Show, don’t tell

The question is not whether animation is an effective tool. Animation has been used successfully everywhere. But what sets an animated explainer video and its production apart? And what are the best examples? And how can you make good videos yourself? Tuuli Lepik from the animation studio Blue Cat explains.

An explainer video is a short, visually simplified and logically structured clip whose purpose is to make a complex idea quickly understandable. The visual language of animation is generally simple and stylised, and as a result the key information stays well in the viewer’s memory – the aim is to give the viewer new knowledge and understanding and to explain the subject clearly. The illustrations used help to convey the subject aesthetically and are visually easy to follow, playful and interesting.

A good role model here is Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, an animation studio based in Munich, Germany, whose YouTube channel is a pop-cultural educational phenomenon. In terms of content, they focus on educational, science-based and philosophical topics, using visual metaphors to explain things. Their clip “We Need to Rethink Exercise” was revised after experts stepped in, which shows how much a sound scientific basis matters to its makers: https://youtu.be/vSSkDos2hzo?si=ifEVydG4UmI-iaBo

The very colourful, minimalist and recognisable visual language and style of the clips is the thread that ties the series together. When making the clips, the studio works with subject experts, which is a prerequisite for creating a good explainer video.

Kurzgesagt’s strength is conveying complex content in an inspiring, encouraging and even poetic way. They describe and explain the phenomena around us and do not try to sell us anything directly. With the help of animation they try, as the German word “kurz” suggests, to explain things briefly. But brevity and compactness are not their only aim. Kurzgesagt’s clips are not just instructional videos – they can also be seen as audiovisual works of art. That is exactly what sets them apart from the classic educational videos used in schools or in e-learning. They have managed to bring to the content the kind of warmth and handling of the material that we might perhaps expect from a good teacher in a classroom lesson.

Who doesn’t remember the “Dumb Ways to Die” song?

One of the most awarded campaigns of all time – and endearingly morbid – is “Dumb Ways to Die” https://youtu.be/IJNR2EpS0jw?si=pBT-kmEWepfgKIwA (2012, advertising agency McCann Melbourne, client: Metro Trains Melbourne). Within two weeks it earned more than 50 million dollars’ worth of free media coverage; the video gathered more than 320 million views, spawned dozens of parodies and spin-offs, and reduced accidents.

Making animated explainer videos is educational and very interesting

After all, in our small Blue Cat studio we don’t make these explainer videos only for IT firms or medical companies. The subject might be, for example, preventing teenage crime, genetic diseases, environmental protection or soil health. Which means that every time, you have to get up to speed. And the producer, the copywriter and the project manager, as well as the illustrator and the animator, all need to know the subject equally well. With animation, you cannot put the right emphasis on content you do not understand. It takes an interdisciplinary team, or a group of people with somewhat broader interests – not just someone to carry out the work, or a production link between a producer and a computer.

Sometimes subjects seem too complicated at first glance. For example, when we were making the Lastemaja (Children’s House) clip https://vimeo.com/340647770 years ago, I’ll be honest: I was personally startled that such a subject or service existed at all. But then I started thinking: all right, it’s difficult, but everyone else thinks so too. And is there a way to approach it delicately and in a hopeful light? And then we found symbols from the cityscape, such as a grimy road sign showing a mother and child beside a children’s playground, convincing and warm performers, and a minimalist, charming illustration, which helped convey the content in quite a hopeful way with very simple animation.

Sometimes animation also needs filmed “live-action” footage alongside it, to connect the information with the real world. For example, when creating educational clips on cybersecurity for the Information System Authority (RIA), we needed to focus only on what matters most – that people don’t make the mistakes that, to put it bluntly, get them robbed. This in turn meant that in our work we tried to understand that very behavioural mechanism. People aren’t stupid, after all. They are informed; in fact, they know these things very well. Cyber threats don’t arrive like a galloping horse to a fanfare, or like James Bond – they tend to happen quietly, like a person drowning.

In creating the explainer animation, we tried to stage exactly these situations. For example, a mother in her home office with her children; someone has a glass of juice, so there is a real risk that it will get knocked over and an important work document with no backup will be destroyed; attention wanders; perhaps you are teaching a child to read and at the same time notice that a tempting QR code has arrived in your email, and so on. Of course, we added so-called “ten commandments” to the clip as reminders – though in fact there are only about four or five in each clip. Another good practice is a recap at the end of the clip that reinforces the most important points: https://vimeo.com/1121789301

Fuzzy Feelings (Apple, 2023, animation: Passion Pictures)

Of course, explainer animation is also used for marketing purposes. Today’s advertising clips are, in any case, largely hybrids of post-production, special effects and animation, and that is no longer even a topic worth discussing.

Animation does come to the fore more sharply, though, when its style or approach helps bring out something distinctive or give the message an emotion. A good example here is “Fuzzy Feelings”, a warm hybrid short film about creativity and empathy that combines live action with stop-motion. An office worker relieves stress through stop-motion; their fantasy world mirrors real life and shifts relationships – soft and human, and on top of that the technology is stop-motion animation made with an iPhone. The aim was to show Apple’s tools as enablers of creativity and kindness rather than as a feature advert, and to raise the brand’s cultural capital. The technique serves the story; the brand value comes from emotion, not from a list of features. The cosy handcraft of stop-motion gives it a sincerity that stands apart from Christmas magic overblown with special effects.

So that the target audience understands

Explaining complex subjects comes with the service. And almost always, the target audience needs to understand what it is about. Sometimes, though, that means we have to look at the service from an ordinary person’s point of view.

In the Digivärav (Digital Gateway) clip we once made for the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, we tried to base the form on the assumption that the service’s target audience was most likely a small business owner. As we developed the idea further, a creative entrepreneur seemed more interesting, and fashion or clothing design in turn seemed attractive as fields. We also felt that it might be interesting to portray the entrepreneur not as a stereotypical businessman but as a confident female character, someone like Kristel Kruustük or Karen K. Burns: https://vimeo.com/1121783119