August 13, 2021

5 Considerations for your Animated Technology Video

Animated video for technology companies is absolutely booming right now. These short explainer videos are such an easy way to say what is often a pretty complex or new service in an easily digestible form. So we can see why it’s popular.

We’ve recently worked on many Fintech, software, App, AI and automation, SaS, and medical technology animated videos. We’re giving you a little insight into common pitfalls that we come across to help give you a head start when thinking about an animated video for your tech company.

There are some ideas to consider that will help your brand video stand out against the noise, and make sure you communicate effectively and clearly to your target audience.

1 Benefits not features

The script is the primary driver of any video, including animation. And simply listing your software or technology features in the script won’t help. Generally; they aren’t why people buy. It’s what it does for them.

Does it save them time? Does it save cost? What does it free up people to do? How does this technology make their life easier? What is a like working with you? This kind of content is what the script needs to tell.

Listing the features doesn’t belong in a technology explainer video. They’re for people who want to drill down into the details later – as a secondary selling tool. Preferably with a captive audience or when you’re showcasing a demo in a meeting.

2 Keep the language less formal

Language is down to scripting again. When we see draft ideas for a script or we’re given promotional materials to use, the language is often overly complex with long sentences and is rather formal. This is really common.

This approach works well for written materials, but since generally, video is heard out loud, it comes across entirely differently and isn’t as well-received. Think of the video a bit more like a conversation.

If you have a complex product offering, don’t use business jargon language and lengthy sentences; you need to explain it quickly and clearly.

This doesn’t mean dumbing down, but being concise, avoiding passive language, avoiding too much repetition.

As tech is always changing and growing, you probably find the business quite exciting and revolutionary to work in (I hope!). So, if we can convey that excitement, the audience will feel it.

You can be creative with language, be funny, use visual metaphors, and keep the language more casual, it is spoken word, after all. It’ll be more relating to the audience and quicker to digest if they’re only half watching /listening (which is often the case!).

Explainer video with quite a relaxed, informal voiceover leading the story

Video by Digital Finch

3 Avoid screenshots

You can be creative with the visuals and save the software screens for an online demo. The purpose of a general brand or product explainer video is to get them to enquire or want to learn more.

A demo is a separate video (or presentation) where buyers are already interested in learning more. For an introductory video like an animated explainer, where they see it on your website or social media and maybe don’t know a lot more about you, they just need to know it’ll work for them.

Sometimes, we create a simplified UI mockup in designing animated videos if there is a particularly great aspect to the technology. Something showstopping or so simple and effective to use.

Monday.com put animated screenshots to good use, as they’ve invested heavily in a fantastic UI, but this often isn’t the case.

In that case, we often redraw the software, simplify the screen where needed, and then animate a short sequence, showing it in a shortened and easy to understand way.

Explainer video promoting the G-Suite from Google – Ui is shown minimally and has been simplified and animation to add dynamism.

Video by Coat of Arms

Though, often a UI mockup is not needed. As I’ve just mentioned, you’re more describing the benefits and how it affects their company and lives, not how it works.

In terms of visuals, trust the studio you’ve hired to come up with bespoke visuals compelling and match the story. Hopefully, their portfolio and expertise have shown you you can trust them, so let them do the hard work or art direction.

You can go quite conceptual and futuristic or very heartwarming and relatable if you want. The visuals needn’t be all ‘techy’ and corporate, and they needn’t be yet another icon led video in shades of blue (I see this sooooo much!).

This example is a video for a no-code website development tool. In a highly / futuristic conceptual style

Video by Ordinary Folk

4 Keep it short

Try and explain your technology offering in 2 mins or under, often 90s a great sweet spot.

A longer video can be cut down for social sharing if you want multiple versions.

Then the engaged audience gets an entire piece, and someone browsing or scrolling will get just the snippet they need to click through and find out more.

If you want a shorter social media or paid advert version, consider create a separate version condensed to 15-30s max. So it’s very dynamic and captivating and gets to the point quickly. Generally, we recommend not to try and use the long-form one.

Making the video more concise will also often bring the cost down (due to shorter length) and means the audience will be more likely to reach the end.

Example of Animated Technology video with a concise message, under 1 minute

Video by Digital Finch

5 Add a human touch with characters

Using character animation in a marketing video can give the video a real boost and make it stand out. When you can visually show a user reaping the rewards, it humanises the video and can create empathy. Generating emotion will help the viewer already feel like you know their pain point, and you want to help them.

When selling or thinking about tech, it’s easy to think of highly conceptual/corporate visuals, but the people who are buying and who will benefit are people, after all. So including people can help the video to be more relatable.

Including custom-drawn friendly characters who your audience will relate to and telling the story through their journey is a great idea.

So there are just some quick ideas to think about. If you are looking for an animated video for your technology company, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Example of Visual Recognition technology video with characters

Video by Lunamik Studio

So there are just some quick ideas to think about. If you’re looking for a marketing or explainer video for your technology company, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. To see some examples of our animated explainer videos, head to the portfolio

December 11, 2020

What Makes a Good Explainer video?

What Makes a Good Explainer Video?

When you need an explainer video for your business, it can be tough for some to imagine… What will it look like? What do we need to say? How long is best for conversion? Will it do what I need for my brand?

Here are some pointers that will help your explainer video to win for you.

Short Script

People generally have a short attention span for a video online, so keep the rambling down; it’s essential to consider what will the viewer see alongside the explainer that goes into more detail. It will generally always be with more context, so you can afford to leave extras out.

An explainer video is designed to be short and catchy, and you can’t do that if you go over 2 mins. Ideally, 90s to 2 mins would cover the message. You can read more about video lengths and attention span here

Well Designed Visuals

The design of a video can be very impactful one way or another. It can represent you poorly if it’s not well thought out – or it can show off your strengths.

