5 ways Animation can Solve your Communication and Budget Challenges
When things get complicated, start animating.
Increasingly, animation is becoming a favourite way for brands to communicate, market and sell. Why? Animation is the perfect way to illustrate ideas that are difficult to visualize, or that haven’t been fully realized. Animation can solve your communication and budget challenges, and it gives you the freedom to be creative. So, next time your CMO says they need a commercial or a sales tool to build excitement for a product or service; think animation.
There are a number of reasons why animation is the perfect choice for a range of content conundrums. We are going to tackle 5 challenges our clients regularly face, with a number of the best-in-class animation solutions.
< 5 WAYS ANIMATION CAN SOLVE YOUR COMMUNICATION AND BUDGET CHALLENGES >
1) Animation as Invention
Need to communicate a concept that can’t be (easily) visualized?
Animation is a great way to create images and communicate concepts that only exist in the imagination. From Star Wars to Avatar, and just about every feature film you can think of in-between, there are a team of animators bringing to life make-believe worlds that couldn’t happen in any other way. And animation in the world of marketing can bring conceptual or the virtual ideas into reality too.
Bringing a Cyber Attack to Life: VISA
Imagine having to explain how your credit card protects you from a potential cyber threat? It’s complex and it’s difficult to visualize. This inventive animation represents a super sophisticated technology process, in a way that’s easy for audiences to digest and absorb. Created by animator Yaniv Fridman.
A Virtual Partnership: Barrick/CISCO
Barrick wanted to do a video news release to announce a partnership that would forever change the future of mining. However, this powerful partnership had yet to be fully realized. The concepts and technology that needed to be explained in the release were still in the planning and building stage, leaving us with nothing to film. Our creative director Graeme and lead animator Josh took the script we developed with our partner Andy Lloyd, from Barrick to bring this complex information to life. The result? A stunning visualization of dancing data points that communicates how digital information from the rock face will be gathered and analyzed to increase productivity and profitability.
Wondering “how much does an animated video cost”?
|| Download our Animation Budget Samples Guide Now ||
2) Animation as Explainer Videos
Do you have a visual idea that’s tough to simplify? Or too expensive to shoot?
You have just been given 150 pages of documentation for a new product or service and tasked with condensing it into a “marketable minute” to sell to the world. Or maybe you figured out how to transform that complexity into a brilliant script but you can’t figure out how to shoot in China, India, and Korea, in the next 10 days, for under 25K! Impossible, right? Well, animation could be your most budget-conscious and most effective way to make your complex story, digestible.
Bitcoin Explained
Yep. Turns out you can explain the complexity of Bitcoin currency in under 3 minutes when you use animation like this wonderful video.
Anatomy of a Computer Virus: Stuxnet
Or the complexity of a computer virus in this video.
The Clinic of the Future: University Health Network
For our UHN client, we were asked to visualize the arthritis clinic of the future. Animation gave us the freedom to create a healthcare world that does not yet exist.
3) Animation as Packaging
Are your source materials historical stills, mixed-source video, or low-quality footage?
How many times have you been given archival sub-standard material and asked to incorporate it into a cutting-edge presentation? It’s a challenge. This is when animation can be the glue that brings all your elements together to create a consistent and original look and feel.
Historical Timeline: YMCA Canada
This was a project created by our team to celebrate the YMCA’s long and storied contribution in Canada. With stunning text on screen and handwritten layers, our animator Josh Kaplan turned this 150-year history into a contemporary brand story.
4) Animation as a Versioning Solution
Need your video versioned in dozens of languages?
Check out this blog by UK-based animation experts, Cognitive, who show you the ease and the benefits of using animation to create videos that can easily, and affordably, be versioned into multiple languages. You can record a simple voiceover in another language, or version text elements ito a new language quickly and cost-effectively. Perhaps the greatest advantage of using animation for videos that will require language versioning is that the versioned videos feel like they were designed for that local market, not simply an adapted.
Wondering “how much does an animated video cost”?
|| Download our Animation Budget Samples Guide Now ||
5) Animation as a Budget-Friendly Solution
Can’t afford to hire actors for a commercial or marketing spot?
Are you on a tight budget with a script that screams out for actors but don’t have the money to cover costs (not to mention a studio space and craft services)?
This is when creating simple, 2D animated characters with clean and simple illustrated backgrounds can really deliver a story at the fraction of the price of shooting live action.
Beyond Average
This visually stunning essay addresses what’s wrong with our education system. Beautiful work by director Elliot Lim:
Character animation can solve your communication and budget challenges, but it can also bring to life the most mundane information; used with excellent creativity in this video on how the new parking violation dispute process works in the city of Toronto. If this was shot on location and with actors, the budget would have been at least 10X the cost of animation.
Here are two examples where we used one simple location, minimal actors and then added animation to live-action scenes to take viewers on a journey that didn’t require the crew or the actors to even leave the room. This allowed us to keep the costs down when creating PSAs for our NFP clients SickKids and Bikes for Kids.
Great Camp Adventure: SickKids
Created with a variety of Q staff and SickKids patients, this video uses an animation style that evokes the feeling of summer camp.
A Dream Come True: Bikes for Kids
This video uses animation to bring to life a child’s imagination.
Animation is like a Swiss Army knife — it can solve any number of communication challenges.
Trying to explain a difficult concept? Need to summarize large sums of information in a marketable video? Want to portray your brand in a fun and innovative way? On a tight budget or timeline? Animation can solve your communication and budget challenges.
And animation is a fun way to engage teams throughout the creative process. With budget concerns like travel, actors and locations fees taken out of the equation; clients and creatives are free to brainstorm conceptual ideas. And those far out, wacky ideas, are a little less crazy in an animated world. Sometimes it’s those ‘crazy’ ideas that become the most sticky and memorable concepts for your brand.
