A good explainer video does one job: it makes something complicated feel obvious. Below are explainer videos we have made, what each one was solving, and the decisions behind them.
They are all our own work. Every one is a real project with a real brief, not a showreel selection.
1. UNHCR Innovation Learning
The problem: explaining a way of working, with no product to show and no location to film.
The subject is method. There is nothing to point a camera at, so the animation builds each idea on screen as the narration reaches it. Roughly two and a half minutes, which is long for an explainer, and justified only because the audience had a reason to stay.
2. UNHCR Environment and Climate Action Fund
The problem: one message, many countries and languages.
Part of the same series. Because it shares a character library and visual system with the others, each additional film cost less than the one before. That is the argument for building a system rather than commissioning one-offs.
3. Carat: values and culture
The problem: an internal message that sounds like corporate wallpaper when written down.
Character animation does the work a talking head cannot. Nobody has to perform sincerity on camera, and the piece can be re-cut later without getting people back.
4. Discovery Parks: the service promise
The problem: turning a written standard into something frontline staff actually use.
The choice that made this work was tone. Humour, not instruction. An explainer that feels like a policy briefing gets watched once and forgotten.
What the good ones have in common
- They are shorter than the brief asked for. Most ideas fit in about 90 seconds. Sometimes less.
- The script is finished before anything is animated. Fixing a script in animation is enormously expensive.
- One idea at a time. Explainers fail by trying to cover everything.
- They sound like a person. The best ones read like an explanation, not a brochure.
A note on length
Run time is the single biggest cost lever in animation. The gap between 60 and 120 seconds is a 25 to 35 per cent difference in price. Deciding duration early is the easiest way to control a budget, and usually improves the film as well.
Want one of your own?
Explainer videos with us start around $7,000. See what an explainer video costs for the full breakdown, browse motion graphics examples, or tell us what you need to explain.