A motion designer with a good understanding of visual communication – and how people usually perceive form and colour, for example, can elevate your video and convey exactly what you mean quickly with simple, but powerful drawings.

Well Designed Storyboard Images For Explainer Video

Good Concept

The concept should be figured out at the start of the production. An exciting concept will make you stand out and make your explainer more memorable. Do you have an unusual idea? It might just work. Or if not, leave it to the creative team of the explainer video company you’re working with.

Ideation is an exciting part of my job, coming up with concepts takes practice, collaboration and openness – especially at the start when everyone is just throwing ideas around. But it is worth it to find those unique solutions.

Having a concept or device, either visually or with the script will bring your explainer video up a level.

Simple Script Language

Everyone uses a certain amount of jargon in business, but there are not many places for it in explainer videos. Spoken language is often quite different from written language.

It needs to be simple. Shorter sentences and shorter worlds make it much easier to digest quickly. This will help your audience understand, even if they’re only half-listening or watching.

When it comes to scripting animation for your business – think concise.

Address Your Target Audience

Being able to frankly speak to your audience and address their exact pain points will be much more useful than trying to catch everyone with vague propositions – or details that aren’t relevant.

If you have a strong idea of your buyer persona it will be much more impactful to them. Again this comes in mostly at the scripting stage.

High-Quality Animation

This feels very obvious to say, but the higher the quality of the animation the more viewers can be absorbed in the story and weird bits where someone moves funny, or it’s jerky won’t catch their eye. As soon as they are distracted, they’ve lost the flow.

The goal of animation is not to be noticed.

Try not to Be Too Serious

The world is full of quite serious corporate videos, there is still a place for them, but Explainers are generally more light-hearted, you can bring out the fun side of your brand or product. You can add some personality to the video, gaining empathy.

Because you can show pretty much anything visually, it gives you a lot more scope to make unusual comparisons, or exaggerate a little. It’ll make you be remembered.

Benefits not Features

Going on about the features of your new software or service may be thrilling to you, but your audience needs to know precisely why it’s worth it, what does it do for them?

It’s a Them not Us approach in the script that will help.

Keep Your Team Small

The bigger your approval team is for reviewing the key stages, the more disjointed the video may end up. It’s a classic case of too many cooks – you will get a lot of personal opinions.

And you need to define, is their feedback valid – will they make the video better? or are they adding more complication?

Music and Sound Effects

High-quality music can set the tone – I’d always recommend using a royalty-free track, not just a free music track (as they’ll be blander / or massively overused. It’s also good to keep your personal music taste out of it and trust the production company.

And if your video is set in natural surroundings – for a more filmic option, adding SFX of recognisable sounds can really immerse the audience and set the scene fully – you’d expect it on a filmed video.

Or if the animation and design are more conceptual based, adding sounds effects of beeps and boops and subtle whooshing, etc help to reinforce movement and flow.

Explainer video from Giant Ant, with a powerful soundtrack – invoking empathy in the audience

A Good Video Production Process

This is the only part where we are serious! Having a precise method in place for the video will make sure that you can review it at each stage, and approve the script, treatment, style frames, design and animation.

This methodology leaves little room for error and means that you should be pretty happy when you see the final product!

Summary

You can see a lot of what makes a great explainer video is in the concept, and script stage. The story you tell and how you tell it is the basis for the whole video and isn’t to be overlooked, or rushed.

Everyone is often excited to get the visual stages, but the planning makes it.

To see some video examples, head to our animated explainer video page. Or if you want an explainer video for your business, let us help you

October 8, 2020

What Factors Affect The Cost of Animation?

As a buyer looking to get a new animated video production for your company, when browsing online you can see such a variety of animation costs, from £150 (uh oh!) to £20,000+ (eek!)

Here are a few reasons why the price of animated video can range so much, and how to make an informed choice when it comes to specifying the work.

Length of video

A longer animation means more work. For example, A two-minute video literally has twice as many scenes as one minute video, and they need creating, and then animating.

There are not that many economies of scale, as the work is usually bespoke to each project. Sometimes if you have a video series, some savings can be made through the series, but within one video, and your first video perhaps, nope.

Being concise with your words in the script is integral to making sure you don’t waste money here.

A long storyboard for animated video production

This storyboard is about 2.5 min video. Which is slightly on the long side for an Explainer type web video. You can see just how much work and frames that needs. A shorter video could be half these number of frames.

Inclusion of 3D Animation

3D animation can pop up in 2D animated videos quite often, and to the inexperienced, it can be undetected. Not seeing the line between 2D and 3D is fine if you’ve not even noticed, it wants to blend in seamlessly.

Including 3D elements adds background and literally another dimension to the movement and view, so it adds more interest- instead of the same front on view you see so often with animation.

It will often be composited and be the same design style, but it gives a variety to the scene, it’s not just flat facing.

But all this means, additional specialised skills in 3D software, modelling and lighting, and then compositing – to make it look like the rest of 2D video.

See the buildings in their video have been created in 3D space, allowing a camera to pass around as it rises. This is much more interesting than a generic pan up, with a completely straight-on looking street.

Animated Characters

Including characters can add a much needed human touch to animation, which if you’re selling or teaching people can help dramatically.

Using animated characters is a great way to act out scenarios and show a real user experience and convey emotion.

However, to get them to move in an organic and realistic fashion – to be likeable takes time to draw, rig and animate.

Low-end videos that have characters will move in a jerky/ stiff way or just not much movement at all. Or worse still, they stop dead for seconds at a time…

It kind of defeats the purpose, as you lose a lot of the human connection and relatability.

Illustration style

A 2D flat colour video using vector simple shapes, most likely, will take a much less time to design and animate than a hand-drawn, and highly textured frame developed in Photoshop or Procreate, as two extreme examples.

Sometimes it’s difficult to talk about drawing and illustration, so here are a few styles, to show what I mean.

You can see the difference between these few images, they show a clear difference in the work and time that went into them.

The 2 on the top are much more detailed, one including natural textures and use of sading and light, the other using 3D to create a complex layout, compared to the bottom 2 that are more simple in nature and are line illustration or solid colour.

Why pick animated explainer video over live action video

And if a scene took longer to design, then you guessed it, it will more than likely need increased time to animate it.

The quality and style of the drawings will very much depend upon your story, who the audience is and what you want them to feel.

Quality of Animation

Again this is down to time, in general, the more time your animator spends, the better the quality of the final piece.

A cheaper (quicker to produce) animation will generally be flat and move less, and there will be fewer scenes. And elements within scenes or whole scenes will be reused.

A low budget animation will also have very basic transitions from scene to scene (one thing exits, and another enters). High-quality animations tend to have more thought out transitions so that the video flows more seamlessly.

Reusing of assets, fewer scenes and fewer elements on screen at one time all saves time, and it may get the job done, but it won’t be exciting, it’s less relevant, and it’ll be less stimulating.

So there is a balance to be struck. Most animation studios will be able to show or demonstrate a few levels of animation quality so that you can see the difference for yourself.

Custom Animation

The cheaper sites offer template style make your own video, so you pick from some (often poorly) pre-designed and and pre-animated elements that you can pop together into a story.

It’s cheap, but of course, it’s massively limited and who knows how many other people are using the same elements in their video?

It’s also unlikely to fit with your brand very closely.

And of course some lower-end studios will be using templates in their work without telling you.

You can see a lot of the cost comes down to custom assets, length of video and time taken. So, in general, a higher cost animation is simply a higher quality product. Hopefully, this helps for next time you need an animated video for your business, and you can see what you’re paying for clearly.

To see a range of animated explainer video styles head to our portfolio, or to read more about what we do and what goes into our work, see the animated video production page and if you have an idea you want to chat about, contact us!

August 22, 2020

Why pick Animated Explainer Video over a Live-action Video

Both animation and live-action productions have their place as marketing video for business, but live-action can be limited.

Let’s explore some of the reasons for choosing an animated explainer video over a standard filmed video for your next company video.

Animated explainer video at its core is a catchy animated video generally under 2 mins long that explains something. It’s quite a vague term, but it covers most of the animated videos you see online in a broad way – and it’s much more diverse than you think.

Vidico

Be more creative

Animation is creative and can be out if this world if you want.

Simply put, it can make you stand out and look unique.

You can show an office one minute, then a street, then a person at home, then an international space station if you fancy! And it doesn’t cost more to do so. That is not even a particularly inspiring example of what can be done with animation.

As long as it serves the narrative, and suits the tone of the video, relates with your audience, your options are limitless.

With a live-action video, sure you can film several locations, but time and costs add up if it’s very expansive in terms of content. Most corporate videos are quite straight forward, 1-2 locations and that’s it.

With the limitless nature of motion design, you can say and show a lot in a very short time.

Buck

Example of a super creative animated video from Buck

Animation is versatile

Explainers videos are a lot more versatile in style than you would think. It’s not just icon sequences any more.

Most companies pick their general corporate branding the first time they go into animation and probably choose a flat 2D design and icon for the illustration style.

It’s a safe (albeit potentially boring) bet.

But many more experienced brands will experiment with style and tone to fit each campaign.

When you draw each frame from scratch, you have ultimate flexibility.

Animation and illustration design can achieve a very fun, or serious tone as needed. This gives you the adaptability to target new audiences, or to bring out different emotions.

A hand-drawn animation style will usually give a friendly caring vibe, while sharp lines and angles can be more formal and business-like.

An experienced design studio can use these kinds of devices to tailor the look and feel of the animation to achieve exactly the vibe you want.

And it’s not just reserved for consumer-based brands like Cola. Even a B2B business is selling to people at the end of the day.

Giant Ant

Duration of use

Your animation way is less likely to go out of date so quickly.

Usually, in explainer videos, any numerical figures that are referenced are not exact; for example, any charts or data you see, and any UI screens are often redesigned to simplify to look and flow. Of course, people are all fictional, unless exactly specified to copy someone.

So, because the video’s not showing such exact information, it’s likely to last longer.

With a filmed video you can run into issues much quicker. For example, if staff leave who had been interviewed, you may need to edit them out of the video, which costs for the work and can leave holes in the content.

And so you need to organise a reshoot, or the video needs more context to explain, which kind of defeats the point.

Or if the premises or signage are updated, you’ll feel that the video is old fashioned.

This happens way more often than you think!

ILLO

Creative Control

You have complete control with the look and feel of animation.

Sometimes on a filming day, things can just crop up… the weather is terrible, an area is closed, your piece to the camera could have been delivered better, a colleague was unwell.

And even if you have a sketched storyboard for a filmed video (but plenty of studios don’t offer this), it’s hard to know what each shot will look like.

There’s always a bit of figuring out on the shoot day… a small element of winging it. Obviously a professional will still do a good job though!

With animation, you have exact control over every scene, in advance of animation.

You’ve seen (hopefully) a written treatment, possibly sketches, style frames, an illustrated storyboard, boardomatic, animatic, then the final animation.

That’s a lot of stages to get your feedback in!

The Furrow

Animation can cover sensitive topics

If you need to talk about a sensitive topic, an animated explainer is a very good route to pick.

