Best 15+ Animation Studios in Glasgow

Two lineages feed animation in Glasgow

The first is games. Scotland has a games industry with real history, and the skills that industry needs, rigging, real time engines, cinematics, environment art, motion capture cleanup, are present here in a depth that a city of this size would not otherwise have. The second is broadcast. Independent production for television, factual and drama, built up a local pool of editors, compositors, sound people and producers who are used to delivering to a broadcaster's technical spec and a broadcaster's deadline.

A third, smaller stream runs alongside both: the art school tradition, which keeps feeding illustrators and directors into the city and gives the local work more graphic ambition than you might expect. Between them, these lineages explain why an enquiry here comes back with such different answers. You are not choosing between good and bad studios so much as between three different ideas of what animation is for.

Real time or rendered animation, and why it decides your budget

Studios with a games background will often propose building your piece inside a game engine. That is not a gimmick. Once the scene is built, a change of camera, a change of lighting or a new cut costs very little, and you can produce many variants cheaply. The trade off is that the initial build is front loaded and the look has a ceiling that a fully rendered pipeline does not have.

Studios with a broadcast or design background will propose a rendered or compositing based approach, where each shot is crafted and each change costs. That gives you more control over the image and less flexibility afterwards. Choose by what happens after delivery. One hero film that will never change suits the rendered route. A system that needs twenty versions, seasonal updates and new product names suits the engine route. Ask candidates to say which they are proposing and what a late change costs in each.

Public money shapes the local animation tone

A large share of the animation commissioned in Glasgow is funded by councils, health boards, universities, housing associations and charities. Those clients need work that is clear, accessible and defensible rather than clever, and they usually need captions, transcripts and often a version in another language. Local studios are used to this and most will include accessibility deliverables without being asked, which is not true everywhere.

If you are a commercial buyer, that background works in your favour. It means the supplier base is disciplined about scripts, structure and sign off. It also means you should look carefully at whether a studio's reel contains anything that had to sell something, because the skills of persuasion and the skills of explanation are not the same.

Crews are fluid, so ask who is actually on your job

Outside the largest houses, teams here assemble per project from a freelance pool that moves between games, broadcast and commercial work. That is efficient and it is why a small studio can take on something ambitious. It also means the reel you liked may have been made by people who are not available in your window.

So ask plainly: who directs, who does the animation, are they staff or contracted, and what is the plan if one of them is booked elsewhere. Ask whether any stage is being sent outside the studio. None of these answers should be a problem. An evasive answer is the problem.

The points worth writing down

Put the handover in the contract: layered artwork, scene or engine project files, rigs and three dimensional assets, a fonts list, and a clean master with no burned in text and no voice. Put licensing in the contract too, naming anything bought rather than made and the term it runs for, with music being the usual offender. If the piece includes a character or a visual system you intend to keep, state that the design transfers to you and that the studio may show it but not reuse it.

Finally, agree what a revision costs before you need one. A studio that keeps a tidy project will quote you a small figure in a year's time; one that does not will quietly quote a rebuild, and you will have no way to tell which is which unless you asked at the start.

How to brief so the answers are straight

Give every candidate the same page: audience, the one thing the viewer should take away, where it plays, runtime, accessibility requirements, languages, deadline, and the range you can spend. Ask for a short treatment, a cost split covering concept, design, animation, sound and management, and a named review structure. Say what the animation has to achieve rather than what it should look like. Say explicitly whether you want a real time or rendered approach proposed, or whether you want them to argue for one.

Read the treatments before the prices. The studio that reframes your brief usefully is worth more than the one that repeats it back. When you want the replies in one place you can send a single brief and compare the responses in the same format. The wider animation studio directory covers other markets if you want a benchmark, for example Stockholm, which has a similar games influence, or Canberra for public sector work. Related local suppliers are listed separately for web design, software development and public relations.