Get the yes before you spend the money

The conversation that costs the most

A client watches a finished thirty-shot piece and says the pacing is wrong, or that they imagined it warmer, or that shot nine should be a close-up. Each of those is now a re-generation.

The same conversation, held over an animatic, costs a rearranged text file.

So the discipline is simple: nothing expensive happens until somebody has approved something cheap.

The animatic

An animatic is the shot list made watchable. Stills on a timeline, each held for its intended duration, with a scratch voiceover and temporary music.

Build it from what you already have:

1. The first frames you generated for every shot: they cost a cent or two each.
2. Each one held on screen for the duration on the shot list.
3. A scratch voiceover, recorded on your phone in one take.
4. Temporary music at roughly the right feel.
5. Titles as plain text.

That is an afternoon at most and it costs essentially nothing. What it buys:

• The real duration. Not the total of your estimates, but what it feels like to sit through.
• Pacing problems, which are invisible on a list and obvious in motion.
• Missing shots, which appear as moments where the voiceover has nothing to sit under.
• A client decision, made on something concrete rather than on a description.

Add a small push-in on each still using the parallax technique and the animatic starts to read as a film rather than as a slideshow. That is free and it changes how seriously a client watches it.

Getting approval that holds

Send the animatic with a specific, short list of what you are asking them to approve:

Please confirm: the order of shots, the length, the script, and the look of the four key frames attached. Once approved, changes to structure or shot count are billable per shot.

That sentence is not aggressive, it is clarity. Clients change their minds because nobody told them when changing their mind becomes expensive. Telling them is a service, and it is how you avoid the conversation where you absorb twelve regenerations out of embarrassment.

Get the approval in writing, by email. A verbal yes on a call is not a record.

Key frames as the look approval

Separately from the animatic, send three or four finished-quality stills: the shots that carry the look. Those are the approval for style, colour and character design.

This is standard practice in animation and advertising, where it is often called a key-frame or style-frame approval, and it exists for exactly the reason it matters here: agreeing the look on four images is cheap, and discovering a disagreement on thirty clips is not.

Pre-visualisation as the deliverable

Worth naming as a service in its own right, because it is currently one of the strongest commercial uses of this technology.

A director pitching a commercial, a studio testing a sequence, an agency selling an idea: all of them need a moving version of a shot before anyone commits to a shoot. That used to require an animatic team or a funded production. Now it takes an afternoon.

The output does not have to be broadcast quality. It has to communicate a shot, and it does that well. Selling pre-visualisation is honest work at an honest price, and it does not depend on the generated footage being good enough to ship.

When the client is you

The same discipline applies to personal work and it is harder to enforce, because there is nobody to send it to.

Build the animatic anyway and watch it once, the next day. The gap of a night is what gives you the outside view a client would have had. Almost everybody discovers the piece is too long.

Today: put your existing stills on a timeline at their intended durations, record a scratch voiceover on your phone, and watch the result before generating anything else.