What to send a medical animation studio before your first call

Most people commissioning a medical animation are doing it for the first time, and the first email usually says some version of “we need an animation, what do you charge?” That is a perfectly reasonable question and an almost impossible one to answer, because the price of a medical animation depends far more on what sits behind it than on how long it runs.

Here is what actually lets someone quote your project properly.

The five things that matter

1. The science, in your own words. Not a polished brief — a paragraph describing what happens. Which molecule binds what, or how the device seats, or what the surgeon does in what order. If you can describe it accurately in conversation, you can describe it in an email, and that is enough to scope from.

2. Who is going to watch it. This changes the animation more than anything else on the list. An investor audience needs the mechanism to land in one viewing. A congress audience will tolerate — and expect — considerably more detail. A patient audience needs a different register entirely. The same science produces three genuinely different animations, and deciding which one you are making is a script-stage decision, not something to sort out later.

3. Whatever reference material already exists. Pathway diagrams, published figures, microscopy, CAD files, the slides you present today. This is the single biggest lever on cost. Reconstructing a mechanism from primary literature is real work; starting from material you have already validated skips most of it and keeps the animation anchored to science you can defend.

4. Your actual deadline, and what it is attached to. “End of Q3” and “our Series A deck is due on the 14th” are very different constraints. Deadlines tied to a fixed external event — a congress, a raise, a submission — need to be flagged early, because they cannot move and everything else has to be planned backwards from them.

5. Who has to approve it. This is the one people leave out, and it is the most common reason a short project becomes a long one. An animation reviewed by one person moves at a completely different speed from one reviewed by marketing, regulatory, clinical, legal and a surgeon advisory board. That is not a difficulty problem — it is a calendar problem, and it is much easier to plan for than to discover halfway through.

What you do not need

You do not need a script. You do not need a storyboard, a shot list, a mood board, or a formal brief document. Those are outputs of the process, not inputs to it — and a script written before anyone has scoped the animation usually has to be rewritten anyway.

You also do not need to have decided the length. Duration is a conclusion you reach after working out what the animation has to show, not a starting constraint. Most projects in this field land at 60 to 90 seconds, but that is a consequence of what fits in a deck or a congress loop, not a rule.

Why the rough version is better than the polished one

There is a natural instinct to tidy everything up before sending it. Resist it. A polished brief tends to describe a solution — “we want a 90-second animation with a camera fly-through of the binding site” — when what is useful is the problem underneath it: what does the audience currently fail to understand, and what would change if they did?

Studios that ask about the problem rather than taking the solution brief at face value tend to produce better animations, because a surprising number of first briefs describe the wrong deliverable entirely. Sending the rough version gives that conversation somewhere to start.

What happens next

With those five things, a studio should be able to come back with a written scope: what the animation covers, what gets delivered, how many review rounds are included, and the date it lands. If what comes back instead is a request for a discovery call before any numbers are discussed, that is a signal about how the rest of the project will go.

If you want to see what the numbers look like before you send anything, ours are published, along with what the wider market charges and why.