The 5 things NOT in your medical animation quote

The quote says £20k. The invoice says £27k.

Nobody lied to you. The number was real. It just wasn't complete — and the gap is always in the same five places. After 20+ years directing medical and technical production, I can tell you the overrun is almost never the animation itself. It's the things a quote quietly assumes you already know.

Here's where the gap hides.

1. Revision rounds — and which kind you're buying

Most quotes say "2 rounds of revisions." Fine. But there are two completely different kinds of revision on a medical piece, and a clean quote splits them.

There's the visual round — pacing, colour, a logo that's the wrong size. Quick. Then there's the scientific round — a clinician reads it, a fact changes, a mechanism gets redrawn. That one is expensive, because it ripples back through animation you'd already locked.

When a quote bundles both into "2 rounds," you find out at round 3 that the scientific corrections were never in the number.

2. MLR and regulatory review — separate from creative

Creative sign-off and medical/legal/regulatory sign-off are not the same event, and they don't happen on the same timeline. MLR will send comments that have nothing to do with whether the work is good — they're about whether it's compliant.

A quote that doesn't carve out an MLR cycle is a quote that's about to get a surprise. The work was approved. Then it wasn't. That's a round nobody priced.

3. Voiceover and licensed music

The animation is the visible cost, so it's the cost people quote. But a finished medical asset has a voice and a bed of sound under it. Professional narration — booked, directed, and matched to the on-screen pacing — is a line item. So is music you're actually licensed to use.

Skip these in the quote and you'll either bolt them on at the end at a premium, or ship something that sounds like a draft.

4. Source and editable files

You paid for it. Do you own the project file?

Plenty of quotes deliver a rendered MP4 and nothing underneath it. Then six months later you want to swap a stat, change a date, drop in a new logo — and you can't, because the editable timeline was never part of the deal. Either you go back to the original maker every time, or you rebuild from scratch.

If file ownership matters to you, it has to be in the quote. It is rarely there by default.

5. Format variations

You commissioned one 90-second explainer. You will not use it in one place.

You'll want a 15-second cutdown for social. A silent, autoplay-captioned version for the feed. A square crop for a conference booth screen. Each of those is a real reformatting job — re-pacing, re-cropping, re-laying type for a different aspect ratio. One source video is not five deliverables.

A quote that prices the hero and nothing else is pricing maybe a third of what you'll actually need.

The one question that closes the gap

You don't have to become a production expert to stop getting surprised. You have to ask one thing before you sign:

"What is NOT included in this number?"

A good production partner will answer it straight, on the spot, because they've already thought about it. A vague answer is the surprise, arriving early — and that's useful information too.

We've run LBMP since 2011. The reason our quotes are longer than the cheap ones isn't padding. It's that we'd rather have the awkward conversation now, in writing, than hand you an invoice you didn't see coming. In an industry addicted to chaos and missed deadlines, the boring thing — a complete number — is the whole product.

Ask the question. Then read the answer carefully.