I love making pizza. Every Saturday, I make the dough with my oldest son Elijah and then later, we all chomp down on some awesome homemade pizzas. There’s a lot of different toppings that you can throw on a pizza, our favourite being sweet pancetta, spinach and mascarpone. There’s a rule when it comes to what you put on a pizza: keep it simple. You could look at a great pizza topping combo and think ‘it’s gorgeous, but it has to be better if I add caramelized red onion…and maybe some chestnut mushrooms…and maybe a few more kinds of cheese!’. Ruined. There’s such a thing as too much. Too many flavours and textures stop you enjoying what’s already there.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that leads better-informed parties to find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties.
Writing a video script is quite similar. The point of an animated explainer video is to clearly explain and promote your business in around 90-120 seconds. The way to do this is to take all of the details and information available and reduce it down to the essentials. All we need is the core features, the value and why it matters. Your viewers probably don’t care about code or what software you used to create an app. But it’s difficult to put yourself in the shoes of your viewers because you know everything there is to know about your business and to you, it’s all valuable knowledge to have and share. That’s where we can help. We’re on the outside looking in so it’s easy for us to put ourselves in the place of your potential clients or customers.
And sometimes it’s just that you’re proud of your accomplishments and it’d be nice to tell everyone about them but that stuff probably belongs on your blog rather than your marketing video. There’s times I do clever stuff while animating – perhaps I’ve managed to manipulate the way a plugin works so that it does something it shouldn’t be able to – but I never tell clients about it because, to be blunt, they really wouldn’t care or appreciate it. All my clients care about is the end product, the animated video itself. Everything else is surplus noise.
Keep it simple.
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