How to solve the main creative dilemma?

If you are a part of a creative team, or maybe just a creative person who provides content, you might face this kind of a choice from time to time. Should I focus on this project or that one? While this is in a sense just an ordinary question for each of us, there is a bigger dilemma underneath it. The dilemma is, as it usually happens, a question of scale: should I elaborate on one big creative project that requires my whole attention and resources, as well as time and dedication or put efforts in a number of smaller art projects which definitely sounds less demanding.

Oh, pressure is almost unbearable! Another side of this dilemma is the question of quality. One top-notch project or many smaller, rather stylish projects, but not that high-class. Naturally, there are even more layers to both directions: bigger or smaller exposure, the payment, amount of time, etc. Both approaches have their own pros and cons, and finding the right one is an arduous task to any creative person. Resources may say one thing, while ambitions keep whispering something else. What should you listen to?

Illustration by Inga Ziemele

We’ve been there. Since as a studio we have such a dilemma, and actually faced it more than once, we decided to separate wheat from the chaff.

Big project means good money, but not consistent payment

If you are choosing big projects you will probably get a better payment. This advantage is usually the main one for many creative people. Choosing it, you will have to spend all of your time and energy on a particular project.

Such projects are extremely demanding: at best, you will make just a few of them in a year, or even only one. The very big con of that is there are very few big projects with good budgets in a market. This is why you can expect great income… but it most likely won’t be consistent. 

In order to be a part of such projects – or a project – you have to show a good, polished portfolio with many cases and proven expertise. What else? You will have to undergo a lot of pre-events — meetings to show your ideas, do some test tasks, create mood boards or just whatever preparation works will be relevant to a big project.

In order for you to get this kind of job, these high-quality projects normally offer contests to find the best candidate.

If you choose to make smaller projects you will easily get the job in a few days and consistent income.

First things first: you will not have to contest on tenders if you are choosing to work with the smaller projects. And why would you? The scale is undemanding. These are projects that require flexibility: you should be able to do the job quickly, and you will have a chance to put this project into a portfolio as quickly as you finish it. This is where you might hear a voice of ambition. It seems possible that these projects will not give you great satisfaction or creative growth.

But it will give you a lot of pros:

• you will be able to master your technique, to polish your style or just upgrade in some tools you want to use;
• have many possibilities to experiment with the style;
• you can just do different things throughout the process of working on these small projects and have quick turnaround;
• normally, smaller projects require not so much creative energy as technique, and the ability to adapt quickly;
• you can collect the library of the assets or some templates or the things you may reuse in others.

So basically you develop your personal approach to certain tasks and personal optimization, and eventually it will help you make the other projects quicker and more efficient all the time.

Illustration by tubik.arts

Finding new approaches vs reusing the old ones

This is another part of the previous point. If you are starting working on a new project – a big, innovative project – you will have to come up with solutions that never existed before, or at least you didn’t use them before at all. It’s getting into breaking bad: trying something new, inventing and shaping ideas, testing and validating them.

In the big projects you will have to mix things, researching the topic, create complicated mood boards, and developing the sophisticated characters. The characters that truly give the world the idea of the brand, with a comprehensive story behind it.

All of it sounds as an extremely vital part of pros to us. In the smaller projects you won’t be as creative as here – such projects rarely need it. As we said before, you will reusing and polishing skills instead of breaking through the walls.

Teamwork

Just one word this time, but so different realities! Most likely in the big project you will interact with many people: communication, collaboration, and working with many departments will be vital. For example, if you are a highly skilled art director, your responsibility will be to interact with other people, and often coordinate the whole team. If you are working on simpler projects you will be doing a job that is particularly yours. Just a one-man-job.

Meaning: you do your part and pass it to the next person in a chain. For example, you create an artwork, then pass your arts to the animator who will make his part. In most cases it’s some restricted responsibility job that needs to be done within some particular time frame. Well, it really depends on your motivation and ambitions which of these is better. However, in terms of growth, it is hard to beat the first one.

The problem of budgets and risk of failure

Of course, being involved in the big projects, you’ll get much more money, but there is a risk of wrong calculation and estimation of resources and time. Such estimation must be precise in budget, terms of work, and the number of team members you need, as well as their positions.  

