What You Say Yes To

Someone mentioned Ray Dalio in a client meeting on Monday. His simple hand-drawn explainer about how the economy works. They mentioned how much they loved those videos.

Sean and I are big fans of those videos too. So we looked at each other and thought: what if our client’s film looked like that?

A year ago that question would have been the end of the conversation. A new animation style means a new team, a new budget and a couple of months. You nod, you say “great idea,” and you move on.

This week we just did it.

The first thing we had to do was argue with Claude about it. It told us two weeks, and that we’d need a motion designer. I told it two days, and that it was the motion designer — that we’d do what I always do, the shot list, the composition, how each scene should look, and it would execute. That took a few rounds. The machine was more conservative about what was possible than I was.

Then we pointed it at the folders. Everything Sean and I had built the first time around, when this was a live-action cinematic short: the characters, the world, the camera work, every decision we’d already made and written down. Those are digital assets now, and they’re the reason this took a day. From a standing start it would have taken far longer. The first film is what made the second one fast.

Not all of it helped. Pacing in 2D animation doesn’t work the way it does in a cinematic short, and some of our favorite shots just sat there. So we killed our digital darlings.

We took a film that ran 2:41 we had already delivered and rebuilt it as hand-drawn 2D animation. Same script. Same narrator. New characters, new trains, new everything you see.

The first several hours were all drawing. Three passes on the images, plus walk cycles so the characters could actually move, before we generated a frame of video.

Then seven cuts.
I said we needed two days. It took one.

And it was a real edit. We gave notes the way we’ve given notes for twenty years in television. The opening drags. Cut the dialogue. He looks sad, get his chin up. The guy has no pants. (He has pants now.) Every round came back in minutes, not weeks.

By the end of the day the film was forty-five seconds shorter, had a new score, and was better than the cut we started the day with.

What’s up now is a first pass. The music is temp. There’s no sweetening. That’s the point — this is what one day gets you, not what finished looks like.

Here’s what gets us excited. The client didn’t ask for this. It was an offhand comment. And now an offhand comment is something we can act on, the same week, without calling a meeting about whether we can afford to try.

That changes what you say yes to.