Key Insights

• Animated videos are an effective way to communicate information through entertainment.
• Animating your infographics invites audiences to have a deeper understanding of your purpose.
• A lot of information can be communicated visually in an animation, so you can keep the overall length of the animation short. This makes animation projects generally much more affordable than live-action projects because you do not need to pay for liability insurance, casting, etc.  
• You can easily change visual aspects of your animation video during the production process.
• Animation projects are completely COVID safe.
• Impact strategy is the key to the success of your animation project. In fact, impact strategy is the key to success for every video project.

Information encapsulated in an entertaining animation

In the digital age, people have an unlimited amount of marketing video content to watch on the internet-more than they could possibly make time for. Therefore, viewers have to be very selective about what they watch and very protective of their valuable time.

In a world where everyone is competing for viewership, how do you get people to share their precious time with you? The answer is entertainment.

When you create entertaining, engrossing content, people will listen to you. However, there is a difference between pure entertainment, and entertainment with a clear marketing objective. Ideally, you want people to listen to what you have to say, and come away from your video with an understanding  of how your business or organization can improve their lives.

Animated storytelling is one of the most effective, efficient ways to convey information about your company in an entertaining way. In recent years, animated videos have risen to a new level of artistry and accessibility. Short animations (45 to 90 sec) have become one of the most popular ways for companies to communicate their message and genuinely impact their audience. In animation, the storytelling possibilities are endless.

Benefits of using animation

Animation deepens visual understanding much more than traditional diagrams.

You may have already used diagrams to explain complex ideas visually. Diagrams work, but they are not as engaging as moving images. With an animation, your diagrams can move freely and express ideas and relationships that are much harder to communicate with still images or text.

Animation omits unnecessary verbiage and visuals and allows you to communicate ideas quickly.

As you may already know, many marketing videos use voiceover narration to explain concepts that can’t be communicated visually. In animated videos, you can read these voiceover scripts faster than in live-action videos, because animations allow you to be more selective about what you show in the frame, simplifying the visual information presented to your audience. By reducing the total visual information in your video, you allow viewers more cognitive capacity to listen to your voiceover.

In addition to presenting information faster, this simplification of visuals also allows you to shorten the actual length of your voiceover script. In other words, you can say less to explain more.

Overall, animations can speed up the delivery of your content, and allow you to make a shorter video that’s just as effective, if not more effective, than a traditional live-action video.

Animation is a cost-saving communication strategy.

If you cut your video’s play time by 25%, you reduce your production costs by 25%. This is why animation is more cost-effective than many other popular communication strategies.

For example, if you want to make a traditional live-action commercial with real actors, you will have to hire at least 10-15 people for at least a day. While using talented actors can be extremely effective, it is very costly, and it comes with more liability. When making a live-action commercial, you need to provide insurance to make sure everyone and everything is protected. Then, add the budget for the crew, equipment, locations, and meals. Things can add up really quickly.

By contrast, our animation projects usually require 3-6 people total from development to completion. This is a huge cost-saving measure considering we will never need to leave our houses to finish the project. We don’t need to hire cast, book locations, rent equipment, and pay for expensive insurance. Plus, because we work virtually, COVID safety is guaranteed.

Ability to change things even late in the project

When you are filming a live-action video with a real cast, altering of footage can be very tedious or simply impossible. You won’t be able to change the cast or location after you see the first draft of your video.

When making live-action projects, creative decisions go through an approval process between the production company and client. These decisions often cannot be undone once they are agreed upon.  Until you film each live-action scene, the only accessible visual information you have about your video is a storyboard. Sometimes, even making the storyboard is not affordable. Often, video clients have no means to preview the final outcome of a video until it’s done. This is why it takes a large team to successfully execute a live-action project.

When you make an animation project, you will have multiple opportunities to imagine and reimagine the final animated video, well into production. The production team will provide storyboards, keyframes, and illustrations from each scene in your video and get your approval before an artist starts animating each frame. This allows you to have a clear picture of the project before the animation process has even begun.  You can even alter cast or locations in your animation after the animator has created a draft of the video. Note that while there are additional costs associated with making alterations to pre-approved scenes, the cost of alterations in animation is not even close to the cost of significantly altering live-action footage.

Animation allows you to maximize the potential of your storytelling by providing a level of attention to detail and visual nuance that is  much harder to execute in live-action productions.

Impact Strategy regardless of project type

I hope you found this information on the benefits of animation useful and insightful. In this last section, I wanted to take a moment to address something that is an essential element of creating any successful video, whether it’s animated or live-action. That essential element is what we call Impact Strategy.

Regardless of the visual medium, you use to tell your story, the most important thing to ask yourself is “what is it that you want to tell?”. Impact Strategy is  Prodigium’s uniquely designed methodology to create a powerful story that will not only engage your audiences but also mobilize them to take certain actions (which should be the final objective of your video). In other words, we create videos that not only give people information, but also inspire them to commit to something greater.

However, this is much easier said than done. The power of your video lies in strong calls to action. Whether you use live-action or animation, your story should lead to a very specific call to action. When clients work with us, we help them create empathy-driven calls to action by using fact-driven creativity.