Explainer videos in Dubai: what to lock before anything is animated
An explainer rarely goes wrong in the animation. It goes wrong before it, when the script is still moving, the brand files have not arrived and too many people are steering. What to settle first, and how long it really takes.
The animation is rarely where an explainer goes wrong
When an explainer video runs late or comes out flat, the instinct is to look at the animation. In our experience that is almost never where the problem started. It started earlier, in the weeks before anyone opened an animation file, when something that should have been decided was left open in the hope it would sort itself out along the way. In animation it does not sort itself out. Every frame is built rather than filmed, so a decision made late is not a quick adjustment. It is work thrown away and built again. This article is about the handful of things that have to be settled before animation begins, the process we use to settle them, and an honest view of how long a good explainer takes. It applies wherever the project is, from Dubai and Sharjah to the rest of the GCC and across MENA, where we work with clients regularly, and whether the film is 2D animation, motion graphics or a mix of the two.
The two things clients most often have not locked
The first is the script. Clients often come to us ready to start animating while the wording is still changing, a line here, a new product feature there, a different opening the CEO prefers. In a filmed project that kind of drift is uncomfortable. In an explainer it is expensive, because the script decides everything that follows: how many scenes there are, what each one shows, how long each one holds on screen and where every graphic lands. Change the script after animation starts and you are not editing a sentence, you are rebuilding the scenes around it. The second is brand assets. Logo files, fonts, colour values and brand guidelines sound like admin, and they are usually the last thing anyone thinks to send. But an explainer is built inside a brand, and an animator working from a screenshot of a logo and a guessed colour is building something that will have to be corrected later. Send working files at the start, not when the first draft comes back looking slightly off brand.
What happens when too many people are steering
This is something we face regularly when a client is not sure what they want. It is the reason we always run one or two rounds of brainstorming with the client, and get their approval on the direction, before anything is animated. Those rounds help us a great deal, because by the end of them we know exactly what the client is looking for. Usually that is enough. Sometimes it is not. On one corporate company profile film we produced with animation, the client wanted a direction for the animation, but the management did not yet have a single idea of what that direction should be. We did a lot of rounds to understand what they wanted and to get one direction locked. When the animation was done, they still felt something was missing. The main reason was that too many people had been involved from the start, and each of them needed a different direction. That made the whole process hard, for them and for us. Rounds of feedback kept arriving from several people who were not able to settle on one style for the animation, and every round postponed the project further. In the end we animated the film twice from scratch before we reached the final outcome. It got there, but I think it could have been much better, and reached much sooner, if the management and their team had been more organised from the start and had known what they wanted, or even what they liked. That is the lesson we now build into every explainer. The number of people steering the film matters more than the complexity of the animation. Before we begin, agree inside your team who decides, and make sure everyone who will have an opinion gives it at the brainstorm and script stage, not after the animation is finished. The same discipline applies to any edit, which we covered in our guide to handing footage to a post house.
How we lock it before we animate
We do all of the following on every explainer, and each step exists to stop a late change before it becomes a rebuild. First, the one or two rounds of brainstorming, ending with the client's approval of the direction. Second, script sign-off: nothing is designed until the script is approved. Third, the storyboard, with styleframes showing the look. This is the step we lean on most, because it is where we lock everything before we start animating. It lets the client imagine the video before it is there. You see every scene, in order, in the style it will be animated in, and if something is wrong you change it on paper, where it costs almost nothing, instead of in animation, where it costs a rebuild. Fourth, the voice-over is recorded and approved before we animate, because the animation is timed to that voice and a changed line means changed timing. Fifth, the quote sets a fixed number of revision rounds for each stage, so everyone knows in advance where the moments to give feedback are. None of this is bureaucracy. It is the reason a well-run explainer feels effortless to watch: every hard decision was made before the expensive part began. If you want to go deeper on putting the brief itself together, our article on briefing a video production company covers it.
How long an explainer should be
Every client asks for something different, depending on the information they want to present, and the temptation is always to add one more point. My opinion, as the founder of J-Cut Production and as a senior video editor, is that an explainer is best kept to 90 seconds or less. The point is to keep the video enjoyable, so people watch all of it without getting bored and without feeling their time is being wasted. An explainer that is not watched to the end has not explained anything. Ninety seconds is enough to state the problem, show how you solve it and tell the viewer what to do next. If there is more to say, it usually works better as a second short film than as a longer first one, which also gives you more to use across social and your website. Where motion graphics sit inside a wider brand film rather than a standalone explainer, the same restraint applies.
How long it takes, honestly
Once the script is approved, the first draft of the animation usually takes up to two weeks. From there, the timeline depends almost entirely on the client's feedback. When the client is good to work with and knows what they want from the start, the film is typically locked in approximately three weeks. When the client is harder, because direction keeps shifting or feedback comes from several people at once, it can take three to five weeks. The difference between those two timelines is rarely the animation team. It is how settled the decisions were before animation began, which is the whole argument of this article. If you are working to a launch or an event date, count back from it with that in mind, and leave room for your own approval time, which is the part clients most often forget to plan for. And when everything is locked and the client is clear, it can move far faster than any standard timeline. Our Application of the Year film for Boom, below, was produced in two days.
Before you brief us
If you have an explainer in mind, three things will make the biggest difference before the first call. A script, or at least the key messages in the order you want them told. Your brand files: logo, fonts, colours and guidelines, as working files. And a clear answer to who signs the film off, agreed inside your team before the work starts. Bring those, and the rest of the process, brainstorm, storyboard, voice-over and animation, can move at the pace it should. Tell us about your project through our contact page and we will come back with a scope, a timeline and an honest read on what your brief needs. You can see more of our animated work in our case studies, and if you are still deciding between formats, our comparison of 2D and 3D animation is a good place to start. If you are wondering whether AI can make it faster, we answered that in when AI video makes sense.
