In today's episode, we're going to be talking about pros and cons when it comes to buying and outsourcing creative content. We'll also talk about the challenges that creatives face when outsourcing each of those options. So yeah. DIY isn't just for mediocre house repair. Stick around. Let's get to it. It's for everyone. Welcome back. My name is Kathryn. And I'm Will. And we are Open Pixel Studios. We're the co-founders.
Yeah. Yeah. I think at this point we should remind we remind people who we are and what we do for a little bit just because, you know, it might be that people are finding us on LinkedIn, on Instagram through different platforms, and. They. Might start here instead of starting in episode zero. Mm hmm. So who are we? What are we doing? Yeah. So we are the co-founders of Open Pixel Studios, were a women owned animation studio out in Springfield, Massachusetts.
And we basically help companies expand with the medium of animation. Yeah, that's what we're here for. We've been doing it for the last six years now. And yeah, but this you know why we're here right now in in your video setting or audio setting. Whichever setting you'd. Prefer. Exactly. This is Behind The Pixel. It's an Open Pixel Podcast. And it's the podcast where we try to bridge the knowledge gap between those who buy creative content and those who make it. As a quick question, Will. Yes?
Where would you say is your current knowledge gap? Ooh. Knowledge gap. That's a good question. I really don't know anything about gap insurance. That's the thing. Yeah, gap insurance. Okay. A lot of people talk about. You know, I guess I know nothing about it. Yeah, yeah. Pretty sure there's such a thing. I don't know which kinds of gaps it covers. Yeah. Does it cover? I don't know. Like all gaps. Like, is it a stop gap? Does it cover? Like, I see. Your clothes at The Gap.
Oh, boy. Okay, well, similar to comparing different insurance options, I guess. Why don't we jump into today's topic? In today's topic, we'll explore where you can buy animated content and the pros and cons between those different options. Yeah, because there's a lot of different options. Lots of different options. So one of the problems we notice with some of the clients that we work is that they need to get some outside help to get the animation done on time. I think that's across the board.
Some of the things that we've seen, some of the other people that we work with have also talked about that. And as a result, they can turn to many different options. You have tons of options out there and so in this episode, here's what we're not talking about. We're not talking about using your internal creative teams like that is a whole other thing and you absolutely can do that when you're working with in-house.
You have a ton of options there that we can sort of mentioned right now that will cover in on a later episode. You can upskill your current workforce, right? You have some folks that you already have. Make make them more valuable. You can hire new talent brings in new people in that have some skills that maybe your in-house doesn't have. You can learn the tools yourself depending on how big you are as a as a business or agency, depending on where you are.
Or you can use templates and there's a lot of template options. Again, I think we mentioned we're going to have a whole episode on templates, but when going internal with animated content each of those approaches that I just mentioned have their own pros and cons and again, we'll get into that in a different episode. Yeah, I mean, one can say that like we as Open Pixel, we really need like an in-house episode director for Behind the Pixel to. Keep a track of all the things
that we kind of cover later. All the yeah. All the episodes that we have on the back end. Like there's so much. To cover it. So much to cover. Yeah. So yeah, we should track those. But before we get redirected, we do a little 303 here. Let's describe what what we are covering today. Okay. Yeah, I can take that on. So what we are talking about today is the seemingly unlimited options that marketers have when they're outsourcing animated content. So not doing it in-house when they're buying.
Going to the out. They're going, yeah, yeah. That's a reference to a previous episode. But yeah, when you have a bunch of those options, that's when things can get really complicated. Yeah. And that can mean it's actually really hard to know where to look for animated content.
It's hard to determine what the best option for you is going to be, and that makes it hard to trust, like what you're going to be getting and knowing what you're going to be getting and the goals of the content that can actually be achieved for your piece. So that whole outsourcing process can be intimidated, intimidating right from the start. Yeah. And then on the creative side, the problem actually changes depending on where and how the artist is being hired.
So I think what we're going to do is we're going to talk about their problems within the context of the outsourcing option. So it's a little bit of a departure from what we've been doing in the past, but we don't want to make any blanket statements around how creatives feel throughout all these options because they're entirely different depending on on your relationship with that particular option. Right.
And we know that because this is a departure, it's a little bit of a change from what we normally do. So take a moment. You know, take a breath. It's okay. Let's embrace the change. We know what to change, but trust us. You'll understand when we get there. So what we'll do is list out the options, name some of those options, talk about the pros and cons, and then address some of the creative point of views within those options. Brochure that that creatives may face.
Yeah, but what won't change here is that I'm going to start by giving the marketers point of view, and then we can jump into some solutions there and we'll go back and forth. So brace yourselves, everyone. Let's do it. Yeah. So I'm taking the role of the marketers. P.O.V. here. Basically as a marketer I want to know all of my possible options before I move forward into making animated content.
I don't want to just Google it because I know that typically on Google, the the people who pay for their thing to be seen first are is what's going to come up first. And they might not actually have the best interest in mind for what I'm trying to work on. I paid the most. I'm at the top of the list. You're going to see me. First, right? Right. Which could be good or bad, depending on the situation that.
