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Taking the Mystery Away from Flash Animation Projects

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing with a fresh-faced company aiming to deliver a high quality product without the mystery of pricing.

What a mouthful, but wait, there’s more.

The outcome of the interview is still up in the air and before someone screams brown-noser, I debated for a bit on whether to publish this blog entry before the final result or after. I decided it didn’t really matter, I like the company and I think everyone should know about them.

The company is:

Fire Starter Videos creates “explainer” (how-to) videos, demonstration videos, whiteboard animations and cartoon animations for any business or person who needs one to sell their product.

What’s the big deal? There are a ton of companies doing this.

Yes, it’s a valid question, but where on the internet can you find a company that lays down the exact price of an animation with premium options? Almost no where. Even I can’t do that as a web designer until I’ve received a bucket-load of information from my client ahead of time. Most companies want to keep you on the line to add in bells and whistles while your bill secretly skyrockets but Fire Starter Videos shows you the price for everything, even before you contact them.

Fire StarterVideos ends any confusion you’ve faced before by letting you know EXACTLY what you’re getting for your money and even if your project doesn’t fit into their structure, they have an easy pricing system for non-standard projects. Their normal packages are priced for 90 second videos, however, if you expect your’s to be longer, they charge a flat rate of 20$/second.* It’s easy math for companies on a short budget.

My favorite video on their website is the Pinterest project (can only be viewed on Fire Starter’s home page – 2nd row, 2nd from the left). It would be regarded as an ‘explainer’ video which tells us what Pintrest is and an overview on how to use it.  I’m sure we were all wondering what the heck Pinterest was before it blew up into this major website that everyone uses to collect and share images like a scrapbook.

Here’s an example of their whiteboard animations:

Pretty cool, eh? It totally raises the professional level of any website when you offer something like this for your visitors, and it should be required for concepts and products that are too intricate to condense into a short one sentence pitch.

So, anyway, regardless of outcome, I’ll still be pitching this company to my clients that need a visual interface with their customers like this, because I’ve met the CEO, they have their heads on straight and their team is fantastic.

*Current pricing as of 3/31/2013.