Need To Explain a Complicated Product? How Animation Can Help

Some ideas are communicated so much better via animation. Some concepts can only be explained effectively via visuals.

And when you consider that 65% of the population are visual learners, you need to seriously consider if concepts and ideas about your business, service, or product, are better communicated visually.

Let's take a look at an example from a video MOGRAPHWORKS created in partnership with Kansas University's Center for Research on Learning.

We created a series of videos for KUCRL's Learning Strategies that teach students how to write. These Learning Strategies have incredible student success rates-- which honestly, makes sense. What makes KUCRL and their learning strategies so special is that they first research how students learn and absorb information best, and only then create their strategies based on those studies-- not the other way around, like most learning programs on the market do. That's why their product is so unique, so effective, and has such positive outcomes for students.

We wanted to use the video to not only highlight KUCRL's product but also use the video medium itself to show how KUCRL makes learning easy.

Video is a great opportunity to not just tell viewers how your product is effective but also show them.

We wanted to highlight a large component of KUCRL's Sentence Writing Strategy: teaching students to fluently write and compose a wide variety of sentences, improving their writing ability, and making it easier to express their thoughts and ideas.

To do this, we needed to illustrate the main different types of sentences: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.

And we wanted to do it in the way that only animated video could.

Here is the line from the script:

"Students learn to identify the requirements of simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences."

It would've been easy for us to just list the types of sentences on screen and call it a day. But we don't do that at MOGRAPHWORKS.

When I spoke to our key contact point for this video project, I asked a question I often ask during production: "Will the audience for this video understand what we're talking about?"

According to her experience in coaching and development sessions with teachers, many weren't able to easily explain the difference between these sentence types. So we thought it would be a great opportunity to use visuals and animation to clearly illustrate the distinctions.

After all, if we're telling the audience that this teaching program works, what's a better way to prove that it works than by teaching something in the video?

Here's a text explanation of the differences between these sentences, so you can understand why it's hard to explain verbally, and how much better it is to have a visual example.

• Simple: A simple sentence is also called an independent clause. It contains a subject and a verb and expresses a complete thought.
  

• Compound: A compound sentence contains two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet).
  

• Complex: A complex sentence combines an independent clause with one or more dependent clauses. A complex sentence always has a subordinating conjunction (after, although, because, since, when) or a relative pronoun (that, which, who).
  

• Compound-complex: A compound-complex sentence has two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.

This text is very clear... if you understand these sentence types already. If you're first learning them, it's really confusing!

This is the visual we came up with to visualize the sentence types instead:

The way we thought to best explain these sentence types was to illustrate them as "colored building blocks" where yellow represented an independent clause, and blue represented a dependent clause. Depending on which blocks you used, you built a different type of sentence.

But because those words (independent and dependent) can be confusing, we omitted them completely, and let the visual communicate that yellow was a complete sentence, and blue was an incomplete fragment of a sentence.

Like so:

Simple sentence: yellow

Compound sentence: yellow + yellow

Complex sentence: yellow + blue

Compound-complex: yellow + yellow + blue

And with the use of these colors and visuals, the concept suddenly became very simple to understand.

Is there something about your product or business that can be better communicated with animated visuals?

I'm sure there is!

Examples: how your product helps clients, differences in product line, product/service use cases, benefits to clients, breakdown of customer onboarding process, product troubleshooting, how to use new software, employee training, service process, highlighting special promotions, benefits to specific industries.

Imagine the impact it would have on your sales goals and bottom line if you knew prospects, clients, and employees were absorbing this important information.

Have questions about a video project? Click here to contact MOGRAPHWORKS today.