Expert Wealth Management, a UK financial planning practice, recently approached us about creating a video to feature on their website home-page. There are tons of great reasons to consider getting a video up on your site:
They make a great first impression, explaining who your brand is in a concise, personable and professional manner.
They’re the perfect form of passive engagement. Videos are processed by the brain 60,000x faster than text. A user may not feel like reading through reams of text about who you are and what you do, but it doesn’t take a big commitment for them to sit back and watch a well-produced video.
They can seriously boost your search rankings. An indexed video on Google may have up to 50x more chance of ranking on the first page than a textual page (even higher if you include a transcript). Plus, they increase the amount of time users spend on your site, which also benefits your rankings.
And that’s just to name a few.
Expert Wealth are a company who feel just as concerned about whether a client is right for them as they are about whether they’re right for a client, so they wanted to create a video that could convey this message while also establishing who they are and what they can offer. After chatting through their ideas and goals, we decided together that a smart, sleek, and sophisticated motion graphics video would be the best way to communicate their brand identity and get this information across in an accessible way.
I sat down with our visual & motion graphic designer, Waheeda Rahman, to learn a little more about the process behind creating an animated video like this one:
Chloe: Why do you think motion graphics lend themselves to explainer videos?
Waheeda: Well, what applies to any time you use animation is that there are no limitations to how you can portray a concept. Things that you know would be impossible to do in real-life, you can find that flexibility through animation instead. The only limit that you have is your own imagination - even if that sounds really cheesy! If you can think it, it can be done. And having that visual element there as an aid just works for helping you to retain what you’re hearing.
Chloe: And is there a specific name for the style of animation we used for this video?
Waheeda: This one was the ‘icon-style,’ which is one of the styles we offer on our animation guide. It’s used to display individual icons relating to the video’s message to create a simple visual companion to the voiceover. It’s well suited to videos that have a really clear message and need the animation to emphasise it and make sure it’s well understood by everyone who watches it. It’s often quite corporate and clean, but that also means it’s efficient in assisting spoken word to communicate your idea.
Chloe: Was there anything on this project that was particularly tricky to visualise?
Waheeda: The mountain scene, which talks about what the client wants from life, was a challenging one. We needed to communicate the idea of a client’s ‘journey’ using those minimalistic images without being too abstract, but we also had to keep it fun and simple and make sure it didn’t distract you from the voiceover too much. Making sure you find just the right visual is really important, so I was quite happy with how it turned out in the end.
Chloe: What can someone who’s thinking about creating one of these videos do to help the process go as smoothly as possible?
Waheeda: Expert Wealth Management were a great client for this project, because they were really straightforward with us about what they wanted and happy for us to just run with our ideas and get to work on them. That said, if a client does have their own ideas and opinions, that’s really great too! It’s really helpful if they’re able to bring those to us right from the very start, so that way we can work with them and make sure everyone’s on the same page and happy with the end result.