Your product is complex, your audience is distracted, and a talking-head video is not going to fix it. We know. Lava Media builds custom characters — designed, rigged and animated in-house — that carry your message and make people watch to the end.
Get a Character Animation QuoteWe draw your cast from scratch — no stock assets, no generic mascots. Silhouette, palette, wardrobe and facial range are built around your brand and your audience, so the character reads as yours in the first two seconds.
Read the case →Every character gets a production rig: 2D skeletal animation puppets for fast turnaround, or full 3D character rigs with facial controls when you need close-ups. Rigs are reusable, so your next video costs less than your first.
This is where character animation earns its budget. Our animators act — timing, weight, anticipation, a glance held half a second too long. That performance is what makes viewers stay past the eight-second mark and remember what you said.
Read the case →Compositing, sound design, voice casting and mixing happen under the same roof. You get broadcast-ready masters plus every aspect ratio your channels need — 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 — labelled and ready to schedule.
Read the case →
A good character animation brief answers three questions before production starts:
A tortoise, a kit fox and a burrowing owl explain what an environmental consultancy actually does. Ninety seconds of character animation, delivered in four weeks without a traditional 3D pipeline.
The fastest route to a character-led film. We define a style, lock character sheets, then generate and direct the animation with AI video tools, finishing with human editing, sound design and cleanup. Best when you need a narrative film in weeks, not months.
Our most requested package, and the one we priced against our own production. Original character design, rigged 2D character animation, stylised UI, custom sound — the format that turns a complex B2B product into ninety seconds people actually finish.
Full 3D character animation when the camera needs to get close. Modelling, texturing, facial rigging, lighting and render — built for product heroes, brand mascots and campaigns that will run for years across broadcast, trade shows and paid media.
Designers, riggers, animators, sound engineers and an editor work in one pipeline, so nothing is lost in handoffs between vendors.
We are not locked into one technique, so we recommend the format your budget and deadline actually support.
We publish our own cost breakdowns line by line, so you know exactly what each stage of animation buys you.
Our character work is built for SaaS, fintech, medical and industrial buyers who need characters that sell, not characters that entertain.
You tell us the product, the audience and the channel. We come back with character directions and a script structure for approval.
You approve character sheets, colour palette and a full storyboard. Nothing moves until the static frames look exactly like the finished film.
We build the rigs and animate the performance, sharing a rough cut so you can react to timing before sound and polish.
Voice, sound design, mix and colour are finished in-house. You receive master files plus every aspect ratio and cutdown your channels need.
Tell us your product, your audience and your budget range. We will come back with a character direction, a realistic timeline and a fixed quote.
Character animation is the craft of making a designed character move and act with intent — not just shift across a frame. In 2D it is usually built on skeletal animation: the artwork is cut into parts, bound to a rig, and posed like a puppet. In 3D the character is modelled, textured and rigged with body and facial controls before a single pose is set. The character animation styles that matter commercially are 2D vector, frame-by-frame, stylised 3D, and now AI-assisted 3D. We build all four — see 2D animation and 3D animation.
Most B2B character animation projects land between $6,500 and $25,000+, depending on technique and length. We published a full line-by-line breakdown of one of our own 2D character explainers — art direction, character design, motion design, voice and sound — which totalled $12,020 over roughly seven weeks. If you want to sanity-check a quote yourself, our guide to calculating animation video pricing walks through the same maths.
Plan on four to seven weeks for most character animation services. Our AI-assisted desert-wildlife film for SNEI ran four weeks end to end; our fully custom 2D character explainer took about seven weeks, or 34 business days, spread across seven specialist roles working partly in parallel.
2D character animation is faster, cheaper and ideal for explainers, onboarding and app demos. 3D character animation earns its cost when you need close-ups, physical products or a mascot that will be reused for years. We recommend one based on your channel and budget, not on what we prefer to build.
By view-through rate and downstream conversion, not views. Our own 2D character explainer held over 90% completion on the landing page and drove more than 65% of the creators we pitched to register for the service. Those are the numbers we brief against, and the ones we report back on.
Yes. We regularly take an existing brand character, rebuild it as a production-ready rig — a 2D skeletal animation puppet or a full 3D character rig — and extend it into new scenes and formats. You keep the character; we make it performable and reusable.
We use AI character animation when it genuinely helps: narrative films where a traditional 3D pipeline would be prohibitive. It demands strict control over character consistency, so we lock static style frames first and finish with human editing, sound and cleanup. For UI-heavy explainers, hand-drawn 2D still wins.
Still deciding? Send us your brief and we will tell you which format your budget actually supports.
