gets attached to a paragraph.

The rough cut goes out with music and colour already on it. It looks better, you are delighted, and then it gets treated as final — so when you ask to cut one sentence, the music, the captions and every graphic downstream shift and have to be rebuilt. Rough cuts leave here with no music, no grade, a watermark and one line of instruction — comment on order and length only.