With marketing paradigms rapidly evolving with the growth of eCommerce, online retailers heavily rely on explainer videos as a marketing tool. Do you know that 64% of your customers are likely to make a purchase after watching one?
There’s no denying that explainer videos streamline your online marketing journey. So whether you own a local shopping or a cross-border e-commerce business, if you are struggling to grow your business, how do you come up with impactful explainer videos? Animated visuals appeal to potential customers and can sell your products. However, do you know how to translate a potential marketing idea through a great script and produce an explainer video? Or chip in with relevant dialogues and facial expressions for each character, and connect each scene logically?
That’s when you need to count on a professional animation video production company to help. Developing an animated explainer video involves storyboarding as an integral process. A storyboard contains all the planned details of the video.
In this article, you will get to know the role of storyboarding in animated explainer video production.
What is storyboarding and why is it important?
A storyboard refers to a visual version of the script narrating how the sequences would flow in your explainer video. It reflects how the visual would unfold before the audience scene by scene, including the timing. In most cases, storyboards are made from notes, sketches, and basic ideas scribbled on paper. Therefore, a storyboard serves as a map for the animated video creator who incorporates all the mentioned elements visually in the explainer video.
Creating a powerful corporate video for your product, service, or brand involves several stages and people. Having a well-organized storyboard keeps all these people on the same page. Besides, it enables the video production team and your brand to coordinate at different stages of the process.
Ultimately, having a detailed storyboard elicits exceptional results in terms of quality and comprehensiveness when the team produces your explainer video.
How does storyboarding help in animated explainer video production?
Creating a winning animated video for explaining concepts to your audience requires a powerful storyboard in the first place. It guides the entire team with the visual script, helping them connect and proceed through narration. It also specifies what each scene would depict, and the respective length of the scenes.
Let’s explore the role of a detailed storyboard in creating explainer videos.
1. Share your creative concept
Walking in the shoes of a marketer, you may come up with a unique idea to promote your product. How do you translate this idea into a video? Firstly, you need to convey this idea to the video production team, who would develop the storyboard.
Once the experts put your creative concept on the storyboard, all the involved teams would gain clarity over the video. Rather than using mere words to describe your concept, a storyboard helps every member of your marketing team to grasp a concrete idea. Accordingly, you may recommend omitting certain scenes or including new ones, or even tweaking a few to make the animation impactful.
2. Visualize your script
When it comes to visualizing your script before producing the video, a storyboard serves as an impactful tool. A well-drafted storyboard enables every member of your team to communicate seamlessly since they understand the final outcome.
Suppose, your animated video presents a scene where someone recommends your product. The storyboard organizes the visual details under the following heads:
- The sequences before and after this scene
- Description of the scene and the character
- The dialogue of the character who recommends your product
- Duration of the video clip
- How the sequence transitions to the next sequence
- Sound effects, music, and voice-over
Established eCommerce sites such as Ubuy India have been successfully using animated explainer videos to market their products. Storyboarding continues to be a crucial guide as they produce compelling visuals.
3. Explain budget and video parameters
Every brand strives to control costs when it comes to animated video production. Having a proper storyboard helps brands get a realistic estimate of the production cost of the video. Each scene is laid out well on the storyboard, which helps in estimating the cost of producing the final product. Accordingly, you need to allocate a budget to produce the explainer video.
Besides, your storyboard defines other crucial video parameters such as deadlines and the use of animation. It specifies whether the visuals will be 2D or 3D, the sequences requiring sound effects, and the narrative of the voiceover. An organized approach to explainer video production gives a proper estimate of the necessary budget.
4. Estimate production time
Given that explainer videos are effective marketing tools for eCommerce brands, it’s crucial to launch them just when your audience needs the product information. So, you need to sync the video production process with your marketing strategy.
A storyboard, along with other aspects determines the time necessary to come up with the explainer video. The video production team evaluates your story, looks into the details, and estimates the time necessary to prepare each shot. During the post-production process, they use advanced video editing tools to amplify its impact.
Since the storyboard includes every detail of the production and postproduction process, marketers get an idea of the estimated production time. Accordingly, they launch the product or pitch them to their clients.
5. Identify potential glitches and resolve them
Producing an animated explainer video is a complicated process. It’s natural to run into hurdles at different stages, which leads to the loss of money and time. Well, visualizing the overall concept through a storyboard at the outset empowers brands to identify potential problems before they arise. This way, you can address these issues right during the planning process as you visualize the shortcomings.
Here are some common issues that the video production team may detect:
- The suggested style of narration doesn’t appeal to your target audience
- The central theme is too weak to create an impact
- The storyline contains some sort of discrepancies
Hadn’t you identified these flaws at the beginning, you’d have to create the video from scratch after a failed campaign!
EndNote
Whether you plan to produce an explainer video for video marketing, grow your eCommerce site, or pitch your product to your clients, it pays to have an organized storyboard in place. Reputed video production teams come up with detailed storyboards that work like a map, guiding the team as well as your marketing wing through its different stages.
A storyboard infuses your narrative sequence with a coherent structure as you visualize the shots. No wonder, why successful eCommerce giants and online retailers have been working with established production teams to streamline their marketing strategies.
Author: Fahad Khan, from Ubuy.
