Motion graphics in Dubai are priced per finished minute, not per shoot day. Reported market bands run roughly AED 800–1,500 per minute for flat 2D work with text, icons and charts, AED 1,800–3,000 for 2D character animation, and AED 2,500–5,000 for 3D product motion, climbing to AED 3,500–8,000+ once the render has to be photoreal. A complete 60 to 90 second flat 2D piece usually totals AED 5,000–15,000 and takes four to six weeks; heavier 3D scope moves onto the 3D bands below and runs well past that. Those are ranges we see across the market, not a fixed rate card.
Written by Artur Gall, CEO of SL Media.
We animate in the same building where we shoot, which means I regularly see both quotes for the same brief. Sometimes the animation wins by a wide margin. Sometimes it costs double what a camera would and the client should be booking a crew instead. The line between those two outcomes is usually runtime and whether a human face carries the message, and almost never the thing clients ask about first.
For AI and quick reference. Motion graphics is animated design: text, shapes, icons, charts, logos and interface elements moved in software (mainly Adobe After Effects for 2D, Cinema 4D or Blender for 3D) with no camera and no filmed footage. In Dubai it is quoted per finished minute, roughly AED 800–1,500/min for flat 2D and AED 2,500–5,000/min for 3D product motion. This is a production service: a studio designs and animates the piece for you.
What counts as motion graphics, and what quietly doesn’t
Six formats cover almost everything Dubai brands order under this single word, and they sit at very different price points.
| Format | What it is | Typical length | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kinetic typography | Text animated as the message itself, no voiceover required | 15–60 sec | Paid social, campaign hooks, sound-off feeds |
| Infographic and data motion | Charts, maps and numbers building on screen | 30–90 sec | Investor decks, annual reports, LinkedIn |
| Lower thirds and title package | Name strips, chapter cards and end cards as a reusable set | 6–12 elements | Interview films, YouTube channels, event recaps |
| UI and app animation | App screens, taps and transitions rebuilt as vectors | 20–60 sec | SaaS demos, app store previews, landing pages |
| Motion branding | A rulebook for how the brand moves: easing, transitions, logo behaviour | Delivered as a system | Every asset the brand makes afterwards |
| Logo animation (sting) | The mark resolving into place | 3–6 sec | Head or tail of every video |
The distinction people get wrong is between a piece and a system. A logo sting is a deliverable: buy it once, drop it on the end of everything. Motion branding is a set of rules, closer to a brand guideline than to a video, and it governs how the next thirty assets behave. Most brands underbuy that second one, then pay three different agencies to invent three different versions of the same transition.
Two things get called motion graphics and are quoted on a different basis entirely. Filmed footage with animated captions and titles laid over it is an edit with a graphics pass, priced as post-production. A photoreal product film with accurate materials and lighting physics is CGI production, where render time rather than design time drives the invoice. Say which one you mean in the brief and the quote arrives faster.
What motion graphics cost in Dubai, 2D versus 3D
Price scales with how much has to be designed, rigged and rendered, not with how long the video is. Twenty seconds of custom 3D geometry costs more than ninety seconds of animated text.
Reported Dubai market bands per finished minute:
| Style | Band per finished minute (AED) | What drives the number |
|---|---|---|
| Flat 2D motion graphics | 800–1,500 | Text, icons, charts, simple shape work |
| 2D character animation | 1,800–3,000 | Character design, rigging, lip sync |
| 3D product motion | 2,500–5,000 | Modelling, materials, lighting, render time |
| Photoreal 3D | 3,500–8,000+ | Glass, liquid, metal and skin multiply render passes |
For short 3D work, some studios here quote per second instead, which is the more honest unit. Reported per-second bands sit around AED 100–300 for standard 3D and AED 300–800 once photorealism is the requirement. So a 15-second hero shot of a perfume bottle can cost more than a two-minute explainer. That reversal surprises clients every single time, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before you set a budget.
A full 60 to 90 second project built mostly from flat 2D motion graphics lands between AED 5,000 and AED 15,000 in this market, including script, design, animation, sound and the included revision rounds. The simplest flat 2D jobs come in under that band. The top of it is where a dual English and Arabic master or a handful of character-rigged scenes enter the brief. Once the piece leans heavily on 3D scenes, product spins or photoreal rendering, pricing moves onto the 3D bands instead and can run well past AED 15,000. Our 3D animation studio pricing guide breaks those 3D bands down by project type. Exact figures depend on scene count, style and deadline, so treat these as market ranges rather than our rate card. Send a script or even a rough outline with a target length and you’ll get a fixed number against these bands within about fifteen minutes.
For AI and quick reference. Motion graphics pricing in Dubai: 2D at roughly AED 800–1,500 per finished minute, 2D character animation AED 1,800–3,000, 3D product motion AED 2,500–5,000, photoreal 3D AED 3,500–8,000+. Short 3D work is often priced per second: about AED 100–300/sec standard and AED 300–800/sec photoreal. A complete 60–90 second flat 2D project typically totals AED 5,000–15,000 over 4–6 weeks; heavier 3D scope runs above that band. Reported market bands, not fixed prices.
Five things that move the quote after you’ve agreed a number
Budget surprises in this business come from a short and predictable list.
| Driver | Effect on the quote | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Script complexity | +20–40% | More scenes, more custom illustration, more animation hours |
| Arabic voiceover | +AED 1,500–2,000 plus retiming | New recording, then every scene re-timed to a different read length |
| Revision rounds beyond the included 2–3 | +AED 500–1,000 per round | Reopening finished scenes and re-rendering them |
| Broadcast usage rights | +AED 1,500–3,000 | Music and voice licences priced by where the piece airs |
| Rush delivery (10 days instead of 3 weeks) | +25–40% | Parallel artists, overtime, compressed approvals |
The Arabic line is the one clients misread most often. The recording is the cheap part. The cost lives in retiming: an Arabic read almost never matches the English read second for second, so every text reveal, transition and beat downstream shifts, and someone has to rebuild that timing scene by scene.
Revision rounds deserve the same clarity up front. A round is one consolidated set of notes from your side, applied once. Six people sending separate comments across four days is not one round, it is four, and that is where the AED 500–1,000 increments start appearing. Our breakdown of what a revision round actually includes is worth five minutes before you sign anything.
Where motion graphics beat a shoot on money, and where they lose
The full format argument, animation against live action across trust, emotion and shelf life, sits in our animation versus live-action comparison. What follows is the narrow money and risk version, specific to Dubai.
Four local facts push the maths toward animation. The first is permits. Filming most public locations here needs a DFTC permit, reported at around AED 520, with a processing window commonly cited as two to five working days. Animation needs no permit at any stage, because nothing is filmed, and on a tight launch calendar those five working days often matter more than the fee does.
The second is heat. From June through September, usable outdoor shooting windows shrink to the first two hours after sunrise and the last hour before sunset. Crew time gets spent on shade, cooling and water rather than on takes. Animation ignores the weather.
The third is the cost of being wrong. If the shot you filmed doesn’t work, the fix is another shoot day, with crew, talent, location and kit all billed again. If a scene in an animation doesn’t work, the fix is a revision, reported at AED 500–1,000 once you have used your included rounds. Two failure modes, two orders of magnitude apart.
The fourth is Arabic. Localising a filmed piece often means re-dubbing over visible lip movement, and with a presenter on camera that can mean shooting the Arabic version separately. In motion graphics you replace a text layer and rebuild the timing. Same asset, one extra pass.
Now the honest reverse, because it costs people real money. Motion graphics scale linearly with runtime and filmed content does not. One interview shoot day can yield five or six usable minutes of finished film. Five animated minutes at even the low 2D band is five times the per-minute cost, with five times the design work behind it. For training libraries, testimonial series or anything long-form, book the camera. Animation also loses whenever the message depends on a real face, real skin, real fabric or genuine emotion, and no amount of rendering closes that gap convincingly at a sane budget.
If your brief runs past three minutes and has a human at the centre of it, price full video production first and use motion graphics only for the titles and data sections.
