3 Types of Animated Explainer Videos For Your Business

The amount of information available today is truly staggering so people can quickly become overwhelmed, especially when it comes to commercial content. That’s why your customers must understand your products or services as quickly as possible, and how exactly these will benefit their lives. This is precisely why explainer videos are so popular nowadays.

These are short videos used to show and describe how a product or service works, condensing vast amounts of information into bite-sized pieces of content that audiences can easily digest. It’s no wonder that explainer videos are so favoured among consumers, with 72% of people preferring to watch a video about a product or service than read about one. Not only are explainer videos fantastic for educating your customers, but also your staff, stakeholders and potential investors too. These help convey what your business stands for, what it sells, and who the products and services benefit.

To consider explainer videos for your business, you must first understand the types available so that you can find the right style for your product, industry and brand. And remember that animation can take abstract, intangible concepts and show viewers how products or services work in ways that may not be possible with live-action content. Animated explainer videos also make it much easier to accommodate any future updates or changes to your products and services, representing a more stable long-term investment than live-action videos.

As an animated video production company, animated explainer videos are our forte. So, let’s look at three of the main types of animated explainer videos for your business to consider. And to make them a reality, be sure to contact Frantic today.

2D has long been the most popular type of animation and is becoming increasingly affordable as time goes on. This style involves creating the illusion of movement in a two-dimensional area by sequencing individual drawings together over time. Although traditionally created using hand-drawn processes, technology enables more companies to speed up the process by doing so digitally. All in all, 2D animation has low production costs, is simple to create, and can be easily story-focused, making it perfect for explainer videos.

Our Money Advice Service video shows exactly how 2D animation can be harnessed in commercial explainer videos. With fun and fluid 2D animation, this is one video in a series exploring several different areas of finance, including savings, wills, bills, pensions and debt. In this one, we depict animated characters in the various scenarios where they may want to save money, which includes starting a family, going on holiday and buying a property. We are regularly asked by our clients to produce character animations, and it’s easy to see why. Creating people that the audience can relate to really brings the products and services to life.

3D animation — also known as CGI (computer-generated imagery) — is about creating a three-dimensional space where the natural movements of real objects can be replicated. While a 2D animation only moves vertically and horizontally in its space, an object in a 3D animation video can move through the depth of its background. This is perfect for demonstrating more complicated products and services, and is particularly useful for showing a product that’s still in the “concept” phase, like what a building will look like when complete. 3D animation can also blend seamlessly with live-action, often heightening the viewer experience.

Taking the Chinese Year of the Snake as the theme, we developed a richly animated 3D landscape focused around a stylised snake for HSBC, with the purpose of emphasising the importance of the renminbi currency to stakeholders. The serpent slithers and weaves its way through the detailed video, drawing the viewer’s attention to the different aspects of trade and global business that the bank is involved in. The renminbi currency features throughout, including an animated bank note composited into live-action footage at the beginning and end of the video in Shanghai and London.

Motion graphics use a combination of visual effects and other cinematic techniques to bring graphics to life. This type of explainer video will often animate shapes, logos or text instead of being character or story-driven, making them perfect for more information-heavy educational content. Motion graphic videos are great at simplifying complex topics and are less expensive to produce than 3D animation clips.

The Queen Elizabeth Prize rewards innovations that have a groundbreaking impact on the world, with previous winners including the Internet itself and digital imaging technology. The prize is given to the engineer, scientist or group who first developed the technology. And back in 2019, we created a video for that year’s award: GPS. The clip used motion graphic animation to show how the technology works (including images of GPS satellites sending radio signals to a ground device) and its applications, before finally revealing the award winners at the end.