Animation gives anonymity to the subject (I mean a person here) and gives you the freedom to really explore a subject matter or tough topic without making anyone vulnerable or a target. There is no risk of exposure.

Using animation for a good cause can really amplify your message, for campaigns about for children or those in need, it can be a vital tool.

Emanuele Colombo

Price?

It’s not necessarily cheaper. Drawing every frame, animating takes time.

But reiterating from the points above, the animation may last longer, and it can be more tailored to your goals.

Unless you have a lot of VFX in your live-action production, maybe for a high-end TV advert, filmed video is often the same cost or cheaper than explainer animation, but we can see it’s more limited unless it’s very high concept.

Saying that… there are generally a few varying price levels of animation (this will vary from studio to studio), so if budget is tight, it’s not impossible.

But generally, the more you spend, its more time you’re paying for, and therefore a higher quality animation – it’s more immersive and mesmerising. And thus a better storytelling device.

oddfellows

Hopefully, these points will help show you that there’s never been a better time to get on board with explainer animation for your business.

Or at least give you food for thought before you jump onto creating a new corporate video for your business.

The options available are a lot wider than you would imagine.

To see a range of animated explainer video styles head to our video portfolio, or if you wanted to read more about animated video production in general, or if you have an idea you want to chat about contact us

December 16, 2019

Design in Animated video – the key to success

Motion graphics are becoming more popular – many businesses are starting to learn the term when it comes to animated video, but in practice, the ‘graphics’ part is often lacking.

Often when a business is discussing creating a new video, they talk about the animation and the scenes, but often the conversation about the design style and illustration isn’t there. It’s overlooked and taken for granted as it’ll just appear and look good.

The first brief is often ‘explainer video, maybe with my site icons’, but that’s so vague and samey, will that be the best route to tell your business message? An explainer video can be so much more than that.

An original design concept with bespoke illustrations can lift the animation and be so much more impactful – which has a real effect on video engagement.

*Bespoke illustrations and design for video*

But talking about design is sometimes difficult for clients – they don’t know where to look for references, and they may not be able to articulate what they like. But this is where creative studios need to have the knowledge to guide them properly.

There is a lot to consider with design – it’s all about the relation to your target audience. In essence, the design will help show them how to feel, and what information is most important.

An animated video for 20s aged entrepreneurs needs to look and feel quite different from a video for internal communication purposes.

The video is also representing the brand – so it needs to look right. You may choose for it to fit in with your other branding materials or may decide to create a new campaign, or it can be stand-alone. Either is fine, but it needs to be a considered choice.

Making the video match your branding precisely as an automatic response without thought, can be restricting and potentially bland.

Design in video needs to achieve a few things:

Clearly communicate the story
Have the right tone
Align with the brand
Be cohesive
Be unique

Picking a design-forward studio

A video studio with a dedicated designer is an excellent place to start. Often at less experienced production houses, the role is lumped in together with the animator. While very few can be great at both, in general, it means they’re mediocre at both tasks.

If they can’t draw, they may be reliant on stock vector images. Meaning the look can change from scene to scene unintentionally, as the vectors are from all different sources (affecting the tone), and it will probably have the same 2D flat graphic look we see so often.

Because they’re buying in assets, the video may also not be that unique.

A scene designed to show a negative.
It’s mixed, and overall has a gloomy, slightly confusing tone

A dedicated studio motion designer or illustrator will have background artistic knowledge, for example of the significance of colours, tones, value, shapes and textures. The use of these seemingly simple things can change the mood or feeling of a video massively.

Unbalanced design layouts or colours with no visual hierarchy, especially where any text is involved, can leave the audience missing the point.

Your animation studio will know when and how to use characters – do you need a key person who tells the story, background people, are we personifying objects?

Custom animated characters can increase the video bill, sometimes by more than you think, but in the right video, it’ll add so much more in the long term.

A creative animation team with the background of business and a professional illustrator or designer can make reliable recommendations for these points.

A few characters

Motion design-led workflow

It starts with research about the business at hand, the audience, a look at competitors and any visual references the client likes.

This study will help inform and is combined with Art Direction – usually from the design lead or creative director. Art direction is often not spoken about at all in business video, especially at the low to mid-end cost range. In simple terms, they create the entire concept of the video.

The research and art direction helps give the creative studio a full picture of the target. Then all design and motion can be aimed towards this target.

It continues through pre-production with style frames. These are a few fully illustrated images from the storyboard that show the intention of colour, typography and layouts styles.

A high-end creative studio or a more significant budget animation may even produce 2 – 3 different image concepts to review – giving the client full information and choice.

The client can make sure it aligns with their ideas and goals before the studio has gone too far – as changes later down the line are always more costly.

They may also show a full sketched out storyboard, so the business can see the broad story before full design even starts.

Illustrated Storyboard

Methodology

After dialogue and approval of the initial concept, frames and ideas, a design-led creative studio will produce the fully illustrated storyboard, complete with extra notes about scene movement and feeling.

Leaving the design to chance, is very risky and means the video may not be what you expected, or want, at all. So any savings made on cost at the start, are turned into a loss.

This method, with rigorous pre-production and client involvement, means that the animator has a clear idea of the flow, and can focus solely on making it move seamlessly.

The result is reliable, as you’ve already seen various illustration stages and it’s exciting, as it’s a bespoke video with a well-thought concept.

If a studio doesn’t offer any interim approval stages for video design, put, you are risking your time and money.

And next time if you want ‘an explainer video’ talk to the studio about different creative options available to you – it’s a lot more versatile than you may think.

You don’t want to end up with the same kind of animation video you see everywhere and fade into the sea of boring corporate videos.

And if you don’t have a clear idea, it should be up to them to guide you correctly – and show you what can be done.