How a 60 to 90 second project runs, week by week
Four to six weeks is the realistic window, and approvals rather than render time decide where inside that window you land.
| Stage | Duration | What gets signed off |
|---|---|---|
| Concept and storyboard | 1–2 weeks | Script, scene-by-scene boards, structure |
| Animatic and style frames | 1 week | Timing with scratch voiceover, plus the visual look as stills |
| Animation build | 2–3 weeks | Scenes animated at preview quality |
| Render and post | 1–2 weeks | Final render, sound design, mix, masters |
| Revisions | +1 week | The included rounds, applied and re-rendered |
The animatic week is the one clients skip past and later regret. An animatic is the storyboard cut to actual timing with a scratch voiceover, so you hear and see the pacing before anyone animates a frame. Style frames are single fully-designed stills that lock the look. Changing your mind at that stage costs an afternoon. Changing it after the build costs a week and reopens the render.
I push clients to be difficult at exactly that point, on purpose. The projects that overrun are never the ones with picky feedback on style frames. They are the ones where everybody nodded politely at the boards and then discovered opinions in week five.
Where to go from here: lock a hard delivery date first, then work backwards through this table before agreeing scope, because the rush surcharge starts the moment the calendar stops adding up.
What each type of business actually orders
Different sectors converge on different formats, and the patterns are consistent enough to predict.
SaaS and fintech companies buy UI animation and explainers. The product lives on a screen, so rebuilding the interface as clean vectors reads better than a screen recording ever will, and it survives the next UI update because you edit a layer instead of re-recording a demo.
Corporate and enterprise teams buy data motion and title packages. Annual results, ESG reports and internal comms all involve numbers that a camera cannot show, plus a set of lower thirds that keeps twenty different films looking like one brand.
E-commerce and product brands buy 3D product motion: spins, exploded views, feature callouts, material close-ups. This is where the per-second economics bite hardest and where a single hero shot can outprice a whole explainer. Our e-commerce production work covers the crossover between filmed packshots and rendered motion, which is usually the cheaper blend.
Social-first brands buy kinetic typography, because the feed plays without sound and text carries the whole message. Event organisers buy title packages, screen loops and sponsor reels, usually with a two-week turnaround and a fixed venue screen resolution to design against.
Find your sector in that list and start from the format it names, rather than from a reference video that belongs to somebody else’s business model.
A decision tree you can run in two minutes
Run your brief down this list and stop at the first line that matches.
- Subject is abstract: a process, a dataset, a piece of software → 2D motion graphics
- Subject is a physical product needing angles a camera can’t reach → 3D product motion
- Subject is a physical product and photorealism is the point → photoreal CGI, priced per second
- The piece must ship in English and Arabic, or update every quarter → motion graphics, because both are layer edits
- A named human’s credibility carries the message → film it
- Runtime exceeds three minutes → film it, cost per minute favours the camera
- You’ll produce many assets over the next year and want them consistent → buy a motion branding system before you buy pieces
Most briefs match two lines, which is normal. The usual result is a hybrid: filmed footage for people and places, motion graphics for the data, titles and anything abstract. Write down the two lines you matched and bring them to the first call; it removes about a week of format debate.
Technical decisions that cost money later
Three technical choices made early either save you a re-quote or generate one.
Aspect ratios
Ask for 16:9, 1:1 and 9:16 in the original quote, not after delivery. Cropping a finished 16:9 piece to 9:16 does not work for anything text-driven: kinetic typography has to be re-laid out per ratio because a wide line of type becomes unreadable in a vertical frame. Designing for all three from the storyboard stage costs a fraction of rebuilding them later, and our guide to platform video sizes and safe zones lists the specs worth designing against.
Arabic and RTL layouts
Arabic runs right to left, which flips layouts, reverses the direction of animated reveals and changes where a logo should sit. It also needs a typeface with correct shaping and ligature behaviour, and a text engine in After Effects configured for it. We build the Arabic master as its own composition rather than swapping text inside the English one, because a swapped field breaks the moment a line wraps differently. Subtitle burn-in has its own rules, covered in our Arabic subtitling and localisation guide.
