The brief

The School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics wanted a short animated film for recruitment: who they are, what the degrees involve, and what careers open up from studying languages.

It had to work for prospective students and for the parents sitting beside them at an open day, which are two quite different audiences watching the same two minutes.

How the work was won

This was not a phone call and a handshake. The university compared quotes from several Irish studios before awarding it, then set us up as an approved supplier and issued a purchase order before any work started.

We mention that because it is the part other public bodies care about. It is evidence that the studio has been through a procurement process, priced competitively against peers, and can invoice against a PO without creating work for somebody’s finance team.

Pricing off the script, not the running time

The school initially thought in terms of duration. We price animation off the final script word count instead, at around 130 words a minute, because the script is what actually decides how long the film runs.

That matters more than it sounds. A client asking for two minutes with a three minute script either gets a rushed voiceover or an overrun, and both are discovered too late. Counting the words first means the number you are quoted is the number you pay, and the film is the length you were told.

What was made

Illustrated backgrounds drawn for this film rather than pulled from a library, a professional voiceover, licensed music, and three rounds of revisions with the course director and academic staff.

Getting sign off from several academics on one film is its own exercise. Feedback comes in from different people at different times, and some of it contradicts. We ask for it consolidated into one document with timestamps, which turns five opinions into one revision round instead of five.

Afterwards

The film was delivered in February 2025 and paid against the purchase order. The relationship carried on afterwards, including a later conversation about re-recording the voiceover using the faculty’s own speakers to get the language pronunciations exactly right, which is the kind of refinement only a languages department would think to ask for.