Explainer video

It has three layers: script, picture and voice. A copywriter writes the script, an illustrator and an animator build the picture, a voiceover carries the words. A storyboard comes first, and only once it is signed off does anyone animate. An explainer video usually gets commissioned when the sales team keeps drawing the same diagram on paper, or support keeps answering the same question.

A software company brought us three pages explaining how their system links a warehouse to an e-shop. Nobody read it. Ninety seconds of animation said the same thing well enough to open a sales call with. In Slovakia a decent one minute 2D explainer video runs roughly 1,500 to 4,500 euros before VAT. Under a thousand you are buying a template, over five thousand you are paying for an illustration style of your own.

Allow four to eight weeks from brief to finished film. The script and the storyboard eat most of that, not the animation, and that is how it should be: fixing a sentence takes a minute, fixing a finished scene takes a day. From you we need one sentence about what the viewer should do afterwards, the facts that have to appear, and a brand manual with colours and type.

Where it is the wrong tool: anything about people, premises or craft. An interview with an employee takes one morning to film, and an animated version would cost several times more and convince nobody. Also watch this with agencies. Studios like selling a two minute film because it invoices better, and a fraction of viewers reach the end of two minutes. Cutting hurts, but it beats making something nobody finishes.

We have a first sentence rule: if the script does not work when somebody reads it aloud off a plain page, animation will not save it. So we send clients an audio recording of the script before a single frame is drawn. It takes a day and saves a week of redrawing. Read your own script aloud to a colleague and watch the moment their eyes drift.