This list could also include some tools that you might use, for example, license for the software, or maybe a render. Since the project is big and complex, it may require the additional services: third party involvement. So you may require some additional resources, additional people or very narrow specialists to your team to make the project happen. Putting all of it in the cost estimation could perfectly work for smaller projects, but in a grand creative project, some things are really unpredictable.

You may be experimenting with the style or looking for the better approach and it will drain your budget. Giant projects are harder to predict. That’s the bottom line. Let’s say, you expect the rendering service. You expect it to cost $1,000. And while you’re applying some particular plugins, finding the best thing that works for you, the cost might reach 3000 easily. You couldn’t predict it! Sometimes it’s harder to negotiate when bigger budgets overlap and vice versa.

Illustration by KSENIIA FAST

The budget estimation equals the payments. So when planning the budget of the bigger project, you should obviously agree on the schedule of payments just to make it regular. We recommend taking it once a month or based on the closing a certain scope of work or some milestones to make. It is comfortable with the long term production to receive money from time to time unlike having it only in the beginning and at the end of the project.

What about the smaller projects and their budgets?  Smaller projects, as we said before, are all about flexibility and speed. If the client wants something to change so normally you start quickly, and a negotiation part won’t take long. If the client wants something to change during the whole process —it won’t break anything, because it will look like it’s another project or another phase of the project.

In this case it is easy to come to agreement due to the fact that it’s just direct spending of another time slot of you or your team. What does it tell us? When you make simple projects, to predict budget and additional spendings is very easy. To estimate the terms, processes, services and the people involved in the project is a piece of cake. You always know exactly how much will be needed to spend for a certain service relying on hourly rate.

Repeating a working model or inventing a new one?

This is the essential difference between complicated projects and small projects: whether the project is repeatable. Big projects are very rarely repeatable —  they are unique, and noticeable on the market because they are not repeating what other projects have already done.

After all, that is what allows them to reach such a scale. If you spent several months on developing some new style and approach, dedicating your time and energy, as well as team passion to make something unique, then you naturally want a project to make its best. The client, too, wants to preserve the style for a brand. In a simple project you will have to use either the familiar technique or a popular approach.

Ordinarily, you will have a reference from a client  to understand what you have to do. So your main task will be not to reinvent things, but to make a really nice copy that works. And make it quickly. For smaller projects it is kind of common to use the approaches that worked. For instance, one coffee shop can just repeat a business model of another cafe that already worked. So it’s a repeatable business model to treat a creative project as a small business or make it as a franchise business.

Creative energy aspect

One more aspect of difference between the complicated, big projects and simple projects may seem a little bit exotic, maybe even esoteric, but this is an important factor for creative people. I call it a creative energy aspect. Here’s what I mean: normally a complicated project is something you do not just mechanically deliver. It’s about your inner relation to the whole thing.

It is more about loving the product, loving the service, and therefore, about conscious approach and deep understanding of what are the essential things of the brand and how you want to show them within the project. Even if you are using a product service, it’s not mechanical — you are trying to talk about it, trying to feel it, touch it. Eventually, it reflects deeper interaction with the product. Another side of it that couldn’t be just mechanical is how you live with these thoughts for some time when you are working on the project.

Your involvement is complete. Therefore, when you finish it, in order to switch to another project and in most cases to be efficient, you need to take some rest. Such projects require your inner energy, and to treat with passion your new project you need some time off. If we are talking about the projects that are going on a pipeline one by one – simple, small projects –  they don’t require so much involvement and the artist, or let’s say creator in a wider sense, is more needed as an executor.

Nobody expects you to think of it for a long time, to mulling over the ideas or to spend lots of time on research. Nor a product needs it. In this case it could be just unnecessary overcomplication of the project. For smaller projects there is predictable execution with well known style, with a known reference and with an exact time frame for an exact event or a marketing campaign. Do you need creative energy resources or this high inspiration for this kind of project? Nope, not at all.

Big projects may be considered as startups

Sometimes while working on a big project you invent something that didn’t exist before, something that will disrupt the market. Let’s consider disruption as some totally new approach or some images with completely different meanings. Such a thing might lead to the scale that is similar to startup creation.

