Animations are a super cool tool for telling business stories, simply because they allow you to communicate your messages with artistic license and no creative boundaries. Plus, animations can enable you to make people build more emotional connections to things they wouldn’t usually feel emotive about creating powerful, lasting impressions.

But producing an effective animation is complex; it requires precise planning and lots of creative thinking. Let’s dive into how you your animation can capture imaginations and have a lasting impact.

Of course, it’s always important to start with the why – to really hone in on the reason why you’re making it. What’s the end goal of the animation? Who are you designing the animation for? And what do you want them to think or do once they’ve watched it?

This focus is so important to ensure the final piece delivers the results you’re after because it’s easy to lose sight of this goal. And it’s important to have in mind a clear call-to-action for the end of the piece to guide viewers towards their next step.

A good script is the foundation of your animation and it’s important to get this right before starting on the visuals. Start by sketching out a clear, structured storyline, making sure it’s concise and focused on the key messages. Too much detail can make an animation hard to follow. You want to make something people can really connect with.

It’s important to pace the script with the viewer in mind. Animation is great for delivering stats, but too many in a short space of time can overwhelm and become tiring to watch, so making sure that the piece isn’t overloaded with messages and allows enough time for the information to really sink in is key. The messages you’re trying to land don’t always need to be overtly stated in the script. The visuals can do a lot of the work independently if well designed.
Consider carefully how your animation will be used. If posting on LinkedIn for example, it’s sometimes better to produce shorter social-media-friendly cuts of the final piece to hook people into watching the whole piece. So build this into your thinking. And of course, attention spans online are short – and getting shorter. B2B videos that are shorter than 60 seconds are on average watched all the way through 68% of the time*.

Developing the script will help you find your tone of voice. It needs to feel right for your brand, style of animation, and subject matter. For example, animation is a wonderfully diverse medium for use of humour and communicating with a sense of tongue-in-cheek, but is it right for your project? Sometimes, contrasting a more serious script with light-hearted visuals can work really well, softening a message whilst creatively landing the serious points. Getting the tone of voice right is possibly the trickiest part and getting the words right is just the start…

No matter the subject of an animation, there should always be a hook or a story to engage the audience – you just have to find it and hone in on it. Here, it’s key to think human. Viewers will probably respond better to the more human aspects of a business’ product or offering so it’s ideal if you can find a story that can bring those aspects to life. How does it improve people’s lives? How does it help their customers?

For statistic-heavy content, you could consider introducing a character or characters to help lead viewers through your story. Using a character can help the viewer build an emotional connection to the piece and make it more engaging & memorable. A detailed storyboard or animatic to illustrate the character’s personality and plan how it will be worked into the animation is critical to avoid making expensive mistakes that need fixing later on in the process.

Choice of music and voice over is key to creating the right feel for an animation. It’s important to use music that matches the movement and pace of the animation – something that adds to the feeling or emotion you’re trying to create. Sometimes you get lucky and nail it quickly but more often than not, this takes lots of time to perfect, but If you get it right, the animation should in part be inspired by the music and vice versa, which is why we don’t leave music selection to the last minute.

And if you’re using a voice over, the choice of voice can make a huge difference. Give yourself lots of options and ideally get the voice artists to record a sample of your script so you can really work out which one’s going to work best.

An animation shouldn’t try to deliver too much. A simple concept communicated well can be much more powerful.

The magic of animation is that it can help the viewer to absorb more information in a shorter time as opposed to, say, reading an article. Using well designed graphics and a succinct attention-grabbing script should make the most of your audience’s attention span and make those key messages easier for them to digest.

Above everything, emotional connections tend to create the longest lasting memories. This is where animation really wins as a tool because it gives you the ultimate freedom to communicate your messages. And if you’re thinking about diving into the wonderful world of animation, take a look at how we can help you.

A picture is worth a thousand words, after all!