So what I might do instead is I might start by asking somebody I know and trust, because trust is something that you don't want to. Hard to come by these. Days. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I might start to also do my own research into those options. Right? If that person gives me multiple options to go off of, then I can do my own research into their. They're giving me basically a head start and I can get a sense of what each of these different processes is like.
Yeah. And I might even try to go as far as getting multiple estimates or quotes from different sources and sort of compare between the two. Yep. And the goal ultimately is that I want to get to know a little bit more deeply who I'm going to be working with so that I can build that trust to. A long term relationship. But the problem for me is that there's no really one place to lay out all of those different options clearly. So it's a little overwhelming.
I wish I just had something where it was easy and I could just be on the beach and lay out in the sun and everything's comfortable and nice. Or lay out like a really nice design. Yeah. Or like a really nice spreadsheet. Yeah. Lay out a spreadsheet. Shout out to all our business folks. You can lay out. Laying out nice spread. Lay out your laundry. Oh yeah. Yeah. Or lay out a baking sheet. Oh yeah. You're still going. I see you maybe lay out that bathroom tile. Mm hmm.
I'm trying to think of other things you get you laid out. All right? You could. You could buy some Lay's potato chips, boy. Okay, you're on a roll. So why don't we lay out all of the options that people have for all the people who are starting to think about outsourcing animated content, where can they actually go to that?
So we're going to try to be unbiased here and we're going to go through each option sort of in succession as to like most involved to to least involved with the creative process. Think about it like that. So your first option, if you're going to be the most involved, is your DIY, the do it yourself animation tools that are out there. There are plenty of tools out there that are browser based animation sort of solutions to doing it yourself.
You can work either with designs that they've already provided. Usually they provide you with a bunch of templates. You can also work with the work, the the assets, the creative graphics and things that you have already. You can import those into into the platforms and you can start animating on your own right away. Today, today, right now. Yeah. And so there's many pros and cons that come with that particular option.
Again, we're not going to name them all here because are so many, but yeah, so pros and cons. So one big pro is that they're cheap, they're less expensive, they're an alternative to basically any other solution and they're probably the lowest option price point wise, that you can that you can go to. And then another pro is that you're in full control of everything that is going on in the program that you're that you're creating that content. Right?
Instead of asking somebody, hey, can you move this? You can just move it. Yeah. And you know, you're doing the WYSIWYG of the The what? The WYSIWYG, you don’t know it? You don’t know WYSIWYG? WYSIWYG is What You See Is What You Get. It's a. It's a terminology. It's, it's, it's in the developers world. I see. Yeah, I, you know, I, I do some development on the back end and WYSIWYG is... It's just like what you see is what you get. Learn something new every day.
Some cons here that we should talk about. Yeah, obviously it's tedious and it's time consuming because it's it's all on you as the person who's maybe not a creative doing some of these these things, these programs aren't really built for animators. Yeah, because we've used some of them and therefore they miss a lot of the complexities that that animators have inside their toolboxes when they go and animate.
So it's usually a single tool instead of what, you know, a Swiss army knife is a good comparison. There's a ton of tools and programs that animators use that have all different kinds of things that they can do. Within that custom and forth. But yeah, yeah. Whereas usually the tools online are very limited in in their platform. And that's intentional though too. Yeah. Because they don't want you to move that much that much stuff. Yeah. So they want to make the process
easy for you too. True. Yeah. Another con here is that it's difficult to get the quality of motion that you're looking for. You might have a set standard quality from like a template that they provide you, but it's extremely hard to get something that actually looks good and is representative of your brand all at the same time. Yeah, it's hard to change tone and yeah. In style. Yeah, exactly. They don't really take into account that separation between visual style and motion style.
It's just like, here's the motion that we give you, right? And that could be good or bad again, depending. It's a con for us because it feels like, you know, motion should be branded to what your brand feels like. It looks like an and behaves as. So we've tried these tools ourselves. I think we mentioned that and they're really hard to work with even for us. They are so hard to. Yeah, I, I'll be honest. I don't think I've ever made a worse animation before... Oh, my God. In my entire life.
And that's even from, like, the days when I was a student making the projects that I made. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is, it is difficult. It is very. Hard. We feel for anybody that's that's trying to work. Yes. And again, the templates are. Yeah. So if you're another con here, if you're not a designer or an animator, you may not know how to make the piece better. And I think that's sort of a downside to all DIY stuff like even not animation, right?
You don't really know if you're going to do it yourself whether or not that's the right approach. It relies heavily on your knowledge of animation. So that could be very little depending on where you are and you know how much experience you have with the medium as a whole. But you know, the templates that you use can have that embedded motion in them and again, we'll get into templates later. But, but it's really hard to change that motion to match what you're trying to do.