If you want any help with video design, check out our video portfolio for style and animation ideas, or our animated video production page and send us a message!

Related Portfolio Case Studies

April 11, 2017

Off to OFFF

Phew! We’ve just come back from OFFF in Barcelona – a 3 day multidisciplinary festival, featuring all kinds of speakers and workshops in design, visual communication and art direction.

As primarily motion designers we were looking for video / motion design / animation related talks, so our review is based on them mostly, but I’m a huge fan of any design really, so I saw quite a few illustrators and graphic designers too.

It was really well organised, I found something unique and interesting in every talk we saw. We left feeling very inspired, and I have a bunch of new projects to try out. So, here are a few cool highlights from the fest with some of our favourite videos and designs – in the order that we saw them.

Outro Studio

Outro Studio, a video and design studio based in Barcelona, did the Opening titles and the book for OFFF this year. Their creative approach to projects was really interesting – like making a space themed video for 30 odd euros. For example, They used a bubble gum machine for the helmet, and did it all through reflection, which was a really clever way to reduce cost and give the impression of space – without some crazy huge set. They also had a great concept, which we follow ourselves pretty much, called – SFFPP Small Fast Fun Personal Projects. Now, I need to get hold of a camera, I felt really inspired to do more video work as it’s been very design based lately here!

Wix

This was really fascinating, because even though Wix are quite famous, they spoke about the troubles finding their brand voice and tone. They started from the early days, showing us the progress and development of their design and videos. It took quite a few projects and experiments to get the tone right for them. Here was a cool little video they made with Shaq, where they finally felt like they had a good base and company voice, which is quite bold in colour but friendly and a bit cheeky. (I think we all know the voiceover too)

Studio Furious

A graphic design and photography studio in Paris, Studio Furious, that came out of a lunch time hobby while at their day jobs. They started making all sorts of weird burgers and photographing them for a personal blog called Fat Furious Burger. This series is great, it was really fun and inventive! With their studio work now, they describe it as either sober or kitch aesthetic – and I love this contrast in approach.

Atipus

A Barcelona based graphic design company. Good on them for doing the talk in English, while I know some French and Portuguese, I’d be terrified to give a speech in them! What stood out most for me was their beautiful wine labels, and I think this is what they’re known for too. The simplicity and bold colours and shapes of all their work, but especially these really resonate with me. This series was based on the good soils from which the grapes grow, which I thought was a great perspective.

Buck

Buck was one of the ones we’d been looking forward to the most coming up to OFFF, and we weren’t disappointed! One of the main projects they focused on was (not surprisingly) Spectacle of The Real for the magician David Blaine.
This is a video we have watched.. a million times! So it was really cool to see the whole back story, working with David Blaine and Christopher Walken. Seeing some of the animatic sketches was amazing too. Truly inspirational stuff.

Imaginary Forces

Imaginary Forces have been in the industry for over 20 years and the breadth of their work was just incredible – a massive variety of videos for some pretty famous films and tv shows! They do a lot of main title sequences, notably Seven, Boardwalk Empire, and Stranger Things – all really fantastic works. But I loved this one in particular for Black Sails, the 3D work is so amazing, and I love their research behind the project looking at classical sculpture as inspiration.

Cookie Studios

Cookie Studios are a very talented 2D and 3D studio from London – enviable 3D capabilities! They had a great talk which was really client-based. They were very focused on understanding client need and rules – and it’s that, not just making, that makes them better designers. As they say, they can take a ‘shit’ subject and make it cool. I loved their alternative to the standard showreel too.

CLAUS

CLAUS is a studio run by Justin Harder, an illustrator and animator in California. He started out working in a studio, but quit/got fired and moved to Santa Monica living for a few months in his RV… we all have to start somewhere! The variety in his title work was fantastic, we watched a few projects and the styles were so varied and well-executed. He’s been famous lately for doing the Deadpool, the Book of Life and Thor title credits (all awesome!) but Thor was my favourite.

GMUNK

Bradley G Munkowitz – known as Gmunk, does stuff that’s really out of this world. Really, otherworldly was my main feeling. Such a funny guy though, he had the audience laughing so much! It was pretty explicit too, a few shocks!

Over the past few years, he’s done a lot of interesting projects playing with light and lasers, which to look at I would say looks like 3d work or all VFX, but a lot is filmed using lights and shapes, which was fascinating. He’s reinvented his style a few times, which was good to see the progression. My favourite was this Adobe logo, with LED lights built the logo out of acrylic.

Jamhot

One of the few fellow Brits was Jamhot – a cool graphic / digital design studio from Glasgow. I loved the honesty in their talk, they spoke pretty truthfully about humble beginnings and wanting to be better all the time, with only their previous work to use a benchmark (like 20-year-old me!). They showed a few lovely projects, but I really liked the classical approach of their work for this school.

Calvin Sprague

I was really amazed at how young Calvin was – and how much he’d achieved by the time he was 25. Seriously props to him! He started doing design for music, punk and rock which over time grew to a much wider audience, doing work for Madonna, Beatles and Led Zep.

But it was not what he wanted to do, it was too limited, so he moved to Amsterdam and started doing stuff for himself – I really liked his style, and it was nice to see the progression and how he got there. This design work for Target was really great large scale – the geometry is lovely.

Ricardo Cavolo

So, I’ve been a fan of this Artist, Ricardo (not designer!) for a few years now, I was excited about his talk. He’s definitely more offbeat, which some unusual inspirations. It was pretty fascinating. His work is mostly inspired by early medieval artwork and symbolism. Think about Gods, medieval magic and fairy tales, making a car into a chariot.. that kind of thing. Unlike most of the others I saw, he definitely has 1 particular style – and it’s very strong visually!

