Most people commissioning their first animated video assume the process works like a shoot. You agree an idea, the studio goes away and makes it, and you give notes at the end. That assumption is the single most expensive misunderstanding in animation.
Animation is built, not captured. Nothing exists until somebody makes it, frame by frame, and every frame depends on decisions made earlier. So the process is a series of stages, and each one exists to lock something down while changing it is still cheap. Understand what each stage locks and you understand how animation works, how long it takes, and where the budget goes.
Here is how a project actually runs, stage by stage, the way we run it on our 2D and 3D animation work.
1. The brief: deciding what the video has to do
Every project starts with a document, and the quality of that document decides how close the first cut lands. The brief covers who the video is for, what it has to achieve, where it will play, and what constraints it lives inside: deadline, brand rules, languages, deliverables and the budget range.
The most useful thing in a brief for a technical product is a plain explanation of how the product works, including the parts customers get wrong. That is what lets a studio animate the argument rather than decorate it. We have written a full guide on how to brief an animation studio, because it is the cheapest and most decisive part of the whole project.
What it locks: the job. Everything after this should be traceable back to it.
2. The script: the whole video in words
The script is the first time the video exists in a form you can judge. It sets the message, the order of ideas, the tone and the length. A rough guide is around 130 to 150 words of narration per minute, which is why a sixty-second explainer has far less room than most first drafts assume.
The script is also where most of the real decisions happen. Which benefit leads. What gets cut. Whether the video is one film or several. When we worked with Lowe’s on the MVP Pro Rewards program, the script stage is where it became clear the answer was six short films, one benefit each, rather than one long one.
What it locks: the words. Changing a line after this point means changing every stage that depends on it.
3. The storyboard: the whole video in pictures
A storyboard is a sequence of rough frames, one for each beat of the script, showing what the viewer sees while they hear each line. It is deliberately rough. The point is composition and order, not polish.
This is the cheapest place in the entire project to change your mind about what happens on screen. Removing a scene at storyboard stage costs a conversation. Removing it after it has been animated costs the days somebody spent building it. If anyone on your side has an opinion about the story, this is the stage to get it out of them.
What it locks: what happens, in what order.
4. Style frames: what it will actually look like
Style frames are a handful of finished, full-color stills from key moments in the video. They show the real look: color palette, typography, character or product design, lighting, texture. If the storyboard answers “what happens”, style frames answer “what does it look like when it happens”.
This is also where the technique gets confirmed, and the technique matters to the budget. Motion graphics, 2D and 3D are very different builds, and we have broken down the differences that matter to your budget separately. Sign off style frames and every remaining frame gets built to match them.
What it locks: the look.
5. Voiceover and the animatic: timing
Once the script is final, the narration gets recorded. We present a shortlist of voice artists, you choose, and the session is directed against the script. The recorded voiceover sets the real timing, because every scene now has to sit under a specific line of a specific length.
The storyboard frames are then cut to that recording to make an animatic, a rough moving version of the whole video. It looks crude. It is also the first time you can watch the video from start to finish and feel its pace. Problems with rhythm, a scene that drags, a line that lands too fast, show up here, while fixing them is still a re-edit rather than a rebuild.
What it locks: timing and pace.
6. Animation: building every frame
This is the longest stage and the one most people picture when they think of animation. Assets get designed or modeled, scenes get built, and movement gets added, shot by shot. In 3D it also includes lighting and rendering, which is computing time as well as people time.
Because everything upstream is locked, this stage should be about craft, not direction. Notes here are about the ease on a movement, the speed of a transition, the weight of a camera move. On a 3D product launch like the InVue OnePOD Max, this is where the product gets built, lit and shown from angles no camera could reach.
What it locks: the picture.
7. Sound, music and delivery
The last stage brings in sound design, music and the final mix. Sound does more work in animation than people expect, because nothing on screen made a noise on its own. Every click, whoosh and impact is added deliberately.
Then come the versions. Different aspect ratios for different placements, cutdowns, captioned files, and any language versions. If a French Canadian or Spanish version is coming, that belongs in the brief at stage one, so the build accommodates it instead of being retrofitted.
How long it takes, and what it costs
A focused explainer typically runs several weeks from brief to delivery. A series, a 3D product launch or anything with characters runs longer. The schedule is shaped mostly by the build stage and by how quickly approvals come back at each lock point.
Budget follows the same logic. Length matters less than people assume. Technique, complexity and the number of versions matter more. Our animation work starts around $15,000 and scales with what the project has to do, and our budget page explains what moves the number.
The process is the same whatever the size. What changes the outcome is respecting the locks: deciding things at the stage built for deciding them.
In summary
- Animation is built rather than captured, so the process is a series of stages that each lock something down while changes are still cheap.
- The brief locks the job, the script locks the words and the storyboard locks what happens on screen.
- Style frames lock the look, and the voiceover and animatic lock timing and pace.
- The animation stage itself should be about craft, because direction was settled upstream.
- Cost and schedule are driven more by technique, complexity and versions than by runtime.