And then the last con here is that the animation quality might not meet the needs and expectations of your audience. And your audience has that expectation of your brand. Right? So it might actually hurt your brand more than helps because you're doing template sized stuff and it kind of looks cool, but that might not be actually representative of of what you're trying to do. I want to acknowledge, too, whether that's internally or externally, right?
If your audience is internal and they have an expectation of your brand. That's true. Yeah. We've done like employee like employee training videos that, you know, they have a certain level of quality internally. It hurts morale. I think it can. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So right does the opposite of what you want quickly put together and not, not up to the standard that we know that the brand's capable. Yeah.
And then you know you get to a point where you like, you know, my supervisor didn't really care about this. They put 10 minutes into. This, right? Like how, how, how should I take that information in if you didn't put the time in? Yeah, it's interesting to think about for sure. Yeah. But yeah, I want to touch a little bit on this is where we changed our approach a little bit to talk about the creative point of view here. Yeah.
So if I'm a creative and you're going, you know, you as the marketer, you're going to outsource through DIY tools. I am mostly out of the loop entirely, but in stage, right? Yeah. And that can be a bit scary to think like, oh, is everybody now going to just switch to DIY tools and am I does my role exist anymore like that? That's a big fear, yeah. But I do recognize that there are people who opt for this option for a variety of reasons.
Usually it's that they're looking for kind of the both the cheapest thing possible and the thing that requires the most creative control from them. So they don't have to go to me to change out every little thing all the time. Yeah, but what we see as open pixel happening in this situation is that when somebody outsources through DIY options, we typically find that they realize they need to move into more of a custom solution. At some point.
DIY will only really take you so far and at some point you realize it's just not cutting it because every time you're probably redoing it and you're paying more and you're basically paying more to hit the redo button every single time. So you never want to pay for a redo. Button, but can you imagine? And every time you undo it. That's like pay to play, but like like awful. Like, well, I guess pay to play as well. If you had. To pay for every undo that you do. Oh, my God. Oh, boy.
It's $0.02, though. Yeah, very little. No, nobody, nobody take that idea. That's a that's a terrible there's a difference between bad ideas and terrible ideas. So the next option is freelancer platforms and databases. So this is obviously the gig economy is what we're really talking about. Some of the most famous platforms include Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer.com There's a ton of others.
These top Toptal I think is how you say that lots of platforms, these platforms basically connect you with a freelancer. That's their entire real job, right? Connect. I'm trying to find someone. Most of the time it's an individual. Sometimes it's a company. You can find companies on there. Some allow you to look through individual profiles to find someone that you'd like to work with, and they also require you to post your job and the requirements of your job that you're looking to create.
Yeah, some of that. Sometimes it can be like a long form and sometimes it can be just a couple sentences. Yeah. Depends on the platform. Yeah. So pros and cons here, going into the pros, you have a review system much like Yelp or Google or I don't know, is there a different review site? I don't know. Apple Pay, Apple Podcasts. I mean, anything that has a review system, you can read through people's reviews that people give them, there's star ratings oftentimes.
So you get to see what they've done for other people, it's kind of nice. There's a pricing system so you can see what someone is going to charge you. Depending. It could be on an hourly basis, it could be on a project basis. Really depends on the platform. Depending on how they're set up, there's messaging systems. That's another big pro.
So and oftentimes the platform will force you to communicate directly with the freelancer through their messaging system so that they have a record of what was actually said just in case. If there's anything that goes wrong because lots of stuff. Goes wrong, should always have a record. Yeah. And then, you know, it's it's all kinds. Another pro is that it's all kinds of work. So it's not just limited to creative work.
You can get developers on these platforms, you can get like a lot of technical work, but something like, you know, TaskRabbit, you can get a plumber to your house and you know, try to find try to find someone so not limited to creative stuff. Another pro and this is subjective is that they claim to be fast and you know, they're generally sort of this cheaper, faster option. We connect you with a with a freelancer really quickly and they get you back your work really quickly. Right.
Get your project made yesterday, right? Yeah. Yesterday. What's beyond yesterday? Get your project done in the. Past, we yeah. We connect you with time travelers to take you back in time. So you already have your project. Yeah. Oh, my God. In the future. So they claim to be fast and, you know, cheaper, faster, therefore better. I think that's usually what people kind of think about.
Yeah, but I think we all really most of us will probably know the saying, you know, cheaper, faster or better pick you. Yeah, that is that is a yes is not equals in the. Industry does not equal better. Yes. Which brings us to the cons long list of cons here. We have a ton of issues with platforms. We're not necessarily against platforms, but we do have some issues with the current platforms that are out there.
So one con is that they require you to have some level of expertize in animation, if that's what you're looking to get done. The marketer. You, the marketer, you, the person doing the requests right, because you need to know to some extent exactly what you're looking for. I mean, usually on these platforms, they have a big old box that says Description of your job and you're looking to put in all of that knowledge that you already know much.
Clearer as you possibly can. Yes. So there's no format around that specifically for animation, because that's not what they're built for. They're built for the connection, not necessarily for extracting the right information. So depending on the platform, you'll need to input input those requirements. And you might not exactly know what it is that you need, especially if it's yeah. If it's a medium that you're working with that's new like animation.
