In the past ten years there has been a growing demand by small businesses for cheap, quick and affectively marketing videos created for the web. Specifically these video include or are entirely made up of motion graphics and animation as their backbone. They are typically called ‘Explainer Videos’ and the demand for them is steadily growing.

This is significant because animation has a unique advantage over things like slideshows, photo galleries or even live action footage. Animation can be incredibly strong at showing abstract ideas or enhancing the content or brand of a company to be friendlier and show their potential clients or customers what they do, or how a product they sell works.

As someone who’s working on eLearning courses for a variety of companies I can attest that often animation is a great tool for showing how a product, service, or company functions and makes it easier for a customer or employee to understand it. This is especially true if the process is abstract or complicated. When I worked for Convergence Training as a contractor, our main goal was to turn a storyboard about the function of a system, machine or process into an affective and engaging storytelling experience.

Visuals for training as well as for Explainer Videos for companies have a lot in common in that storytelling is central to what makes them engaging and affective. Storytelling is the backbone of visual media, whether is be in graphic design, commercials, or movies at the box office. If you don’t have a good story, or a story that is told clearly and affectively, the underlaying message or engagement suffers greatly. Story is what comes first and what needs to be gotten right before any other content is created.

This is why Pixar in particular hires “story artists” as a full time job. These are the people responsible for the foundation of Pixar’s films. They craft and create affective storytelling by following the rules about having three “Acts” in a long form movie. They know how to craft adversity and tension into an engaging movie experience and how to write good, realistic characters and dialogue that make us really care about what happens next.

Storytelling is a hard thing to do well, it requires a lot of skills and insight into how people tick, and how to craft a movie, book, or video worth watching. As an animator who works freelance on make different marketing based videos for training, commercials and small businesses, I find I’m still learning everyday about the importance of clarity, timing, and affective visuals for what I do in crafting an affective story for my clients needs. But storytelling is always the foundation and is always what keeps people engaged, and it’s what fellow artists and marketers should think about first when thinking about crafting an Explainer Video of their very own.