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Humans. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, can’t read this blog without being one (hyper-intelligent dolphins aside). We’re a weird animal who finds meaning in pondering our own existence, and joy in watching unreal events display to us on very large or very tiny boxes of metal and wires. But why do we love to watch videos with an almost voyeuristic enrapturement, and what joy do we get from seeing stories unfold that we have no part in?

By understanding the philosophy behind why we watch videos we can better cater to those deeper needs with our own video content.

Hold onto your explainers, optimise your search engines, and blank your blanks because we’re taking an epic look back through our back catalogue of fascinating Explanimate blog articles and dammit, we’re bringing you along for the ride. Remember the time we profiled successful examples of brand videos? Or our epic two-part A to Z guide to digital animation technology? Ooh, we just bet you don’t. Thankfully we’re here to give you the ultimate cheat sheet: 10 of our best explainer video blogs (but also the others are pretty good) condensed down into one handy little quiz!

It’s easy to think that creativity in the workplace is a luxury only afforded to those working in artistic fields. Heck, here at Explanimate our whole thing is to show off the creative side of your brands and organisations. But even those of us who work in the arts can get bogged down by the monotony of the nine to five grind. Creativity is found both in day-to-day business practice, company structure, and in advertising for the business – but how important is it to purposely work creativity into promoting your own business practice?

Our findings? Very. But it’s reasonable to ask: what exactly is it about a creative flair that helps a brand grow, attract new customers, and develop more useful ideas? Here are our top thoughts on the topic of creativity:

So you wanna’ jump on that mobile app bandwagon. Maybe you want to expand your brand image, or you have a cool new idea for a mobile-based service. Whatever your intentions are with developing an app, the one thing that’s absolutely vital to understand is your user experience design. Yeah, it can feel a little pretentious to start whipping around terms like ‘UX Design’, but the crux of the idea is to create an overall beneficial experience for anyone using your app.

This leads us to the question: what design choices make an app more intuitively useful? And how can we best take advantage of existing animation techniques to give the best user value? Today we’re looking at five ways animation is commonly used in mobile apps to enhance user experience.

The association between animation and kids is strong. Many of us grow up watching cartoons for entertainment, and some of us were sat in front of the TV as youngsters for the mildly reviled ‘educational cartoons’. But the uses of animation for education are far more wide-reaching and a lot more entertaining than many realise, finding modern applications within work, hobbies, and new technologies, while still holding the power to teach much younger audiences the basics of life.

It’s 6:00 pm in 1990s Australia. You’re either in one of those buttoned-down families who insist on watching the 6 o’clock news every weeknight or, more likely, you’re watching The Simpsons. There are quite literally thousands of classic quotes from the first ten seasons of the long-running primetime animation that get bandied around by Australian young adults in day-to-day conversation today, and with its regular 25 year presence on Channel Ten its not hard to understand why. When a TV show grows up alongside you it burrows into your heart, with its quotes and references following you all your days like some sort of non giving up school guy.

There is indeed a Simpsons quote for every occasion, and as an animator and writer I’ve often been struck by how well the show’s dialogue relates to the animation experience. The subtle social commentary of classic Simpsons also lends itself to some hilarious insight on the workings of advertising, marketing, and design. Today I’ve put the two together and gathered just a few examples of quotes that relate to corporate animation, whether directly or indirectly. If you’re a long-time Simpsons fan hopefully you enjoy the references. If you’re not, hopefully you enjoy the soft sense of confusion you’re no doubt already experiencing. In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrast. Thank you.

In such an oversaturated job market it can be tempting for companies to ask: Do we really need a recruitment campaign at all? The biggest flaw with this thinking is assuming that the best-suited employees will not only magically find your job ad, but that they will automatically want to work for a company they know nothing about. Good recruitment videos offer fast and effective company awareness specifically aimed at people within, or looking to get into, the field of work. So how do you go about crafting a video strong enough to nab your dream employees?

Ah yes, the corporate training video. More ridiculed than the recruitment video, and only slightly less reviled than the school project video. But little do most people know it doesn’t have to be this way. Indeed, your training videos can be eye-catching, funny, or even – dare I say – interesting. Don’t believe it? Check out our eight tips for making great animated training videos and decide for yourself.

Every couple of years there seems to be a new fad in corporate video. When whiteboard animation first came swaggering onto the scene it too seemed like the kind of phenomenon that would enter with a blaze of glory and fade shortly after with not so much as a whimper. Yet here we are several years later and whiteboard animation is still going strong, like a reality TV show nobody quite understands the appeal of but everybody keeps on watching.

Surprisingly, the answer to this appeal lies largely in the psychology behind what we’re watching. There are several subconscious reasons we’re drawn toward whiteboard animation, and today we’re shedding a little light on how they fit together.

Even in the twilight years of cat videos, vloggers, and ice bucket challenges it can be hard to see how any online video platform could begin to compete with YouTube. As of 2017 their audience numbers were in the range of 1,300,000,000 people.

In recent years though we’ve seen the beginning of what may prove to be the fall of Rome — uhh, I mean YouTube — through unannounced changes to the way particular content is promoted to the average viewer. These changes, which define and elevate ‘advertiser friendly’ content at the cost of all else, have left even the most popular YouTubers short of views and looking for alternative platforms. The news is even worse for animated content, as YouTube’s ‘quantity is better than quality’ algorithms leave labour-intensive media like animation in the dust.

If your brand is one of many who look to animated explainer videos as an effective way to explain your products and services, it’s worthwhile knowing what other options you have when choosing a platform to host your brand’s videos.