Let’s imagine a pretty standard situation. You decide to order a first business video for your brand, find a video agency, shake hands with them and set that ball rolling.
But suddenly, you notice that something goes wrong 😳
The pace of a project changes, you can’t get on the same page with a team, your communication spreads through dozens of documents, chat sections in messengers and feedback simply doesn’t make it to the final recipient — production team.
You start wondering what could be the cause of these issues since the production team seemed to be very reliable and legible, came in with great recommendations, but then everything went completely downhill.
The key to this problem is actually laying on the surface and in this article we’ll show you the process of the explainer video production, tell how to avoid animation video production mistakes you may come across after ordering your first animation video 😎
Common Animation Mistakes That Takes Place During Video Production Process
Normally, all typical animation production mistakes derive — more or less — from miscommunication, so we’ll try to approach this problem from different angles to give you an idea of how to prevent animation mistakes before they actually appear.
Video production is always a two-way street, so no matter how professional a team is — without proper input from a client they will hardly be able to deliver a video that is 100% relevant to meet the set marketing goals.
Client’s involvement is important, and if you want a team to deliver work on time and within the initial budget make sure to cooperate with your production partner and provide all the information they might need.
No professional production team can guarantee that with minimum client’s involvement, they will be able to deliver a video that hits the bull’s eye 👀
👉 Pro tip: if you’ve started to work with a production team and they don’t require you to be involved in the production process, chances are you’ve stumbled across incompetent Contractor.
👎 Underestimating the importance of script scenario
Script writing is one of the most important steps in the production process as it lays the foundation for the success of a future video. It is, in fact, a textual description of all the actions that are about to take place on-screen.
It’s essential to think through all the ideas you want to see in a video on this stage, since introducing changes into the scenario once a project is done won’t be practical by no means. For example, if tweaking a script will be needed at the post-production stage, in order to keep the narrative consistent the video producers will have to change illustration, animation, transitions, object locations, etc. as well.
And it’s not hard to guess how it will affect the budget and project delivery timeline. (spoiler: badly)
So that’s why it is so important for you to take time and thoroughly go through a script scenario provided by a production team, and suggest any edits/adjustments before the production process starts. It will help to drastically reduce the number of costly edits later on.
Video production team develops a concept; however, they don’t own all the information regarding brand philosophy, mission, product or service features, etc. Make sure to cooperate with them as much as possible during the script writing stage, providing all the important details and ideas about your product and brand 📑
The same would also go for the brief writing stage (more on that in this article). And by the way, if you’re interested to get to know the video production process better, and all other stages that it includes, download our video production guide:
GET THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO EXPLAINER VIDEOS: TYPES, BUDGETS, STYLES
This is one of the most common animation production mistakesthat causes the most devastating effect. We’re talking about the situations where numerous people are involved in the communication and progress assessment process.
Let’s say the production team sends in a business video to get feedback, and a few members from the client team start to comment on it simultaneously. Often it leads to contradictions in commentary and inability of a production team to process all the information they are given correctly.
To make sure that both the communication and cooperation between you and the video agency plays out smoothly, it’s better to have a single point of contact — a decision-making person that will transmit all the feedback to a team.
The more points of contact involved in the communication process, the less productive it will become 〽️
👎 No consolidated feedback
At Blue Carrot we always encourage clients to run brainstorming sessions on their side to come up with the best ideas they want us to display on-screen. At the same time, it’s important to have those ideas gathered together, in a consolidated feedback which then can be sent to a production team.
In the video production industry it’s a common issue when communication between client and production team gets fragmented. It results in situations where no one understands what’s currently going on with a project and what adjustments should be made (if there’s any).
👉 To avoid that it’s better to send out to a production team all the suggestions and comments on the process all at once.
👎 Not understanding all the specifics of how video agencies work
The nature of a video creation process demands from production teams to stick with a Waterfall methodology instead of Agile. For some clients that might not be obvious right away and they start to ask why the team can’t introduce all the changes that client wants. To explain that, let’s look at the main differences between the two methodologies:
AGILE
WATERFALL
The project work is carried out in sprints, meaning that a team works on different components of a project simultaneously.
The project is carried out in a linear manner where the project is broken down into a series of tasks and each subsequent element is built upon the preceding one.
Obviously, the team won’t be able to start animating characters before there’s even a storyboard sketched out or a video scenario outlined. That would be completely ineffective and that’s why the Waterfall model is preferred over Agile in a video industry.
How to Avoid Animation Video Production Mistakes
👍 Focus on the core messages and align art accordingly
In all our blog articles we always try to emphasize the importance of putting marketing goals first. In terms of project cooperation, it would mean prioritizing core messages — and the idea you want to convey — over the artistic aspect of a video.
