Another Failure

Often the outcome of a bid will be determined by factors completely outside of your control.

You can do everything perfectly -good creative, good budget, good rapport with the potential client -and still not land the job. It's common for animation/effects/design to get the short straw in the grand scheme of a production. Often that means it's one of the first things that's cut or scaled back so much an editor can handle it, or put off until there's no time.

Sometimes it's a combination.

For this project we pulled together several design ideas.

It was a fairly open assignment, and the concepts flowed pretty easily.

The client limitations were to keep it in the ballpark of what they already had (but to make it different).

Our concerns was that we make reference to the subject matter, but not mimic it.

The ideas were simple, and sometimes easiest expressed through storyboards.

These (and others) accompanied a written treatment which not only described the actions but justified the concepts.

Just about anything can done with motion graphics, but for them to be good there needs to be an inherent reason.

After this presentation, we were told they loved everything.  They were concerned we'd be able to do the work for the budget (we designed the concepts so that'd be possible).  Everything was a few months off.

Ultimately, other production issues came up. Time marched on and the client decided to keep their in house designer on the project.

We enjoyed the day or two spent on the concepts and were happy to pitch ideas and would gladly do it again for these folks.  Sometimes the stars just don't align.  In this case, we had no financial gain from the work we developed but we didn't spend all that much time on it.  Two or three days.  But it was an enjoyable exercise and sometimes you need a workout to keep in shape.