A two-minute animated video can explain what twenty slides cannot. With a good explanatory video, you can make a complicated legal appeal process understandable and manageable, and you can demonstrate how a mechanical patent actually works.
One of our most important tasks as communicators is to make difficult concepts understandable. It’s tempting to think that the more complex something is, the more complicated the explanation must be.
The Language Council puts it simply: Clear language builds trust. This also applies to visual communication. Often, a two-minute explanatory video can be far more effective than a twenty-slide presentation crammed with numbers, text, and graphs.
Learn more about simplification: Plain language: Why is it so hard to write simply?
The brain can't handle everything at once
The Australian psychologist John Sweller has conducted research on what he calls cognitive load. He points out that our working memory is limited, and every superfluous detail takes up capacity that would otherwise be devoted to the core task. This means that unnecessary information prevents us from remembering what is important.
We always start by working with the client to get a thorough understanding of the issue at hand. Once we understand what is actually happening, we can distill the process down to its core. This allows us to distinguish what is truly important to communicate from everything else that can come later.
Next, we develop a visual style that fits the theme and target audience, and—most importantly—reflects the brand’s identity, tone, and values.
At the same time, we write the script. Once the style and script have been approved, we create a storyboard for the film. Once we’ve agreed on what to tell and how, we begin production.
The goal is always to create explanatory videos that are so simple that a person can summarize the main points of the video after watching it just once.
Below are three examples of animated explainer videos we have created for clients.
The Discrimination Board's appeals process
For the Discrimination Board, our goal was to make the legal complaint process simple enough that people in vulnerable situations would actually use it. We created two short explanatory videos in a style that deliberately neutralizes gender and ethnicity. One explains how the complaint process works, and the other outlines what falls under the Board’s mandate. In this way, a complicated legal complaint process was simplified and made accessible to those who actually need to use it.
DOF's mooring patent
For DOF Renewables, we were tasked with explaining why their patented solution for transporting fiber ropes to moor floating offshore wind farms is better than the old methods. It is a complex mechanical process, and the difference between the old and the new is simply easier to show than to describe. We used simplified 2D animation to visualize the actual savings in time, money, and emissions, and to explain the method they’ve developed in a way that customers can immediately understand, whether they’re engineers or not.
Bergen Carbon Solutions’ nanofiber
For Bergen Carbon Solutions, we created an explanatory video showing how they convert greenhouse gases into nanofibers.