Boing Boing pointed me to this beautiful animated video by a German studio called "finally". From the description with the video:
Music is a good thing. But what we did not know until we started with the research for this piece: Music is also a pretty damn complex thing. This experimental animation is about the attempt to understand all the parts and bits of it. Have a look. You might agree with our conclusion!
I think this is a great example of an experience that's both remarkable in presentation and interesting in content. I didn't learn the details of resonance or musical temperment. But I came away with little introductory nuggets of each part. I came away with just a bit of motivation to keep learning. Sometimes that's all an explanation needs - a taste of an idea that invites someone to keep learning.
People often ask about the origins of what has become known as “Common Craft Style” and what inspired us to use paper cut-outs, hands and a whiteboard. The truth is, it was a solution to a problem.
I had been experimenting with drawing on a whiteboard in live action videos and found it frustrating. I felt like such a dork trying to draw and look at the camera at the same time. It felt forced. Sachi, always the problem solver and adult in the room, suggested our current format. She had seen me reach for paper and use drawings when trying to explain something and saw the format as a natural extension of that tendency.
Many years later, here we are. The original format of that first video, RSS in Plain English, is still very close to the videos we make today.
As it turns out, our videos use the same principles of some of the very first animations. They are live action recordings, with stop motion and other visual effects that create animations. I was amazed to see the video below, which was recorded in 1900, 111 years ago:
American animation owes its beginnings to J. Stuart Blackton, a British filmmaker who created the first animated film in America. Before creating cartoons, Blackton was a vaudeville performer known as "The Komikal Kartoonist." In his act, he drew "lightning sketches" or high-speed drawings. In 1895, he met Thomas Edison. Can you guess what this meeting with the famous inventor inspired him to do?
There is amazingly little difference between the animation above and what we do at Common Craft. It's a simple process of holding the camera still and changing what appears on a frame-by-frame basis.
For another example, consider Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python, which doesn't use video, but photos. He was the creator of the colorful animations that became one of the most memorable parts of the show. Here’s a video of him talking about his process in 1974 (via CartoonBrew).
Again, it’s very close to our process. It’s just stop-motion with cut-outs. Take a look at the example of his storyboards from the video above:
We start each project with “thumbnail storyboards” that look like this:
Here’s his lighting a set-up
And ours:
His hand moving the cut-outs...
And Ours...
So what we do has roots that go back to the very beginning. While these examples came to us recently and were not a part of our early process, I think it’s fascinating that the simple idea of live action animation has changed so little over the years.
To get a feel for our process, check out this time-lapse footage that shows the entire production of Twitter Search in Plain English:
We’re approaching the four year mark in making Common Craft videos and over this time, I’ve always wondered: why do videos work? In fact, I think the bigger question is not just our videos, but any short animated video that is designed to educate. What is it about this style of video that hold people’s attention and helps them learn?
First, what is an animated video?
Let’s talk about what it’s not. An animation is not live action - animated videos don’t usually have actors, sets and stages. It’s not a screencast - animated videos don’t usually focus on computer screens. Animated videos, in some ways, exist in a purely fictional world that is completely designed by the animator or producer. They often use illustrated representations and symbols of the world to tell stories versus the objects themselves.
Do they work?
We could debate this point forever. After working on videos for almost 4 years and seeing the success of the members of our Explainer Network of producers, I am comfortable making the claim that yes, animated videos do work. We see demand every day for animated videos, usually meant to explain products or services.
If you need further proof, here is an iconic animated video that helped lots of young Americans learn about government:
But Why? What is so special about this format?
I put this question to the members of the Explainer Network and their responses fall into a few couple of categories:
In his book “Brain Rules” developmental molecular biologist John Medina breaks it down like this: “Vision trumps all other senses.”
When you tell a story visually people remember it because human beings are creatures driven by sight. As Medina notes, recognition and recall soar when information is communicated visually.
Now these points are not necessarily unique to animation. However, animation provides a very rich visual medium that can have more power and creativity than others because it’s limitless. If it can be imagined, it can be animated.
Another point from Bryan:
As comic book artist Scott McCloud noted in his phenomenal TED talk, illustrations are very different from photographic images (such as video shot with a camera). Illustrations tap into a deep iconic universal form of communication that is deeply embedded in the human brain. Illustrations illuminate things.
Second: Getting to the Point
Another recurring theme is the idea that animations make it easy to cut through the noise and focus on what matters. We’ve noticed that with Common Craft videos as well. Nothing appears on that whiteboard that doesn’t need to be there - nothing.
Bryan Zug:
Animation in particular gives us the ability to use kinetic illustrations to crop out noise and focus the eye of the human mind on a very specific story.
I think the power of visual metaphor is a big point that is unique to animation. In what other medium can inanimate objects morph into other objects or have personalities?
I think we all associate animations with getting to the core of it… cartoons and animations were presented to us as kids; they helped us make sense of a world that was so new to our eyes. They still appeal to us in adulthood, whether through the humor only understood by adults in Pixar movies or by discovering the world through political cartoons, or…
Putting animation to video as a way of explaining things is the next, logical (and fun) step.
I really like this point. I imagine that most of the videos that we (Common Craft and the Explainer Network members) produce are focused on introducing a new product or service. This boils down to helping people feel comfortable and accepting of a different way of doing things. Animations help people over the hurdle of understanding the big picture.
Communicators have a choice in this context: Going directly into the product or service with all the features and buttons, or taking a step back and building a simple and easy-to-grasp world around it. We’ve seen that animation is the perfect medium for building that world. It helps people feel comfortable and less anxious about learning something new because it’s presented in a format that feels fun and familiar. To Mark’s point - they communicate in a way that helped us as children.
There will always be a place for live-action, screencasts and other formats, but online animated videos occupy a particularly useful niche on the web, one that is often perfectly suited for introducing, educating and informing.
I really love the effect of shadow of the previous image that is left on the chalkboard. I wonder what would happen if we tried this on the whiteboard? I'm sure it wouldn't be nearly as cool.
