Lesson 4: You’re not paying us to push buttons

15 years. 15 lessons.
By Matt Cooper

One of the things we’ll often ask at the start of a project is:

Would you like our input?

Sometimes a client comes to us with everything locked down.

The script has been through 47 stakeholders, everyone’s signed it off and our job is to bring it to life.

Fine.

But often there’s an opportunity to make something better before we start.

Maybe the script works on paper, but we can see places where the visuals could do the heavy lifting instead of the words.

Maybe we’ve been given a storyboard created by a brilliant illustrator, but they’ve naturally thought about the individual frames rather than how we actually move between them.

Motion changes things.

And sometimes it’s bigger than that.

You might have asked us to make one video, but we can see an opportunity to create a whole load of additional content from the same production.

Social clips. Teasers. Internal comms. Shorter edits.

Why make one thing if, with a bit of planning upfront, the same investment can work much harder?

None of this is about us saying “no” or telling a client they’re wrong.

Quite the opposite.

It’s a collaboration.

You know your business, your audience and what you need to achieve.

We know motion, storytelling and how to take an idea from a script or a sketch and turn it into something people actually want to watch.

Put those two things together and you generally get a much better result.

Because ultimately, you’re not paying a studio to push buttons. You’re paying for access to a craft.

Our job is to use that craft to make you, your product or your service look good, be understood and, ideally, create that lovely sweet spot between education and entertainment.

That’s where the good stuff happens.

Lesson 4 done.

Only 11 more opinions nobody asked for coming your way.