BUSINESS VIDEO GOALS:
❌
✅
DEVELOPING A VIDEO WITH COMPLEX MOVING IMAGERY AND OVERLY ANIMATED CHARACTERS WILL MAKE OUR CAMPAIGN UNIQUE
DEVELOPING A VIDEO THAT CONVEYS CONSISTENT MESSAGE TO THE TARGET AUDIENCE WILL BRING US MORE CONVERSIONS
And don’t get us wrong — we aren’t trying to take away the ‘quality’ out of the equation. The point here is to keep focus on the information your video delivers and not on the micro-management activities like constantly readjusting color saturation, making characters do some extra moves etc, etc.
Instead, trust all the hassle to video producers and provide competencies that a production team is actually missing. These are understanding of your brand, your product, and your audience. Because no one but you can provide this information.
👍 Google Docs — for feedback. Video calls — for idea discussions
Very often, due to a large number of communication channels the feedback a client gives on a process can get lost. Imagine simultaneously chatting with a team through messengers, email and other apps — it’s not hard to guess that such a mix will only overcomplicate the feedback process or even lead to animation production failure.
Over the years working in the video production business we’ve come up with an ideal system that we use for working on projects. We gather all the client’s feedback via Google Docs or such software as Boords or Frame.io. If there’s something that is very hard to explain in a textual form, we normally hop on a video call.
But still, it’s preferable to carry out all the ‘back and forth’ activities in a textual form (because it’s simply faster). Video calls, instead, work great for introductory meetings, briefing, and general coordination of the project pace.
To better understand how to structure the production process we also encourage you to get our guide where we explain all the peculiarities of a video creation process in more details 👇
GET THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO EXPLAINER VIDEOS: TYPES, BUDGETS, STYLES
Obviously, none of the above wouldn’t make much sense if you hire an unprofessional agency. So, when selecting a video agency for your project, pay close attention to their expertise and prior work. Check the team’s portfolio and try to find examples relevant to your project. Look at how they pace communication with a client and what questions they ask you.
A professional agency would have a set of questions already being established and ready to be sent to their prospective clients. Such questionnaire normally comes in the form of a brief and looks like so:
A good sign of reliability is also the team’s openness and readiness to answer any questions that client asks them — from something generic like ‘How the production process goes in your team?’ to more tricky ones like ‘How do you deal with difficult clients?’ and ‘What is your policy regarding source files?’.
👉 On our blog we’ve posted an entire guide on how to choose an animation video production company, so make sure to check it as well.
👍 Trust more to your video production partner
As simple as that. If you partner with a reliable production team, they have probably seen it all already, and are fully aware of typical animation video production mistakes. So if the video producers advice on something, that means they know what will work best for the particular part of a video (or scene).
Don’t be afraid to trust your production team. Professional agencies always know how to pace the video creation process so that you can get the best results within a budget you have and timeline you can afford 💸
Final Thoughts
Being a a video agency ourselves, it is of our best interest to have the video production process carried out as smooth as possible — for each project, no matter the size or complexity. Clear and effective communication alongside the clear goals setting and continuous cooperation with a client always result in high-quality business videos that fully match the initial requirements.
At times, however, when reaching out to us, not all clients are fully aware of how the video agency works or what to expect when ordering a project. We hope by now, however, you’ve got a clear understanding of common animation mistakes.
All the animation video production mistakes provided in this article comes from our own experience and 300+ videos we’ve developed over the last seven years. And we’re more than happy to share our knowledge with the community. Whether it’s a few questions regarding animated video mistakes to avoid or a project request, contact us and we’ll do our best to help you out!
🥕 Increasing landing page conversions with our video for Scrathpay startup
Consider Blue Carrot As Your Trusted Partner
🔹 Beauty CCR
An animation video that showcases a perfect mix of a traditional approach to shooting beauty care products and a novel 3D animation. The video incorporates live footage and custom developed animation — to enhance viewer’s understanding of the product features, its impact on beauty, and the skin-care routine of individuals in general.
🔹 GetUpside
A 30-second long promotional video produced by Blue Carrot team for GetUpside— a service that allows users to earn cashback on gas and restaurants. With this project our task was to display main areas of service application, app partners (to get a cashback from), main benefits that users get with GetUpside, and the simplicity of a payout procedure via PayPal.
🔹 Kicker App
A great example of an explainer video developed for the SaaS product. Kicker Appreached out to us with a request to create a video that would educate viewers on the most common problems connected with data classifications in ERP systems, and how Kicker App can help deal with them. To ensure that viewers stay focused on the actual subject of a video, and nothing distracts them from it, all the characters, objects, and other animated imagery were designed in a minimal style.
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