How to budget for animation in a research grant

Most enquiries I get come from people with no idea what an animation costs, which is fair enough, given that almost nobody publishes a price. Some have money and can't tell whether it's enough. Some have none, and are finding out three years too late that they should have asked for it when the grant was written.

Then there are the ones who do it the right way round. They write asking for an estimate precisely because they haven't submitted the bid yet and need a number to put in it. It happened twice in four weeks this summer. One told me which style she'd have to pick based on the funds available, then said the estimate was enough for her fellowship application. The other sent her budget range up front and asked for a formal quotation with a breakdown, to attach to a proposal. Neither had worked with me before, and nobody had told either of them to do it that way.

Plenty of those applications come to nothing. Some land.

I've been doing this since 2017. Bristol first, then UCL, Bath, Penn, IARC, Bern, Amsterdam. Four separate departments at Penn have commissioned work over the years, which tells you how it arrives: almost always through someone who came back, or who passed my name to a colleague. What follows is the money side of the job as I see it, plus what the funders put in writing.

Here's what happens when the line is missing. A US trial I worked on was funded in 2018, and enrolment ran from 2021 to 2024. In September 2025 the programme manager emailed to ask what a results video would cost. From that first email to the day I could start drawing was about four months, nearly all of it budget approval, quotes and vendor paperwork. The animation took five months after that and came out this autumn alongside the paper. The missing budget line cost them the best part of a year in which nobody could say for certain that it would happen at all.

What it costs

Nobody likes asking, so I'll go first.

£999 per finished minute for whiteboard animation. £1,899 for traditional 2D. £3,899 for detailed work. A research explainer usually runs two to three minutes, so somewhere between £2,000 and £11,700 depending on which style and how long.

If you'd rather not take a supplier's word for it, the University of Bristol publishes a public engagement costings guide for its own researchers, and it puts a high-quality video at £1,000 per minute of finished product. That guide is from 2020. Prices haven't gone down since.

Two things nobody thinks to ask. Whether the quote includes VAT, which depends on where the supplier is based and shifts the number by a fifth. And whether animation is the right format at all, because if your finding is a single relationship then a well-drawn diagram in the paper and on a poster may do more for less, and if the audience is other specialists a narrated slide walkthrough will often do the job. Animation earns the cost when the thing you're explaining changes over time, or has to reach people who are never going to read the paper.

As for how much of the grant, there are two published figures worth knowing. Wellcome's old public engagement enrichment scheme asked applicants for around 5% of the research grant. Orinoco Communications has written up a £250,000 grant that got £15,000 for two animations, which is 6%. Both of those are just examples of what someone once asked for and got. Work out what the job costs first and use the percentage afterwards to check it looks sensible, because a budget built backwards from a percentage tends to show.

And if the number doesn't fit, say so early, because the shape can change. In July someone told me her range before I'd quoted anything, and two shorter animations turned out to be a better answer than one longer one.

Where to put it, and what not to call it

On UKRI applications it belongs under directly incurred other costs, alongside consultancy fees and subcontracting, which is where a bought-in service like this sits. The exact sub-headings vary a little between councils, so check yours. On Horizon Europe it goes in the purchase category for other goods, works and services, whose official examples are consumables, catering and events, printing and graphic services, translation, and open access publication costs. Communication isn't on that list, which is rather the point. Describe what you're actually buying: a purchased service, sitting alongside printing and graphic services. US federal forms vary by agency, so read the instructions for yours. On an NIH budget it generally sits among the other direct costs, but wherever it lands the justification does most of the work.

Which brings me to the bit most people get wrong.

Everyone assumes Impact Acceleration Accounts are there to rescue a missed communications budget. UKRI's current IAA guidance excludes "non-specific public engagement activities and general science communication", in those words. What IAAs will support is engagement where interaction with users, policymakers, patients or communities is integral to achieving impact. A general results video usually won't qualify. Something built for a named user group, as part of a specific impact pathway, might. STFC funds no public engagement costs at all. Wellcome's enrichment scheme excluded "media and communication activities" on the same logic, and it closed in May 2022, though it still turns up in advice online.

Both exclusions point the same way. Funders will pay for an activity aimed at a named audience far more readily than for communication in general, so write the line as the first of those.

The actual words

Animated dissemination of findings (approximately £3,800). Trial results will be returned to the 1,400 participants and to referring clinicians as a 2-minute animated explainer, produced in English and Spanish with subtitle files, hosted on the study website and embedded in the results page, with views reported alongside the study's other dissemination outputs. Based on a written quote at £1,899 per finished minute. This is the primary route by which participants will receive the findings. The peer-reviewed paper is paywalled and written at a reading level the majority of our cohort cannot access.

The last two sentences are the ones that persuade. They explain how the people who gave you their data will find out what you learned, at a point where the paper won't reach them.

Swap in your own figures, name the format and the length and the languages and where it'll live, and only make the accessibility argument if you can back it, because that final sentence is doing a lot of work. If your funder wants a dissemination plan, as PCORI does, the budget line and the plan should describe the same thing in the same words.

If the grant's already running and there's money sitting there, don't assume either answer about whether you can spend it this way. Ask your research finance team whether it's eligible under your award, whether the existing budget covers it, and whether the funder has to sign off on the change. Asking takes a day. If there's nothing left, ask anyway, because some programmes hold dissemination or follow-on funds that aren't advertised loudly, and plenty of institutions have a public engagement pot that goes underspent.

Either way, get a written quote early, and ask even if you think it'll come to nothing. I'm glad of the email either way. Someone wanting what you make is a good day whether or not it turns into a job, and almost everything I've worked on came from a recommendation rather than a search. If I can't fit it in, or the number genuinely doesn't work for you, I'll point you at other animators who can do it.

One last thing before you choose a supplier

I've got an obvious interest here, since I draw these by hand. But if the animation is going to sit alongside a paper, check the publisher's policy before you commission anything. Springer Nature doesn't permit AI-generated images, animation or video in anything it publishes, and JAMA prohibits AI-generated video submitted with a manuscript.

Ask whoever you hire how the work actually gets made.

Why I'm writing this down

The best part of this job is taking something complicated and explaining it in a way that's fun and arty and that all sorts of people can relate to. Starting a new one, inventing the characters and the style, reading a paper that might change how people get treated. What's frustrating is that some of the ones I'd most like to work on never get made, because nobody asked for the money.

So if you're writing a grant at the moment, put a line in for it. You'll be glad of it in three years, and if the bid doesn't land you've lost nothing.