Working with If I Had A Dragon: A Practical Guide
If I Had A Dragon is a Welsh animation studio based in Cardiff. They produce 2D and 3D animated content for television, streaming platforms, and commercial clients. The studio has built a reputation over roughly a decade for handling mid-budget animated series and occasional feature work. If you're looking to commission animation from them or apply for work there, there are a few things that aren't obvious from their website. I've dealt with several studios in the UK animation space over the years, and the process with If I Had A Dragon follows a pattern similar to most mid-tier animation houses, with a couple of specific quirks worth knowing about upfront.
What If I Had A Dragon Actually Does
They handle full production pipelines: storyboarding, character design, animation, compositing, and post. Their sweet spot is animated series between 11 and 26 minutes per episode. They've done work for BBC, Channel 4, and international co-productions. They're not a VFX-heavy studio doing photorealistic work. If your project requires that, look elsewhere. Their strength is stylized character animation with solid production discipline. One thing people miss is that they frequently operate as a co-producer rather than the sole animation house. This means if you're coming to them with a finished script and design package, you need to understand that they'll expect creative input during pre-production, not just execution. Trying to hand off a fully locked project and saying "just animate this" usually backfires. They'll do it, but the quality suffers because they haven't signed into the creative direction.
The Commissioning Process
Reach out through their official contact channel on their website. Include a one-page treatment, your budget range, and a target delivery date. Don't send a 40-page pitch document as your first touchpoint. It gets filtered out. I've seen people waste weeks waiting for a response when a concise email with a link to a portfolio would have gotten a reply in 48 hours. Once you're in discussion, expect a development phase where they'll ask for storyboards or animatics before committing to full production. This isn't stalling. It's how they determine whether your project fits their capacity and whether the creative vision aligns with what their team can deliver within your budget. Skip this step at your peril. For If I Had A Dragon, the typical turnaround from greenlight to delivery on an 11-minute episode runs about 12 to 16 weeks with a small team, or 8 to 12 weeks if they have resources to spare. Season orders of six episodes or more will extend those timelines proportionally. Budget-wise, expect costs in the range of £80,000 to £200,000 per episode depending on complexity, frame rate, and whether you need original music or just licensed tracks.
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A Real Problem I Encountered
On a project last year, we were working with If I Had A Dragon on a series with a tight deadline. Halfway through production, the director changed the background art style mid-season without updating the layout department. We ended up with mismatched perspective grids between episodes three and four. Fixing it would have meant reshooting three weeks of work. The workaround was straightforward but not obvious: I pulled the production designer and the layout artist into the same room for two hours and rebuilt the perspective templates for the affected episodes. It cost us a day of lost productivity but saved us from a much bigger delay. The lesson is that mid-production style changes are where these kinds of issues hide. Address them immediately and get the right people in a room together rather than letting them propagate through the pipeline. First, their turnaround times are realistic, not optimistic. When they give you a delivery date, it's probably accurate within a week. That's unusual in this industry and worth factoring into your planning. Most studios will quote you dates they know they can't hit. If I Had A Dragon tends to overcommit internally rather than oversell externally. Second, they prefer working with producers who understand animation terminology. If you keep calling it "motion graphics" when you mean character animation, you'll create confusion that slows everything down. Use the right terms: animatic, storyboard, keyframe, rig, tween, compositing. It signals that you know what you're talking about and makes communication faster.
The main downside is that they don't do rush jobs well. If you need something delivered in under six weeks for a full episode, they'll either turn you down or the quality will drop. There's no workaround for that. Animation is physics. You can't compress the process without sacrificing frames or detail. For urgent projects, consider smaller freelance-based studios or in-house teams where you can stack resources on demand. If you're an animator looking to work with them, check their careers page regularly. They hire on a project basis, so openings come and go. Having a strong demo reel focused on character acting and secondary motion will get you further than a reel full of abstract motion studies. They need people who can make characters feel alive, not people who can make shapes move interestingly. The studio's website is ifihadadragon.co.uk. That's the only official contact point worth using. I've seen fake emails floating around forums from people pretending to be them. Always verify through the domain before sharing sensitive project materials or deposits.