You might not know exactly what you're needing out of that description. But hopefully through Behind The Pixel you will have some knowledge to go off of that will give you, you know, that level of expertize that you need to work on your next project. Good upsell, good.
Often we've seen things on these platforms like, you know, quote, need a two minute explainer video right and no context whatsoever on strategy and what the project entails, what style type we're talking about, does it include characters? What kinds of assets do we need to make all the. Things that help determine the price? Yeah. Yeah. And also that determine how the freelancer approaches that project and make creative decisions they're going to make. And so, you know, a big disconnect there.
Another big con is additional fees. So the fee structure for these platforms kind of changes depending on which platform you're dealing with some charge on a recurring basis because you're content, you know, you're consistent, they're a SAS company, they're software as a service. They're charging recurring. Some are based on the freelancer. So the freelancer has a rate, they're charging you a thing, and then they'll do a percentage of that rate. And actually most platforms actually charge twice.
So they'll charge you for putting up the job and then they'll charge the freelancer for taking the job. So they're actually getting paid twice to make a single. Connection, right? Which, you know, no shame on them. That's how they're running their business model. It's a business model. Just one thing to keep in mind, the other sort of con is that you're searching through a pool of mixed level talent.
And what we mean by that is, you know, the industry as a whole, the animation industry hasn't really defined what it means to be a junior or a senior or a mid-level. I mean, it's just in the title, but you can. Sometimes it's just years of experience, but you can have years of experience and maybe not be at the at the right level. You need to be like there's there's so many ways you can misinterpret. That, right?
So the con here is that the platform is charging you to get someone who could have a lot of creative talent but doesn't actually have a lot of experience working on multiple clients or working with clients through their process and workflow. Right? So it's a double edged sword. So you have to kind of decide what kinds of risks you want to take when going to these platforms with a specific person. And then the other last con here is that, you know, again, pro or con kind of your view on it.
It's it's global. The platforms are global. They're not necessarily tied to the U.S. So you could run into a language barrier that happens a lot. I think famously, I think it was Upwork who put in a checkbox button that said, like only show this job to the U.S. clients or something like that, because they were getting so many issues with language barriers on projects. So most projects require multiple revisions. You're going back and forth and sometimes that language barrier can come into play.
Yeah, which I would say as a as a clicks I'd note solution here. You know, if you're running into language barriers, you could just learn a new language. Yeah, that is one aspect right now. Hong Yoga and I say must. Mm hmm. I go gonna say Muska. There it is. We're learning Japanese. Yes. So learn new languages. It's actually a wonderful thing to do. Yes, it takes time, but could be worth it for the long run. Yeah. To help expand your capacity too.
If you know somebody that's super talented but you know there's a language barrier there, help! Help it out. Yeah. Yes. So we've talked a lot about the pros and cons here. I want to talk from the creative point of view again. Yeah. So for me as a creative, if I'm a freelancer, I'm setting up a profile and it's actually, you know, pretty easy to do for the super simple.
Yeah. I mean, I have a nice portfolio of work that I can pull from and I can showcase and I probably have like profiles at all of the platforms that I possibly can write because I want to get exposed as much as possible to the different clients. But what that means is that selling my service can actually be a lot harder because my potential customer has so many different options to choose from.
How do I convince them that going with me, either directly or going through this platform or wherever it might be, is the right way to go. And I might not have thought about selling my services through a platform, right? I might have thought about it from just making a website or whatever, or going through Instagram. And so because I might I might, I need the work, right? I need this work to come in. So in a way, I have to use the platform.
And as a result, I'm now competing against all of these other creatives. And I might have to reduce my price to get the amount of projects. That are released. You feel like you do? Yeah. And I feel like I'm just doing that whole thing that we see in the creative industry of racing to the bottom. Yeah. And that's frustrating.
Yeah. So it's important to kind of remember from the marketer's point of view when you're getting this outsource work from these platforms, you, the marketer, you, the communications person, whoever's buying the content, you might not be paying the creative what they're actually worth. So, you know, you have to sort of have a conscious lens when going through and searching through those platforms because the platforms incentivize creatives to basically fight each other on price.
Yeah. And the more we fight, the more we get paid, they get paid, you know. And so yeah, it's, it's a lose lose situation there. And I cannot stress this enough that people deserve to be paid for their time. Okay. And that includes us. I want to acknowledge so if for any reason you're thinking about becoming a sponsor for this time. Oh, wow. Okay. Trying to throw in a little thing that we're not taking sponsorship dollars just throwing that in. So another option.
Yeah, moving. Along. Right. So if we're talking kind of staying in the freelancer realm. Yeah. About platforms, but another option that you have is just hiring an independent freelancer. So directly director. Free. Yes, this is someone who is paid for the thing directly. D to f direct to freelance. There you go. That's that's not going to get John. But sure. So typically we've seen freelancers hired for tasks within a specific stage of the animation workflow. Though this is not always the case.