At the same time the smaller projects can be treated more like a craft thing made on a conveyor. It’s like a factory production unit. If you value predictability with known procedures, with known business processes, everything is quite standardized. Improvisation isn’t a thing here. Everything should be done with exact tools, with exact time frame, with exact number of resources.

Illustration by tubik.arts

Timing and scheduling

The timing and scheduling is really predictable for the smaller projects. When culating the duration, the hours, days or whatever you calculate about your employees or your team involvement, the mistakes will be minimal. Let’s imagine the next situation: you are planning the illustrator work for ten days, and the same amount of time for the animator. Plus, five days for corrections. Therefore, that’s 25 days. The expected mistake is five days or maybe 20% of all the time. Things are extremely different when it comes to the big projects.

You have to plan months of work, as well as the involvement of all the parties. The number of elements you are taking into account is ridiculously bigger than for a small project. In that case you just have three components like illustrator, animator and the feedback time. So you can easily manipulate these things. In a big project, you will obviously have at least ten tasks ( but on average 30 to 50),  20 or even more different people, so you can predict their deliverability and their coping with timings. The possibility of mistakes is way higher. 

For instance – and this is experienced by many projects –  you may predict the project to be done in three months, when it will be done in six months. Double failure with the timing is very possible.

One more important factor

When clients order a service for a big project they expect a life changing outcome. As a result they require from you full involvement. During the course they can come up with great ideas, recommend it to you, and even pay additionally. But the timing of such projects can be unpredictable.

From our experience, there were some projects that had to be done in half a year but they turned into years of production. While simpler projects are more in line — they are very predictable and short. They require a short and quite predictable production time frame as clients don’t pay so much attention to them, they treat them as a part that should be done to a particular deadline.

Usually, they treat it more as a tool for marketing or just a tool for sales. They don’t consider them to be masterpieces and spend months and years for their completion.

Conclusion

Illustration by Mary Maka

The main question you should ask yourself in order to solve this dilemma is the next one: do I look for certainty?  If you want certainty and quite regular work with some predictable tasks, predictable amount of time you want to spend and predictable schedule — the smaller projects better fit your goals. On the other hand, complicated projects can often go out of schedule and of resources.

When doing complicated projects, you should be prepared for unexpected things in terms of the team. You may require some exotic or very narrow specialists, the additional resources, or to make research which will lead you to unexpected conclusions and it will change the whole project. The development and the research phase is much, much longer in the big projects in terms of budget and just earning. Meanwhile smaller projects are really fast and turnaround. So you get the money quickly, you quickly do the job and you quickly get another project.

You should measure your professional ambition: small projects won’t bring much money, it won’t be really huge growth. On the contrary: it will be more gradual growth if you just take more and more projects of the smaller scope. But this will be really fast turn around with money, while in bigger projects the amount of money will be big. But you will definitely have periods when you get a lot of money and then you work without any money coming up.

Big projects means huge budgets, but a non gradual distribution of these budgets over time. We talked a lot about the skills, but let’s emphasize one thing: working on the smaller projects you will master your skills and polish your approach.

You will be the master of simple things: deliver results quickly and conveniently for a client. Who mostly mastered this as people who make some kind of art for stock websites. They are so predictable in their level of quality, and time they spent on a project. These professionals know that ik a day they need to deliver the result: 5 or 10 works. And they work really mechanically, delivering a very sustainable level of quality in a very short time.

If you are working on a big project, your level of growth will most obviously go really high within time you work on this project because you’ll learn more — new approaches, researches, you will get acquainted with other people, other narrow specialists, maybe some super great art directors. This is a great way to push yourself to the next level. It won’t be gradual, but unexpected and radical.

Why? Because you will not be polishing your basic skills. You’ll be creative, get the best out of your design thinking, and will go to the new horizons of methodology mastering. It is really up to your goals, ambitions, and current state of resources – emotional and creative – to choose what is better to make: a lot of small things, but or to make really big and life changing experience projects. In the end all of us want to motivate, to grow and do even greater projects and services, to make our clients really happy. What is your choice?

The process of creating an animated video is fraught with a lot of dilemmas. Luckily we have figured out most of them and are happy to discuss a creative project with you.