How we produce animated videos
There are lots of different benefits to creating an animated video. Animations enable you to share information with your audience in a visual and memorable way. They can help you to simply complex topics, making them easier to understand for wide audiences. Animations are also a cost-effective solution, allowing you to have full control over the look, feel and content of your video.
If you’re thinking of creating an animated video with us but are new to animations, take a look at our production process below. We’ll take you through each stage of an animated video project so that you’ll know what to expect every step of the way.
Discovery session
During an animation project with us, you’ll have dedicated producer managing the process to ensure the project stays on budget, on time and on message. We’ll start the project by having a discovery session with you. During the session we’ll discuss your objective, the key messages you want to include, your target audience and what you want your audience to do once they’ve watched the animation. This will help us to inform you which animation type would best suit your project, and whether it would work as a stand-alone animation or part of a series of larger content project. We’ll be able to advise on the most appropriate style and tone for your project, as well as the recommended length of the animation.
Research and script
No matter whether you have a script in place or if you’d like us to write the script for you, we take the time to understand your audience, products and services. This helps us to ensure that your animation is a true reflection of your brand or business and speaks to the needs or problems faced by your target audience. We are highly skilled at distilling complex ideas and messages into clear, concise and easy to follow copy. We always write with your target audience in mind.
Design and illustration
As mentioned above, we’ll discuss the style and tone of your animation during the discovery session. Once the script is in place, we’ll move onto the design and illustration phase of the project. We can work with your existing branding to create bespoke illustrations that include characters, scenes and iconography. Once we’ve created your illustrations, we’ll use them to design a storyboard based on your script. The storyboard features key scenes throughout the script so that you know what the animation will look like before we start the animation process.
Voiceover and sound
Before we start work on the animation, we record the voiceover in-house. This provides us with the timings needed for the animation. Once the animation has been signed off, we can provide you with a range of alternative voiceover sample voices for the final edit meeting any preference for demographics such as age, gender and regional accents. The final animation will also feature background music and SFX.
Animation production
Our production process works in a way that the actual animation phase comes towards the end of the project. We take time to ensure that each step of the process is agreed and signed off so that when we come to animate, the script and visuals have been fully approved. This ensures that work doesn’t need to be duplicated, saving you both time and money.
Subtitles and accessibility
Accessibility is important to us and we can work to any accessibility guidelines you have in place. As standard our animations are provided with subtitles. Once your animated video has been fully signed-off, we will generate the subtitle file. This can be provided to you as a separate file that can be uploaded alongside the video in YouTube or Vimeo, or we can permanently embed the subtitles in the video.
Delivery
Now that your animation project is complete, we want to make sure you have everything you need to share your video. We’ll provide the final video in a format suitable for uploading to your website and social media profiles. If you have any questions about the format or how to upload and share your animation, we’re always on hand to help. We can also share design assets so that you can use them in additional resources or social media content.
If you need to make any changes to the animation in the future, whether that’s an update to your logo or repurposing the animation for a new audience, we’re happy to help.
If you have any questions about starting your own animated video project, contact us today at info@hyperfinemedia.co.uk.