Sometimes a freelancer can get hired from start to finish on a project. Yeah. So some of the pros that you have here are that you're having direct contact with that freelancer, right? You don't have to go through a platform or a third party or a middleman. You don't get charged. For connecting with someone. Exactly in charge. So you get the direct contact with them and you get to maintain that contact. I mean, you can just send them a DM on Instagram or LinkedIn, right?
It's actually super easy to distance. Like, why would I have to pay someone else? Right. Right. Another pro here is that their workflow is typically customized to their own needs. So based on the work that they do, both their tools, their workflows and their systems are actually custom to how they operate. And what that means is that you don't actually need to fit your project request into sort of this one size fits all platform. Yeah. Usually just an open box that's says description.
Right, right. Yeah. So the way in which you're requesting that work to the freelancer is actually going to be a lot easier because they can help guide you through their workflow and you can get a better sense of what that process is like. They'll be the ones to kind of ask you those questions that you need to get to get to that. Correct. Like budget for the project. Yeah. So they're going to be helpful in, in guiding you through that process. Yeah. A third pro here is just consistency.
You know what you're going to be getting stylistically for every project that you work on with them, which is a beautiful thing to not have to question it, to say like, I know what they're capable of doing. Here it is. I know what I'm getting. Yeah, and that's that's great. Yeah. That's like, you know, consistency across both communication but also style in other options. I think sometimes when you get into multiple animators on a project, it's a little bit harder to get consistent animation
in motion across the project. So. All right. We'll talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. But I want to take a second here to shout out all of the great, fantastic freelancers that we've worked with over the years. Yeah, there's a. Couple of them. We love all our freelancers. Yeah, yeah. It's one that's something to maybe keep in mind that, you know, on our side as studios, we're also hiring freelancers. Absolutely. So there's it's there's a beautiful market of freelancers that you should consider hiring.
Yeah. We have our own database that we use and, you know, feel free if you're a freelancer to to check that out, you know, different kind of platform, but. Yeah, yeah. We're trying to find ways to support freelancers on multiple fronts. Yeah. Yeah. So you want to talk about some of the cons? Yeah, it is to acknowledge that because that said, there are pros and there are. Yes, let's let's talk about it.
So as a marketer, you're going to need to be active about staying compliant with different state laws. Right, because you might be hiring people from different states and also all over the world. Right? Yeah. So each state in the U.S. has different thresholds for what they define as what a freelancer is, or you might see it as a contractor. So you need to look at those laws to make sure you're staying compliant. Ten, ten. Any night.
An example of this is if you're continuously hiring one person over the course of the year for a certain amount of hours or certain amount of, you know, time in the schedule, the state might actually consider them a full time worker. Yeah. And this actually it it goes to the last option for the platforms. It's a big selling point for the platforms to hire them instead of hiring a freelancer directly. Right. So try to make sure you're staying compliant. Correct.
It's all about compliance whether you know, if you're talking about a giant corporation like Pepsi or Coke or, you know, some big entity like that, the platforms are saying, hey, we keep you compliant.
If if we go through like I don't know if if you're a freelancer out there that's on some of these platforms, they'll actually call you if you've only had one, one person on, on or one job through their platform, they'll call you and triple check that you have other invoices out to other companies and clients. Right. So. You know, they are doing a little bit of that legal fee. It is just a note that you won't get that if you're just hiring a freelancer directly.
Yes. So another con that we see here is what we're calling these sort of all eggs in one basket problem. And it's basically if a freelancer becomes unavailable for any reason, you know, you run the risk of needing to hire somebody else for that project, which can create some scheduling conflicts and create a little more stress that you might not have been prepared for. So a potential solution there is to just always make sure you have like a backup option just in case.
But yeah, that can definitely create some issues. One more con that we see here is that cost tend to fluctuate. This is pretty standard. Yeah, every freelancer will have a different way of charging for their services, which means as always, just a general solution here. Always add padding to your budget because depending on who you're hiring, especially if you have to bring on somebody else in the middle of the project,
their rate might be different. Yeah. And also in this economy, I mean, I feel like, you know, in this economy you're trying to do you're doing more with less, which is a terrible way of looking at it. But that's that is the situation that a lot of marketers find themselves in is I got to do way more with a lot less money. So. Right. And it's just keeping in mind that there's no one standard like to determine those costs. Yeah. So keep it in mind.
The final con that we see here is sort of a limited skill set. And what that means is that, you know, a freelancer can be incredibly awesome and talented and do amazing work, but they might not be able to meet all of your creative needs. Right. If you have different projects with different styles and different challenges that you're working with.
So it might be that you again need to find somebody else or for some other aspect of the project or other things that a freelancer wouldn't be able to provide. You know, I mean, it's typically why a lot of companies will hire multiple freelancers or have a freelancer database, right? Yeah. And, you know, it's I think it's safe to say that, you know, if you studied animation or you're an animator specifically, that you're you might not be the best designer you're really good at.