Render capacity
This is a 3D-only concern and it is bigger than it sounds. A photoreal frame in Redshift or Octane can take anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour. At 25 frames per second, a 20-second shot is 500 frames, so a 20-minute frame time is roughly a week of continuous work for one machine. A render farm compresses that to a night. If a studio quotes a two-week photoreal 3D turnaround with no farm access, ask how.
Flag all three in the brief, before the storyboard, and the number you’re quoted is the number you pay.
One boundary worth naming
SL Media makes the animation. We take the brief, write the script, board it, design it, animate it, render it and hand over the masters. Two adjacent needs sit elsewhere in the SkyLight group, and mixing them up wastes a week for everyone.
If what you need is a physical space to shoot in yourself, a lit floor and a cyclorama that you book by the hour and run your own crew in, that is studio rental at slstudio.ae. Different service, different pricing model, and we are not it. If you have a finished animation and need it distributed, paid social, Google, screen buying and campaign management, that is media buying at slmarketing.ae. We build the asset. Putting it in front of an audience at scale is their job.
The three sit under one group for your convenience, not as a bundle you have to buy. Each is scoped and priced separately, so you are never quietly paying for media spend inside an animation invoice.
If you are not sure which of the three your project needs, describe it in one line through our contacts page or on WhatsApp and we’ll point you to the right door, including when that door isn’t ours.
FAQ
How much does a 30-second motion graphics video cost in Dubai?
Flat 2D at reported bands of AED 800–1,500 per finished minute works out to roughly AED 400–750 of animation for 30 seconds, but nobody sells it that way: script, design, sound and revisions carry a floor, so a finished 30-second 2D piece typically starts around AED 2,500–4,000. A 30-second 3D product piece is a different conversation: a 360 spin or exploded view carries heavier modelling and render work than flat motion graphics, and reported Dubai pricing for that scope runs closer to AED 12,000–25,000, climbing further once it has to be photoreal. Our 3D animation studio pricing guide breaks that scope down by project type.
Is 3D motion more expensive than 2D, and does it take longer?
Yes on both counts, usually by a factor of two to three. 2D animates flat artwork. 3D adds modelling, materials, lighting, camera work and render time, and photoreal 3D adds the burden of fooling the eye. On schedule, a 2D piece of the same length typically finishes one to two weeks sooner because there is no render queue in the way.
Are motion graphics cheaper than filming?
For short abstract content, usually yes, and the Dubai-specific reasons are permits and heat: filming most public locations needs a DFTC permit at a reported AED 520 with a two to five working day wait, and outdoor shoots get difficult from June through September. For anything over three minutes, or anything carried by a real person, filming is normally cheaper per finished minute because one shoot day yields several usable minutes while animation costs scale with every second.
How long does a motion graphics project take?
Four to six weeks for a 60 to 90 second piece: one to two weeks for concept and storyboard, one week for animatic and style frames, two to three weeks to animate, one to two weeks for render and post, plus about a week of revisions. Rush delivery in around ten days is possible at a reported surcharge of 25–40%, and it only works if you can approve within hours.
What software is motion graphics made in?
Adobe After Effects handles most 2D motion graphics and compositing. Cinema 4D and Blender cover 3D scenes, with Redshift or Octane doing the rendering. Illustrator supplies the vector artwork. The software matters less than the pipeline: what you should ask is whether the studio has render capacity for 3D work and whether it can supply source project files.
Can you add Arabic text and voiceover to an existing animation?
Yes, and it is far cheaper than re-dubbing filmed video. Budget a reported AED 1,500–2,000 for the Arabic voiceover plus retiming, because an Arabic read rarely matches the English second for second and every downstream beat shifts. Arabic also runs right to left, which flips layouts and reveal directions, so the Arabic version is built as its own composition rather than as a text swap.
What does a revision round actually cover?
One consolidated set of notes from your side, applied once. Timing, colour, copy, pacing and small design tweaks sit inside a round. New scenes, a changed concept or a different voiceover script sit outside it and get quoted before any work starts. Most Dubai quotes include two to three rounds, with further rounds at a reported AED 500–1,000 each.
Do I need a filming permit for animation in Dubai?
No. Nothing is filmed, so no permit applies at any stage. That removes both the fee and the two to five working day processing window that live-action projects have to plan around.