Above is our brand new animated explainer video… You have no idea how relieved I am to finally post it.
There’s nothing worse than working on your own explainer video. First of all, there’s no boundaries. Although you can impose a deadline, it’s not real and it doesn’t actually help. There’s no rush at all as we have previous client videos and older reels doing the same promotional and VSEO work this new video will do. We’re busy already so this explainer video is not a priority for us – it’ll help with marketing but it’s not a must-have right now. Client work is always our most important task so we were often left with very small windows of time to tackle this project.
And secondly, speaking of clients, they have these rules they bring with them. Branding guidelines. They have a specific service or product that they offer. They have expectations and videos in mind that they liked the look of. These are a great foundation to build on when crafting a style for an animated video. Our branding consists of 5 colours, a marble and a vintage logo and our service consists of creating video content of just about every style. So, the problem was too much freedom. You learn to live and thrive on being confined by the limitations that a client brings with them and it works. To illustrate, try choosing between your two favourite colours. Easy, right? However, if I hand you a colour palette with hundreds of variations of those two colours it’s not so easy. You’d go back and forth, rethinking each choice. The more narrow the project specs, the more precise the execution of the project. Some of the best ideas come to us when our options are few and we’re forced to get creative.
So, this went through 3 or 4 different versions. We had the voice-over track recorded in August of 2014 and we’ve just now, almost a year later, got around to finishing it up. Oh, and in case a few viewers are thinking ‘hey, I know that voice!’, the answer is yes it is (he’s talking so we don’t have to).
Then there was a draft that used cartoon versions of the team. There was an idea built around passing the marble from the scriptwriter to the voice-over guy to the animator etc. and we had a few very rough versions of the characters created. However, it didn’t have the flow and feel we wanted so we scrapped it entirely and ended up tweaking the original idea.
We’re extremely happy with the end result. It explains precisely what we do and gives a good idea of what a client can expect and just as important, it conveys this message in under 90 seconds (which is ideal).
If you’d like us to explain and promote your business, service or idea, use the form below to shoot us an email. We promise, it won’t take a year!
