En este momento estás viendo How we work: Explainer Videos

How we work: Explainer Videos

Lot of things happen between the moment you decide to produce an animated video and the time that video is ready to be published. It’s not rare for somebody to feel overwhelmed with this process, especially if you haven’t participated before in video production. What do you do first? How soon can I see a sample? Can we change things along the way?

These are all valid questions and we have the answers. The most important thing when producing an explainer video is to have a solid base, in which we’ll place all the elements that come afterwards. The more solid you build the foundations of a house, the better.  It’s the same with a production process. Any attempt to skip a stage, move forward faster, or to change something previously approved, will alter the logical order of the workflow. We can think about it like a card castle.

One of the most important things along the process is the kick-off call with the client, which is the actual start of the production process itself. There, the client will validate the timeline for the project, the target audience, references and everything we need to complete the video. In this regard, the more the merrier. Old videos from the company, references from the competitors, brand manuals, pictures, videos from our portfolio, everything helps us to materialize the client’s vision. All this information and assets are what our team uses to get the right angle and approach for every project.

We have selected as an example a section of our explainer video for Eignapharma, in order to show what happens in every stage of the production process.

During this procedure, there’s three fundamental perspectives: narrative, artistic and movement. The first one consists in everything that has to do with the story and the characters and their actions. The narrative for the video is born during the pre-production meetings and the scripting process, to be expanded with the storyboard and finally come to life with the Animatics.

During the scripting page, we think and design the narrative structure of the video, together with the first draft for the voice over and the description of how the different scenes are going to look.

One the technical script gets approved, we move on into the storyboarding process, in which we show the client frame by frame, through visual references, how the video is going to look paired with the voice over. This is a very important part of the process, specially for complex projects, as we start visualizing the video. With shorter videos, we usually skip the Storyboard, to work directly on a Key Visual and the design of particular frames.
One of the most useful tools when it comes to animated videos are the Animatics. Through this technique, we animate the drafts from the storyboard, synchronizing the voice over (and sometimes the music), in order to provide the client with a first glimpse of the rhythm, frames and different movements that the video is going to have. Besides this, Animatics are a very good guide for the time we start animating the final designs.
04-Animatic
Design comes next. But before jumping into creating and designing all the elements in the video, we present the client with the Key Visual, which consists of a particular scene, fully designed and illustrated to show the general look and aesthetics of the video. The client can see and evaluate coloring, lighting, fonts, settings and backgrounds, for example, and can make comments and corrections before we develop all the scenes and frames. We usually provide the client with two or three different “looks”, all of them will have the brand’s manual and other references taken into account, together with any other information in this regard provided in the brief or during the kick-off call.
The animation stage is where everything comes to life. With the approved design, we put together the different scenes and start animating every element on the video.

Every single stage we mentioned plays a key role in the construction of the visual language, style, narrative and movement of an explainer video. The production process stays the same, what changes is the particular content of each project.

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