Questionnaire Reply from Axis Animation.

Questionnaire

Company Name: Axis Animation

Name: Stuart Aitken

Do you have a degree? if so what is it in?

yes, BA(Hons) in design (Glasgow School of Art)

How did you get into the industry?

I taught myself 3d in my spare time after I left college and started producing various SF themed images and published them on the web (I had my own site) - some of these got me noticed and hired - I also spent quite a bit of time on various 3d mailing lists which was another way of creating some kind of public profile and awareness of myself as a CG artist (this was previous to things like CGTalk and so on existing)

How long have you worked in the advertising business?

I would say animation business rather than advertising per ce - but about 15 years

What style of advertising do you do?

we do animated 3d commercials for clients like Scottish Power plus a lot of work for the games industry (trailers, intros, cut scenes etc)

Do you have much creative freedom?

I’d say Yes, but it varies - its important to always understand the constraints of the job and work towards fulfilling the innate needs of the situation at hand and getting your client what they want (or need) - within that there is always creative freedom (indeed that is what your clients need from you), but being able to realise this within a distinct set of criteria and on demand is not always easy and it can sometimes feel limiting.

You are also typically working in collaboration with other creative people or teams both external and internal (eg an agency, and/or production company, marketing departments, game developers, other artsist and animators,etc) and those people will have opinions that you need to take on board or work with as well, especially when they perhaps contradict your own.

In general I think its important to focus on execution as much as possible - this doesn’t mean you don’t have creative freedom just that you need to think much more about just doing a great job and being professional about doing it.

I think generally the people who do the best work find some way to make it creatively satisfying for themselves even if ostensibly they do not necessarily have a load of ‘creative freedom’ in the purist sense of the expression.

How much is an average advertisement cost?

how long is a piece of string? :)

it can vary immensely between around 10k anywhere up to millions - there are all sorts of clients out there with all sorts of budgets

I’d say for axis most of the commercials we do tend to range from around 35k up to around 150k, but we also do things with smaller budgets and the games related jobs can have much larger budgets than that

What is the general time period you have to work to?

that will depend on the complexity of the job but typically anywhere from a few weeks to 3 or 4 months

How do you see advertisements developing in the future?

3d ads will probably become a fad once the hardware has enough penetration into the home.

I think in general ads have to get smarter and smarter as the ‘dialogue’ they have with their audience gets more complex and sophisticated (indeed the audience becomes more sophisticated). being obvious doesn’t always work and increasingly commercials can be quite obtuse or seemingly at a tangent to the thing they are selling (eg recent cadburys ads)- that’s a trend I see increasing

Do you feel an increasing need to use animation in advertising today?

Not necessarily, but I wouldn’t say its decreasing either - I think there is a move towards greater use of VFX and 3D in commercials generally as those technologies become cheaper but there is also a move to lower budgets given the current economic situation

Do you think animation in advertising is helpful?

I think the question would be better phrased as ‘effective’ rather than ‘helpful’ and the answer to that is hugely dependant on the creative and execution and its appropriateness to selling the product

there is no generic answer to this - it totally depends, but in at least some cases resoundingly yes :)

What do you think the public prefer, normal advertisements or animated ones? Why?

again I think that depends hugely on the specific commercial and not on whether it just happens to be animated or not in a general sense - some ads and/or products and/or ideas work great with animation and some don’t. Also some animated commercials are great and some are not, on the execution side. You can have a bad idea brilliantly animated and vice versa.

There is also probably a distinction between whether a commercial is popular in its own right (almost as a piece of entertainment) and if it actually sells the product or not - I can imagine some commercials being liked and popular in terms of the former POV but not necessarily a great success from the latter.

I suspect people may ‘like’ animated commercials better in general as they tend to be more obviously ‘entertaining’ than merely ‘selling’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are effective (it probably helps though)