You're really good at motion and less on the design. Yeah. So that's that's what we mean by limited skill set. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about the creative point of view here? Yeah. So depending on my experience as a creative, I may or may not be used to freelancing. So it depends on who you are as a freelancer. You might be just starting out. Some people have been freelancers for decades. They've been all over the industry very well known freelancers out there that that work solo.
So I think, oh look, I don't know that song. Oh, Frank Ocean. Oh, okay. Sorry. Go ahead. Sometimes, though, I get put into a position where it feels like I need to do everything that the client wants. I think that's a position that freelancers are consistently in, which can get frustrating, especially if I have multiple clients doing sort of the same things.
To me, or I'm in a position where I'm a new freelancer, maybe I want to impress and like make sure that I get everything done on time and with their expectations and and or I'm in a position where I'm running short on time and that could be a little bit of a hiccup. So in all these scenarios, yeah, I feel like there's the from my perspective as a creative, I'm, I might be ebbing and flowing from being comfortable with a client to being being sort of constricted by a client.
I think that's fair to say. If I'm a seasoned freelancer, I have probably a typical workflow that I have that works really well for me. But I might be actually running into with newer clients some misinformation on terminology that people are using when they're in the conversations that that I now have to go through and probably find myself explaining that over and over and over again to many different clients that are new, that don't that don't quite know how to use those terms.
We covered this in a separate episode on terminology. It's not all the terminology that you need to know, but it's it's some of the ones that we come across for sure. It doesn't this this misinformation problem doesn't prevent the work from happening. Right. So you still kind of get the work done, but it makes the conversation a little bit harder. Communication can sort of fall because you're not quite expecting the right the right thing. Yeah. On both sides of this. Yeah.
Those conversations, you know, and misinformation for the algorithm sake is not only applicable to elections and vaccines, it's all in saying. Sure, sure, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. Misinformation is everywhere. So hopefully we're providing you with as much truthful in. The algorithm. As possible. As a freelancer. I'm basically a business. I'm a solo business. Solopreneur is is a thing, but I want to build relationships directly.
I have those relationships that I know I want to reach new clients, but I might actually have my own marketing problems. All right I'm I'm a business with marketing problems. I just have one person at my business and this whole topic is like a whole other episode really. And we can talk about in the future if you're interested. We're not really here to teach freelancers how to be better business owners. Because there's other programs, there's. So many programs out there
that are fantastic by the. Way. Yes. They look into it. You're freelancing. Absolutely. And, you know, we can name some, but we don't want to push anyone in any direction. But if you're a freelancer and I would absolutely look through through those options because they're they're fantastic. Yeah. And I don't you know, I don't think we're actually qualified to talk about being really good business owners.
Reminds me of like a like I'm shaking in April right now and I'm looking at it being like, you know, are we qualified? Looks hazy. Try again. Which brings us to the next option. Right? Right. The animation studio. Is hiring an animation. We're going to take a hard look at ourselves. Yes, you're doing some introspect in here. Yeah. Yeah. To provide hopefully some some clarity. So. Yeah, pros and. Cons, tell us about that option. Yeah.
So if you're hiring either an animation studio or you might call it a production company. You know what I heard? Sorry to cut you off, but you know what I heard? Prod co. Prod co. Yeah, boy. Oh, I. I saw it written and I was like, what is a prod co production company? I got that totally makes sense. Okay, well, I won't be using that, but we define a production studio or animation studio as having multiple team members.
So more than one. Yeah. With multiple skill sets that create all sorts of different creative projects, namely in the medium of animation. That's what we're talking about when we define this right now. So this is slightly different from what you might know as a creative agency, but we will get there. So hang tight. Or just an agent? It was just an agency. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So some of the pros here for working with an animation studio, you are going to have creative flexibility and reliability.
So, for example, if one person has to step away from a project, another person within the team can immediately take it on. And generally, there's always more than one person that has an eye on the project at any given time. So there's a level of accountability there in terms of schedule, in terms of creative content, yeah, you have a little more reliability to make sure that your project's always being at the forefront. Yeah. You also have the benefit of management, right?
Typically you'll have a dedicated project manager, sometimes on both sides of the project, but almost always within the animation studio. And they're going to help you navigate both the client relationship that you have, and they're also going to help navigate the communication with the artist. So they're keeping everybody on track in the same schedule. That's their primary focus. It's a beautiful thing.
A third pro here is that as a team, you're going to have a deeper understanding of the overall strategy of an animated video project as it pertains to executing on your campaign as a marketer. So a team of people is going to be more involved in the different of the production workflow that are going to help to build something that complements your strategy as a whole. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, the size of your composition
becomes really important here. Yeah. The size of your team composition, because you never want a situation where you have too many cooks in the kitchen and it becomes a kitchen nightmare. Boy. Shout out to that show. Boy, you. You nailed it. Nice. Yeah. Also a good show. Yeah. We'll have a bake off later. Nice. We're going to keep yeah, we're going to do a whole episode, just a bonus episode about our favorite, you. Know, favorite. Cook shows.
