How to Create an Animated Explainer Video

How to Create an Animated Explainer Video

Posted on Saturday, 26 July 2014

How to Create an Animated Explainer Video

Today we will be covering animated explainer videos and how they can help you create high-impact messages and engage your audience in different ways than other mediums. They are also fun to make and we will give you some useful tips on how to create an awesome animated explainer video. Let’s get started right away!

What is an Explainer Video?

Animated explainers or “animated corporate videos” or “animated demo videos” are short online animated videos you often find on company websites, telling you what particular companies do, explaining their product or service. Explainer videos are a very popular tool to boast your brand, building your audience engagement, increasing conversion rates by as much as 144% and converting prospects into customers after adding the explainer video on the company website. You can also have a look at our explainer video service page ‘What is an Explainer video?’.

Taking Diabetes To Heart – John’s story

Animated Cartoons have a ton of benefits

Utilizing the benefits of animated cartoons for your own killer explainer video can help you communicate important messages that speak to potential clients in different ways than other marketing medium can. Simply because:

A cartoon keep your viewers on your page for 2X longer than with text only. Yes that long!
You’re communicating via a channel they don’t associate with business and sales so they are more receptive to your high-impact messages.
Increasing conversions
Getting the word out there about your service or idea – videos are super easy to share on all social sites and other popular sites like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Vimeo.
They focus on the message rather than tiny details, so they can get the real benefit your are trying to communicate.

Not much else needs to be said really; there are few better ways than creating a fun, cool animated explainer video to convey your message perfectly! Live action is an option but means you are stuck to the confines of the real world without the magic of cartoons to help enhance your message.

What is the ideal length of your explainer video?

For online videos, research show that the sustained attention span is about 60 seconds. Generally The Shorter The Better. The less you say, the more likely people are to remember it and the first 7 seconds are the most crucial to get your message across. That’s when you have the viewers attention span and you need to convince your viewers to continue watching the video. The longer the video is, the less people will continue to pay attention to it. The attention span is known to degrade for without that are long.

If your video is under 60 seconds, you can expect roughly 60% of viewers to watch the whole video.

Typical recommendations (based on our own experience and industry rule’s of thumb):

The ideal animated explainer video length: 60-90 seconds.
150 words per 60 seconds which corresponds to 2.5 words per second.
An estimated 60% of viewers will watch the video to the end if it’s below 60 seconds.
Address the pain your customers are having between 0-20 seconds.
We generally don’t recommend explainer videos to go above 120 seconds (while there are exceptions).
Going above a length of 60 seconds lowers the completion rate by up to 10%.

For more information and data, please find these following graphs from Wistia’s website.

As you can see; For video, length really does matter!

Promoting Active School Travel – Glasgow City Council (2019)

When writing your script, keep in mind that typically 150 words equals 60 seconds of video. So, how many words should your script have?

Video Length – How many words?

60 seconds – 150 words
90 seconds – 225 words
120 seconds – 300 words

Summary: How to Create a Killer Explainer Video

To create a a great, short animated explainer video you need:

An engaging short story script for the animation about the product, service or idea.
Once you have a script, you need an awesome voiceover. We will help you recommend a professional voice over actor, or you choose one yourself. There are many options.
Video Production: Hand over the script to Sundstedt Animation and we will help you create a killer, original, fun, handcrafted animated cartoon explainer video using our experience in producing awesome explainers for our clients.

Now get started and create your own awesome explainer video!

About Sundstedt Animation

We bring video projects to life by creating awesome moving image work. No web video project is too demanding for us, from 2D animations explainers to illustration and VFX. Here are some of our animated videos: