Other uses for animation
Animation is often used for exactly the same purpose. A ‘click to play’ 1920 x 1080 video embedded on a webpage to help explain and promote a business, service or product. However, there’s many more ways to use animation that most people never consider. From Gifs to animated UI elements to advertising banners and 3D product demos, there’s a lot more options to explore than simply having a 90 second explainer and uploading it to YouTube.
Headers & backgrounds
Above is an embedded video I’ve hosted on Vimeo. Instead of formatting the size to conventional proportions, I have created it 2500 x 800 so that it’s better suited to a banner background (as seen on our about page). The video above is embedded using Vimeo’s custom embed settings so that it doesn’t show any overlays unless you hover the mouse over top and it is set to autoplay and loop. The video could have stretched tall like a tower or extremely thin and horizontal. Videos don’t have to be rendered 1920 x 1080 as most videos are.
Video can be the background on just about any part of a web page. Whether that be a full page video with menus, links and content overlaid or just a portion of the screen as seen behind this paragraph. This particular background video is hosted on our YouTube channel but you can stream background videos from many hosting services or even host the video yourself. Self-hosted videos often afford you more control over how the video appears and interacts with your visitors.
Gifs
Gifs are a great way to use animation to get noticed as they can auto-play and loop on a viewers social feed (many social platforms also do this with video). Gifs are generally small file sizes and thus don’t take long to load up and the format also supports transparent backgrounds. Short clips and Gifs might be the preferred option if you want to utilise animation on a tighter budget as it costs a lot less to have a few 5-10 second clips than it does to buy a 90 second video. Gifs are used often by the likes of the New Yorker, the Guardian and the Huffington Post to liven up articles and blog posts.
Uses for traditional video
Although just about every new contact we get is someone asking about a 1-2 minute animated video to promote their business publicly, this isn’t the type of video we produce most. More than anything else, we create animated videos for our clients to use internally. These range from training videos and survey results to holiday messages, thank you animations and video previews of new products and ideas to circulate within a company. Animated video is a method of communication and as such it can be used to communicate just about anything.
If you’d like us to create an animation to help your business, please take a moment to fill in the form below.