Vallée Duhamel

Montreal based duo, Vallée Duhamel, did the main titles for OFFF this year, which was a great finale for me. Their work is generally quite surrealist and they make videos described at High-Class Lo-Fi. Which basically means they usually real objects and household items to create their videos, which are filmed – but the end result looks in no way homemade.

Watching the behind the scenes for some of their work was incredible to see weird small sets, and throwing things about, a massive contrast to the final polished product. For example in this video for Google, they struggled to get the grapefruit to roll straight!

Wooh ok that was a long one! And really quite gushy sorry – but I think the work really speaks for how awesome and diverse it was. I think I’ll be back for more, so… until next time OFFF!

March 30, 2017

9 Tips for Finding a Video Freelancer you can trust

9 Tips for Finding a Video Freelancer You Can Trust

As an agency or studio, hiring a loyal video freelancer is a great way to expand business capacity and add skillsets to your team at a low cost.

When you do find a good freelancer, or freelance team, it can seriously boost your game. Having someone you can really trust to deliver high quality video or design work, without the hassle of paying for their downtime is invaluable.

There are so many highly competent, talented video contractors, who know the business inside out – so how do you find the right one for you?

Here are 9 tips for finding a freelancer you can really trust to help grow your business

1. Get recommendations from other agencies or studios you know

Word of mouth is still a great way of finding good people. Ask people you trust, to see who they trust. This is the best place to start if you’re unsure.

2. Put your job on a specialist video / design job site

This is a good start, as it weeds out more of the non-professionals straight away.

Often when adding a job to a generic site, especially one with no login to apply, you will receive so many replies of such varying quality, it can be daunting to go through them all to get rid of those who are not suitable.

Picking a video specific website like motionographer, filmandtvpro, or ifyoucouldjobs will give you a better calibre of applicants to start from.

3. Look at a number of their previous jobs

If you can, go much further than just a few videos they send upon application, you’re looking for consistent quality.

If you have a quick look at up to 10 videos, you can see if the quality or standard drops and they don’t always have the level that you need.

And with that many videos, you can see they are working regularly, it’s not just an evening side hustle.

Looking at more of their past projects will also help you gauge properly if their style suits your needs.

4. Find out what role they played in each video

Often a contractor will only have been involved in 1 part of a video, for example – they did the design or just the animation part of it.

If it’s not obvious from any accompanying text (which it really should be), ask them what they did.

You don’t want to hire someone you think does animation and design, but you find out they’ve exaggerated their animation capabilities – and they’re really just good at design.

5. Speak to their previous clients

Speaking to a previous client may not be needed, but getting a quick recommendation will certainly ease your mind if you’re unsure.

If you have found someone who is a potentially good fit, they probably won’t mind if you request to speak to a previous client.

Ask them about the full process end to end. Were they easily contactable? Did they deliver on time? Were there any unexpected costs? Did anything go really well / or badly? Did they work on more than 1 production?

6. Locality doesn’t matter

Initially, you may be looking for a freelancer to come into your studio to work, or at least be quite close. But this isn’t always necessary. Local can often be very expensive, or not high enough quality.

For example, freelancers in London, or other major cities can be more expensive, purely because of where they are.

And if you are based more rurally, then there may not be the right person close enough to you to commute to your offices.

As long as the timezone isn’t too different – say less than 5-7 hours – you can have clear remote working relationships. I can see this trend of freelancers remote working getting more and more frequent.

You don’t even need to stay within your country, though you may feel more comfortable.

Although we’re UK based, some of our main clients are based in the USA, we have great communication, simply with Zoom and email.

7. Have an introductory meeting

Often when agencies are looking for a freelancer, it’s quite last minute, they need help now! You may be in a rush to get work done – so there’s no time for an intro.

But a short meeting just to introduce both yourselves is vital to start gaining trust in the relationship, it only takes 20-30 mins to have a good chat and judge if they’d be a good fit for you, and vice versa.

This can be in person or using a zoom is fine these days too. It will allow you to fully gauge what they’re like – are they approachable, do they seem honest? These qualities are just as important as their work.

If you like them as a person it makes the job way easier and you’re more likely to hire them again. Most agencies don’t want to be looking for freelancers that frequently, they want to find someone and stick with them.

8. Collect a list

When a big video production comes in and you have to pull out all the stops. You need a handy list of good animators or designers you can turn to for quick reliable turnaround – so you don’t waste essential time.

So, if someone writes to you – they have a great portfolio, the price is reasonable and they seem capable, but it’s not the right moment, find some way of saving their email or contact details. you’ll thank yourself later when you’re in a rush!

9. Plan your jobs / specifications well

Once you’ve decided to hire a freelancer for the job – they need a solid brief.

Freelancers are usually smart, and intuitive, but for a first project, they need a good clear plan to work to. They can’t read your mind yet!

If you leave it too vague and they get the wrong idea – you’ve all wasted your time (and money) when the client isn’t happy.

Give them as much guidance as you can, to begin with, the initial briefing with any job is very important.

They will use all that going forward. It’s often a good idea to go through the script or storyboard line by line and make sure each section makes sense.

The more info the better, and also be very clear about deadlines, contracts, what the deliverables are will all help the project to run successfully.

If possible, I would also allow a bit more time than usual for a first video project, so you have more time to make sure they are following your process and you can go through any questions without stress.

These days it is so easy to find a video freelancer online and work remotely, so go ahead!

These tips should help you sort through and find the perfect match for your company.

To see examples of our video work head to our video portfolio or animated video production page.

And if you need a hand in your studio – contact us! We work for some great video and marketing agencies worldwide and offer a robust white-label video and animation service.

