After the marketing revolution, video marketing has become vital for businesses. It helps in increasing conversion rates, boosting engagement, and building business visibility.
It is an understood thing that time is the most valuable and important element for businesses. The production, product launch, and even its promotion depend on timing.
In this article, we will talk about the time that is required to create an effective animated explainer video so that you will be able to create a foolproof marketing plan to make the campaign successful.
So, without any further ado, let’s dig in!
Usually, a custom-made animated explainer video production takes at least 4 to 8 weeks to complete if created from scratch, but it might take a few days to complete the production if made on the template.
There are two major elements that variate the time in an explainer video production:
- The video quality. (Higher the resolution/quality, the higher will be the completion time)
- The video production company. (The production completion duration depends upon the production company’s availability)
An Animated Explainer Video Production Process
The production processes and client requirements usually decide how long it will take to create an animated explainer. Here are the steps that are included in any video production phase.
- Script
- Voiceover
- Storyboard
- Animation
- Video Polishing
Before we begin with production processes, first understand what are the major difference between template and custom-made videos and why a company should spend on custom-made instead of utilizing free video templates.
Template Videos Vs. Custom-Made Videos
While creating an animated explainer video for your sales campaign, it is vital to understand the difference between custom-made and template videos. Video designers and producers consider it as one of the factors that determine the quality and duration of a video.
Using templates for animations can be affordable and easy to create and can be completed within a day. The only drawback of using a template is that you will find hundreds of similar videos throughout the internet and will never be able to reflect your brand identity or product uniqueness through the video.
The online available templates are made up of predesigned elements and link an animation library to them. It means that only predesigned objects and elements can be used to create the video. You have the freedom to use predesigned as well as external animation elements in your videos.
On the other hand, if we talk about custom animated explainer videos, it can be time-consuming but provides you with desired results. It can explain your business’s niche, describe the product features, demonstrate the app working, and more the way you want.
Custom-made videos allow you to represent your brand value easily to your targeted audience and create a separate identity in the market. These videos usually take around 4 to 8 or 10 weeks and are specially tailored according to your brand so that your targeted audience and customers can relate to the story your video is telling.
Animated Explainer Video Production Processes and Timing
Custom-made video production requires teams of professionals like animators, scriptwriters, voice-over artists, directors, producers, editors, designers, and illustrators.
In short, all the video production steps require individuals with special skillsets to execute. Basically, all the steps can be simplified into these categories: Script, Storyboard, Voice Over, Character and Graphics Design, Animation, and Music and Sound Effects. Let´s take a look!
- Script
After the meeting and requirement gathering, the first step in video production is scriptwriting. You understand the video and business goals of the client and outline a story around it.
The scriptwriter takes a day or two to write the story brief and create a script. Usually, the scriptwriting hours depend upon the video duration, topic, and the number of revisions the client asks for.
- If your video is 30 seconds long, the script will be around 60 words (2 words per second) and require one day to complete and finalize by the scriptwriter.
- If your explainer is 60 seconds long, it will have 120 words and require a day and a half for completion.
- If its duration is 120 seconds, then it will have 240 words, and the scriptwriter will take 3 to 4 days.
In short, the scriptwriting will require 3 to 8 days, and if any revision or feedback comes, the duration may vary. It is very rare that the script’s first draft gets approved by the client. It mostly takes 2 to 3 revisions to finalize the final script.
- Storyboard
Once you are done with scriptwriting, the next phase is storyboarding. It is the real visualization phase where the designer visualizes the scenes of the video and puts the story in every scene frame by frame accordingly.
The graphics designer creates a comic-styled storyboard where he sketches the video scenes frame by frame and aligns them with the script.
Storyboarding is a complete visualization phase where you can add and delete the scene, even alter the script (a little bit) and give the client’s imagination a real face.
This stage requires around 1 to 3 weeks. The designer and the creative director sit together to see and compare the story with the scene, and after that, the client will approve the storyboard.
- Animation
At this step of video production, the actual magic happens. After the storyboarding, the characters are animated and get their digital movement on the screen. Most of the animators like to animate the video in 2D because it is quite easy to animate in a two-dimensional space rather than a three-dimensional one.
The actions and movements are assigned to the characters as described in the storyboard and script. Animation is the most critical part of video production, and even a slight mistake can be noticed and seen by the audience.
Animation helps the imagined character to come to life and relate to the story. It requires years of experience and hours of animation to create live-looking and appropriate characters for the video.
This step acquires the following times according to the video duration:
- If your video is 30 seconds long, it will need 2 to 3 days to animate.
- If it’s 60 seconds long, 4 to 6 days will be needed.
- And if the video is 90 seconds long, you will need 8 to 10 days.
- Voiceover
It is the most fun step – the voice-over. After successful storyboarding, the voice-over artists are hired to recite the script and record the background audio for the video. They narrate the script and speak scene after scene, just like artist records their voice for animated movies.
You pick a voice-over artist according to the client’s requirement of accent, gender, and age so that the narration won’t sound artificial.
Voice-overs play a key role in the video as they bring the human essence to the video and deliver a tone that evokes the audience’s emotion while watching the video.
This step requires 1 day or hardly 2 days.
- Video Polishing
Video polishing is the final step and comes in the post-production phase. Once you are done with animation and voice-over, it’s time to finalize the video, apply some visual effects, and dispatch it to the client.
But, wait, it’s not that easy. Video polishing is the step where all the individual video assets are combined together to create one complete file.
Video editor applies transitions, background music, voice-over, VFX, color correction, and clip merging in the post-production phase. It requires 1 or 2 weeks to finish a video and deliver it to the client.
The Summary
In this article, we talked about the video production phases and how much each phase will take to create an animated explainer video. And if we calculate the overall timing of a video project, 3 to 4 weeks will be required collectively.
Although the available templates have made life easier, all you have to do is to put the things in it, and here you have your video.
You can go with the video template option if you don’t have time or budget for customization. But the point of uniqueness and originality will always be missing in the video. Template videos failed to provide the pro-level quality that admires and compels the audience to watch.
Ultimately it bore the audience and made them skip the video. People are smart enough to identify between the original and template-made videos and prefer to watch original content instead of some copy of a copy.
So, using a template for video production can be risky for your business and might have a great chance of losing potential customers.
P.S: If you don’t want to compromise the quality of your video, here are the top animated explainer video companies that can create some best animation for your business.
Every company puts its heart and soul into creating a product and aims to market it in a manner that stands out among the competitors, which cannot be achieved through a video template.
Video customization help companies to represent their brand values, uniqueness, products, and culture through a video that is almost impossible with the templates.
The custom-made videos are quite expensive as compared to the template-made videos because they need professional tools and a team to execute the production.
The Editor’s Choice
And if you want a company that is an expert in explainer video production, then we recommend BuzzFlick – a video animation company in the USA.
The studio has created hundreds of animation projects in collaboration with worldwide renowned companies.
You can put your trust in BuzzFlick and represent your business in style!
Happy Animation!