Cooking shows. Yeah. So what are some of the cons with studios? As much as we like to admit we're perfect. They're definitely you know, I actually. Sorry, I take that back. There are no cons. There are no cons. Right, right. All right. So we just keep going. Reality check. There are cons. Let's talk about them. So one of the cons here is that working with an animation studio can be more expensive, right?
The studio tends to be more expensive because of additional costs that you might not be considering when you first thinking about hiring them. Yeah, things like especially if they're in a physical location dealing with overhead. Yeah, right. And if a company's not remote. So that's something to keep in mind. Yeah, they're we're remote. We don't have that issue. But yeah. But there are different costs that are associated. Yeah. So another thing to think about that's a con is capacity.
So this varies from studio to studio based on both the size and the artistic limitations that they have. Yeah, studios may take on too much work at one time, right? We're taking on as many projects as we can expense. We're trying to survive or we're trying to like, you know, try to grow and grow. We're trying to expand. And that might mean that one or more projects might suffer on the back end. Yeah, because of the strain on the creative team.
So that's something to keep in mind about maybe even asking a studio how they manage their projects. Because if you're talking us and we're working on anywhere from five to as many as like 15 projects in a given month, how do we ensure that everything stays intact? Yeah. And on time, really? It's really on time. Yeah, exactly. So something else to think about that's a con here is the stylistic range. As much as we might hate to admit this style choices are also limited
within a studio environment. Yeah. Depending on the set up that they have or the total talent that they have at the studio, it also limits the styles that they can hit for your project, and they might have to go and hire freelancers or hire other people in house. Hire other. Studios, hire the studios. That happens for sure. Yeah. So that's something to keep in mind because that might up the cost on your project as well to consider.
Yeah, a final con here that we have is sort of the internal studio dynamics that are happening within the projects we're talking about. There's no issues. It's never issues in companies. So studios will might also hate to admit this, but there's always a layer of office politics that are going around with other people at the studio who are probably running your project, right? Yeah. And those politics can sometimes get in the way. They can vary the level of success or effectiveness on a project.
So it's really just something to be mindful and looking out for. One thing you could try to determine for yourself is like looking at a studio is this studio approaching things on sort of like a Game of Thrones vibe, office politics, or are we talking about like Ted Lasso politics very two. Very different. Both shows. Very great shows. Yes. Fantastic. Very different approaches to team building. Sure. Absolutely. So keep that in mind. Not cutthroat. Right? Right. Yeah. Creative point of view.
Yeah. In a studio environment. So as a creative working in the industry, the reality is that I'm basically staying employed because of the work that comes into the studio, because of the sales that the studio is is giving us. So that means that some projects might not be exactly what I want to work on. Yeah. Right.
As a creative, you kind of have these these ideas about what you should be working on on your own, and the studio is giving you work that you may not be entirely excited about others I might be really excited about. So there might be different levels of of excitement depending on the projects that come in as an artist. I never really have considered your marketing strategy right at a studio necessarily.
I usually as an artist leave that to the strategy people because almost always there's a separation there between at the sales point. Here's the strategy we're going for, right? That's a different role. That's a different set of people. Usually that that aren't necessarily the people who are working on the project. Right. Or the creative directors focusing on the strategy curve of the artists and then rolling that information back. Yeah.
So I, I also really just want to expand my own skillset, right? I'm again internally working through some of the stuff. So it's at artists, at studios might struggle between producing the best content that they possibly can for a project that they may not actually believe in. Yeah. So that's kind of the, the point of view there usually and that's a whole I think that's a whole other episode as well. How do you work on things that you're not super excited about? Yeah, sure.
But it's important for studios to recognize this of their artists. Yeah. And where they. Are. Yeah, that's. All right. Well, so why don't we jump a little bit further up the ladder here into your last option? So we're talking about now hiring an agency. Yeah, which we mentioned a little bit before, but I think it's really important to start by defining what we mean by agency here.
So agencies are multiple people again, but they're working on multiple aspects of different business goals for a company or for a client. And this is typically generating more revenue or profit over time. Yeah. So agencies are developing strategies and executing on campaigns with their internal marketing and creative teams. Right. So you wouldn't necessarily hire them for just a single piece of content.
You usually you're looking for a broad range of services that they can provide in this sort of all in one inclusive package. Yeah. So a pro to working with them is that you can work on multiple campaigns at a time, especially if you're a company that's expanding and trying to test out multiple things. The largest agencies have hundreds, if not thousands of people. Yeah, so all be able to work on your project. They are downsizing today. But. But yes, they are still pretty big. Yeah.
But they're set up for a larger scale. Yeah. Regardless. Right. So agencies will usually need to work on large projects and longer projects so they're able to understand the needs at that scale. Yeah. And they're also highly knowledgeable of the different global trends that are happening that might help to make some of your business decisions a lot easier. So, you know, in a way, I can use all of the data that tells me that I need to trend towards a culture of toxic nostalgia, perhaps.
Have you been a nineties Khan yet? Oh, my gosh, no. Is that a thing? Very nostalgic. Yes, it's here. It's in Connecticut. Oh, man. They're probably all over at this point. I could see the multiple ones. Yeah, but speaking of cons. Yeah, let's get into, like, the guns. So top of the list, they're expensive. Number one, agencies tend to be super pricey. You know, they employ lots of people. They have lots of overhead. Therefore, they need lots of money.
And you need to be sort of at the top of their list in terms of their client list, in order to make the sort of move them to do anything for you. Their strategies might not totally align with your morals or your values or your goals. Usually your goals, but not morals and values depends on the agency. But some agencies tend to have a process for success that you might have a different view on. And if those don't sort of jive and work well, you might face some pushback in unexpected ways.
Another big con here is that the results that you get from these agencies could be skewed after the agencies run reports. They have to run reports to sort of prove their effectiveness. That's their whole job. Right. So those reports can really be made to say whatever they want. You know. I think public facing side, they want to look good. Everybody wants what want. Yeah. So manipulating numbers kind of comes becomes part of the job. Another con that you may not be aware of.
Agencies also outsource their creative work. Almost all. All agencies. Studios. Yeah. So where on some of those list they have an approved vendors list. Almost always. And they go through that which usually ends up marking up the price on those things. Right. And then last con here, agency personnel move around a lot. The one account manager might change over the course of the campaign.
So, you know, you're running campaigns for about six months to a year and, you know, the people there might change over the course at the time that you're running that campaign. So the next person might not be as good, might not be as in. Fact, companies might merge. All sorts of things can happen. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the creative point of view here. Working at an agency.
So as a creative at an agency, I am typically well aware of my role and the function of being a creative year. Yeah, right. I'm usually better equipped to understand that sort of y behind what we're doing. Yes. Because it's talked about more frequently and I can even work on things really fast. Usually I have to yeah. I'm used to be able to being able to juggle around multiple projects and different timelines all at once. But with that does come this sort of like base level of stress.
Yeah, right. And it's because the expectations that I'm working off of are quite high now. I need to be able to do it. A little bit everywhere. Everyone's doing less with more, more with less mirthless. Yeah. Yeah. So and so sometimes as an addition here I am dealing with a lot more of those office politics that are going around.
Yeah, I might need different levels of approval at different points of the production from multiple people, which can actually block some of my creative capability for being able to do the work that you're asking me. Yeah, we talked a little bit about going upstairs and that staircase gets way bigger and bigger. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. It's an escalator at that one. Yeah. Yeah. And in this situation, there's a lot more cooks in the kitchen. Yeah, there's a lot more.
Paul, Hollywood's that you're trying to get a handshake from. Right. And it's very difficult. Like one handshake is hard enough. You're trying to do that like multiple times over. I think we watch too many cooking shows that there might be too many cooking shows in the world. That's. Oh, that's. Yeah, that's a debate. Is there enough. Well I think that's it. That's, that's the end of the episode in terms of our content.
Yeah. I mean hopefully you got a sense of some of the pros and cons between each of the options that you have just to give a sense of maybe which one you might be leaning to. Yeah, more than another. So just to summarize, you have a couple of options here. You have your DIY option, you do it yourself. Go to the go to go, go to a browser and animate on your own. You get your platform solution. Find a middleman that will connect you to a freelancer.
You've got your direct a freelancer situation, you've got your hire a studio production company somewhere in the middle there. Or you can go all the way up to an agency model that again will help you with strategy from the jump on a larger kind of thing. Yeah so we hope you can you. It'll give you some thought about which options to consider. Yeah. Which options might be right for you, which options might not be right. And let's also to say that like, you might go with different options
at different times. Sure you can. Yeah. So here's the tease for the next episode. Our next episode will be another hack. Got to get our hack game in order to make doing some of that short form content. We also have a bonus episode where we are going to talk to the creative this time. Nice about working on creative content, how they handle those issues as communication issues. What is it that they experience? This is someone we haven't worked with before, but we are very excited to talk to.
You always this person. Really, really good conversations. So yeah. Yeah. And we're excited to be on their podcast later on. That'll be a bonus episode for us as well. So it's going to be a special episode. It'll be great. So yeah, so at least for this episode, a big thank you to Emilia for producing this podcast. Yeah, the producer is Jackson Foote and our music was created by Hidden and licensed to film meet dot com. Until next time. You jump right into it.
I was I was shocked usually we usually we you know we say. I'm just trying to get over it. I'm trying to get over it. Let's see how this is. Trying to I'm trying to get over it quickly. Uh huh. So you're prolonging. This. I see. That was my. Until next time. Stay open line wrong. I did it wrong. Now I'm now I'm just in an excuse to prolong it even further. Until next time. Stay on us. Stay open. You did it right. This is brilliant. Keep it going. Okay, we've got this.
Until next time, stay honest. Stay creative. Stay seated. We should do it.