February 28, 2017

8 Ways to get More Visual Content in Your Blog

Visual content for blogs is a must-have, and there are so many benefits – it improves site SEO, more blog views, increased time spent on the page, improving your brand image and more.

But, you don’t always have to create it yourself – In this post, I’ve laid out a few different types of great visual blog content, and the different methods for producing it yourself, or finding a good piece that already exists.

Creating Visual Content vs Finding and Curating It

The content you’ve made for your blog will always be more relevant to your audience and perform better, because it’s made by you and for a specific purpose.

However, we know there’s not always the time and/or budget for original visual content, and you have to look elsewhere for visuals.

The key is to find a good balance, and figure when it is really necessary to create your own, and when you can use something that’s already been made to illustrate your point.

Photos

I guess the first thing people think of in terms of visual content and a blog is photos.
If it’s relevant, just take some photos, phone camera usually have a fairly decent lens these days – certainly good enough quality for a blog post, providing you have good natural light.

Types of photos that can work well for blogs, are specific product shots, or photos of your staff, events you’ve been to, your space, any gadgets you use. Showing your company culture can make you much more personable and add a real voice to your blog posts.

If you’re not up for photography, a few places to find specific imagery are Wikimedia Commons & Flickr CC – just make sure you get the attribution right (sometimes you need to add the author for example).

Or for more generic stock photos you can head to Death to the Stock Photo. They pride themselves in being non-cheesy, which is great! However, any photos you choose still need to reflect your company, so pick carefully – it really needs to be applicable to the blog content and reflect your brand accurately.

Graphics

Often, a photo isn’t enough – you need a few words to fully explain your point, and help people remember your content better.
If you have some design knowledge, then Photoshop or Illustrator are great for creating fully bespoke graphics, that will be the most relevant to your content and really represent your company in terms of style.

However, If you’re inexperienced in design, then I would head to something like Canva. Canva can be a free service, and if you have no clue about design / layout / colours/ fonts/ whatever, don’t worry! It’s extremely user friendly for creating visual content that works well.

Remember that while you may want to use lots of font and colours, often less is more. And as always it needs to be in keeping with your brand and easy to digest.

It’s worth picking 1 style and keeping within that, or only varying slightly while you’re finding your feet. This will create more unity.

Infographics & Charts

If your blog post is numbers based at all – an infographic is perfect for Condensing lots of information into an easy to understand format. Rather than just a list of numbers, you can represent them visually, and give much more impact.

There’s many ways a professional would make these – if it were me, a mix of Illustrator and Indesign probably (but I’m very nerdy) – and keeping a nice grid layout for good comprehension.

Creating infographics may seem daunting if you’re less nerdy, but again, there are foolproof ways if you have solid data! Canva also has great functionality for this and so does infogr.am. You’ll have lots of options for the best way to visually show your data.

To find premade infographics, you can look on SlideShare and coolinfographics but one of the best ways to find infographics most relevant to your industry / niche is searching in google using your specific keywords + infographic.

Graphs & charts

If you don’t need a whole infographic, but you just want to illustrate one point at a time with a impactful chart, you can create these easily by using Google Sheets or Google Slides.

They may not be the most ‘beautiful’, but they will be extremely relevant to your web audience and a useful asset to display data, and make it more easily understood.

Videos

Videos are known to be impactful on blog posts, and it can be fairly easy to create them. You can go the DIY route and have a go (but do invest in a tripod!), you can make a video with your smartphone – and the end quality will matter less if the content is good.

Videos that are good for blogs are; animated infographics, tutorials, client case studies (whether animated or filmed) short videos with staff about specific topics, showing new products / premises, yuor if you’re more regular with production, then you can start a Vlog. A vlog is a great way to add a human face to your business, and give real, personal feeling, insights to customers.

Tips for Using Video on Your Blog - Tubular Insights

If you want to step up your game, you can hire a professional. If you’re using a video production company, I would recommend filming / producing a few videos at a time to create some economies of scale – especially if it will form a series, this means you’ll have a consistent output and a consistent look.

Again, finding the time and resources to create blog videos may not always be possible, but there’s so many videos already online now, we’d hope that at least 1 shows your point!

Finding relevant videos can be a bit of a minefield but Youtube, Ted Talks and Vimeo and are good places to start – have a keyword in mind, and keep trying variations of that until you find it. If you find someone or a channel who creates good videos quite frequently – it’s worth bookmarking!

Summary

It’s been shown that visual content on your blog will earn you higher engagement, and there are so many options – with different levels of difficulty and cost – so just find what’s right for your company right now.

You can invest as little or as much time as you want, and still have more impact with your blogs.

In an ideal world, we’d always create our own content, but not everyone is at this stage.

So, the key with finding the right content for your blogs online is very careful consideration – question each item – does this speak to my audience, does it suit my brand, does it say what I want to say, does it have the right tone for my site?

If you’re ready to start producing bespoke content for your blog, and you want a hand with graphic design or video for your company, have a look at our portfolio and get in touch!

January 25, 2017

Highlights from 2016

We’ve had quite the year in 2016 – so here’s a quick highlight reel to show what we’ve been up to. And just a snippet what lies ahead.

New Clients

2016 was certainly a busy one. We worked with 34 new clients (as well as loads of our existing customers) last year across USA, UAE, UK, and throughout Europe. Though sadly as studio nerds we don’t get to visit all this great places, we can only imagine!

Motion Design

We’re constantly upskilling here, and although Victoria is trained in fine arts and graphic design – classes specifically for design for motion didn’t really exist until very recently. So we jumped at the chance, and we completed the highly regarded School of Motion Design Bootcamp Course.

