Case study · Animation & launch film
Braintegration
Better State of Mind
Braintegration sells an internal shift. There is no device to demo and no dashboard that explains itself in three seconds — which is exactly the kind of brief that quietly runs over budget. This is the record of how the film got made, what it cost less than it should have, and how one edit ended up carrying the whole launch.
The body of the film is graphite and charcoal. Colour is held back for the release.
Watch on YouTube ↗The decision that saved the budget
The animatic didn’t become the film. The animatic was the film.
On a conventional route, board art is a disposable stage. You draw it, you get it approved, and then you rebuild every frame in whatever medium the finished film is made of. The drawing is thrown away twice — once when the notes come in, and again when production starts.
We picked a visual language that removed that second throw-away entirely. The body of Braintegration is graphite and charcoal, start to finish. The sketch that got approved is the sketch that shipped. Every hour spent on boards stayed in the final cut instead of being spent twice.
That single choice is what made an unusually complex animatic affordable — and it is visible on screen, not just on the invoice.
Illustrations & boards
Frames from the cut
Click any frame to enlarge · ← → to move
State of Mind
The line work you see here is board art. It was never redrawn for production — the sketch language is the finished language.
Predator and prey
Charcoal rendering carries the weight the story needs. Same medium as the boards, pushed to full tonal range instead of swapped for a new one.
The colour event
Colour returns here, after six minutes of grey. Withholding it that long is what makes the butterflies land — and what kept the render budget concentrated in one sequence. The held frame from this shot now carries the store listing, the site header and every paid social crop.
Where the money moved
The savings came from sequencing, not from doing less
| Cost driver | Conventional route | Route taken |
|---|---|---|
| Revisions | Absorbed after render, priced per shot | Absorbed at animatic, priced per morning |
| Medium | Boards drawn, then rebuilt in a production medium | Graphite start to finish — board art survives into the cut |
| Colour | Full-colour grade across every shot | Monochrome body, colour concentrated in the release |
| Render passes | Re-run as notes arrive | Single pass against a locked edit |
| Launch assets | Shot separately once the film is done | Framed inside the film, pulled as stills |
| Cutdowns | Re-animated per aspect ratio | Composed safe for 16:9, 1:1 and 9:16 |
The compounding effect sits in the last two rows. Because the key frames were composed with the launch in mind, the store screenshots, the site header and the paid social crops all came out of footage that already existed. That work would otherwise have been briefed, quoted and produced a second time.
Launch plan
A plan the film can actually carry
One film is not a launch. Each phase below reuses what the previous one produced, so nothing gets commissioned twice.
- 01
Hero film
The full cut anchors the site and the app store listing. It sets the vocabulary every other asset borrows from.
- 02
Vertical and square cutdowns
Short forms pulled from the locked edit, not re-animated. The charcoal predator sequence is the hook — it stops a scroll on its own.
- 03
Store and site stills
Screenshots and headers lifted from held frames. The look on the store page is the look in the film, exactly.
- 04
In-app motion
The sketch language carries into onboarding and empty states, so the first session feels like the film that sold it.
- 05
Ongoing
New pieces extend the system instead of restarting it — the reason a second film costs a fraction of the first.
References
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