Character Animation

Not one to be left out of the fun, our animation expert, Harry, has been delving further into the work of 2d character animation and rigging.

It’s pretty tricky work rigging a character correctly, but it makes a world of difference when it comes to movement – and getting it realistic (not just kerky and sporadic). He completed training at the end of last year to further improve – and we’ve had some great results!

New Sectors

For us, 2016 saw a low of new video and design work across the medical, education and technology sectors in particular. We love learning about new businesses and organisations – and their markets. There’s nothing like a video production to help you learn in depth about a new field relatively quickly. It’s so interesting!

Working Internationally

We now have a second base at LX Factory in Lisbon. From Summer 2016 and continuing into this year we’ve been working between both locations. It’s great, Lisbon has really grown as a creative and technological hub in Europe.

This year ahead

OFFF Festival

So we’re heading to #OFFF17 . It’s a multi disciplinary design and art festival in Barcelona. In their own words “It is more than just a Festival hosting innovative and international speakers, it is more than a meeting point for all talents around the world to collaborate, it is more than feeding the future.”

We’re looking forward to hearing from some amazing speakers and meeting some like minded people!

3D

We’re also making some great advances with 3D design and animation. This is still under wraps at the moment, but we’ll be unveiling some great new 3D projects soon and are looking forward to fully expanding our offering.

Gif Page

We’re working on a web page just for our gif animations. It’s going to a be fun and very silly, there may or may not be a dancing taco…

Lastly – if you want to see some of of our latest projects, whether design or animation head to our lovely Portfolio Page. We update it all the time 🙂

January 23, 2017

Captions in Web Video – A Quick Guide to maximise your message

Browsing online we’re seeing more and more videos showing with captions – what’s this all about?

This is due to the rise of mobile video which is growing massively, recent research shows mobile video views grew 6x faster than desktop views in 2015. (Invodo, 2016)

One of the main problems for marketers is that mobile users may not always have the sound turned on – or want to turn it on. So although the visual message may come across – crucially half of the video could be missing.

So how do you get your message across if your video is voiceover or interview-based? This is the same issue, whether filmed or animated video production.

Captions are a great way of letting people preview the video content, and letting them decide to watch with the volume turned on. Or letting them take on board the full message when the volume isn’t an option.

Making the assumption people will always listen from the start is a mistake.

However, sometimes you may not want or need captions, and it’s not always straightforward.

3 Main Types of Captions

Animated Captions – inbuilt into the video that just show highlights and keywords

Open Captions – like subtitles but can’t be turned on and off – they’re embedded within the video

Closed Captions – abilities to turn the subtitles on and off, set by the video player.

Social Video

If your marketing is very social media-based, for example, Facebook adverts, (and who would blame you!) 100 million hours of video per day are watched on Facebook. (Tech Crunch, 2016) There can be a lot of silent video playback, so you’ll want to incorporate full sub captions, or make your visuals very self-explanatory. The latter is only really possible with animation or motion graphics based videos.

And so now more often on Facebook and youtube, we do see full sub captions are being used. Which means people can still get the content, but without having to turn the sound up – it’s a great user-focused approach.

For those heavily invested in social video, Open captions are a great option, as it gives you more flexibility with the design than video player generated closed captions.

This means your video will never show without captions by mistake, the full message will always get across.

Obviously they still need to be clear, so you can’t be crazy with font choice or colour, but you can be sure they don’t overlap with any visuals, the font is suitable, and you have full control of the process.

If you’re still dabbling with social video production – then Closed Caption system is a great way to start and increase engagement.

Website video

For your website, you may not need full subcaptions. If your service or product is heavily B2B – you may still have a good majority of desktop users, who have access to speakers or headphones more easily.

So for a website video or a video just for presentations, you may find that a few key highlight messages, animated nicely do the trick along with the voiceover.

The best to way to find out if your visitors are coming by mobile, tablet or desktop, is to check your wenbsite analytics for the screen size and device used most frequently. You can also check the time on page – to see if you’re putting off mobile users with your site.

There are a few downfalls

It can take a bit of effort and knowledge required to produce the right files for Closed Captions – it requires generating an SRT (or similar) file, which is basically a text file of the script that is formatted so that each line is associated with a time code – so if you’re not familiar it can be a little daunting and time consuming.

Facebook and Youtube now offer automatically generated captions – woohoo! But sometimes what it hears is incorrect, so this is not a foolproof method. Especially when you’ve spent time and money producing a video to generate sales (imagine loads of a typos in a proposal!).

Here’s a quick example where I have put Youtube Closed Captions on a preexisting video. You can see the client didn’t plan to have this, as the captions over overlap the animated text somewhat. And Youtube initially did quite a bad job of guessing the captions! So, it’s not always straightforward.

If you’re not up for a DIY approach, You can hire companies to easily make a perfect transcript if you’re getting errors, then upload that SRT file to youtube or facebook.

If you choose to have animated captions that are ever present and part of the video design – then it’s crucial they are timed well for those who are listening and match the voiceover – as hearing and seeing them as different messages will create a little confusion.

This seems obvious, but marketers are still doing this! It’s so difficult to take one message fully on board if you’re hearing another.

Getting started

So to get started, first look at your analytics and your marketing efforts. Is your audience website and desktop based or do you drive large amounts of traffic through social media and mobile?

After you have a clear idea of your own users you can decide what level of captions to use.

It’s good to know this info at the beginning of a video project, so that nothing is overlapping that area of the screen, or that the video producer can add animated highlight captions which capture the message in an elegant way.

If you already have videos online on youtube or facebook – see if the automatically generated captions work for you – and there you go, you’ve already increased watching potential!

In the meantime – check out our newly updated portofolio, and see a wide range of web videos with animated captions!