Behind The Pixel: Closing The Animation Communication Gap

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Speaker 1
Welcome back.

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Speaker 2
Woo!

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Speaker 1
It's a hack. It's a Hack.

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Speaker 2
Don't I sound excited?

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Speaker 1
We're hacking it up.

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Speaker 2
We are hacking. I'm excited.

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Speaker 1
So let's get into it—today's hack. I'm talking all about the steps before jumping straight into writing. So this is before you jump into writing. This is our sort of planning stage. If you would call it that there. So if you're an organization that has very little time, very little money, maybe very little resources, not a lot of people.

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Speaker 1
And you don't know where to start with animation. This might be the episode for you. In last week's episode, we went through and talked about structure. We talked about the script and generating more captivating stories and how to do that. But if you are sort of before getting ready to write, these tips are essential to support your intended outcomes.

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Speaker 1
We have some intentions with our outcomes, with our video, and we want to put those into action. And so this is the episode that talks about that. So it may sound reasonable and straightforward, but in our experience in the past, we've noticed that some have skipped the steps before coming to our doors. And it makes the videos that we make slightly less effective than what they originally intended.

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Speaker 1
So it's really important to get these out of the way sooner rather than later. So let's outline our approach for preparing to write in a script. Number one, you want to conduct your research. So typically, we want to talk to our customers or our intended audience who we're going to be talking to. So you can ask them about the topic that you're going to communicate to them about how they feel about them, how they generally feel.

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Speaker 1
This is a really big hurdle for people because it requires us to remove all of our assumptions. Right? We forget that. We guess a lot. We think about how.

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Speaker 2
People are feeling.

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Speaker 1
So we want to remove all of that, and we really want to have a one-on-one conversation with the people that we're going to be talking to anyway.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, you can think about those kinds of customer pains.

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Speaker 1
Yes, customer pains, if you're in the business in the business sphere, yeah, for sure. We're trying to see how they feel about the situation. We're trying to see that could be like excellent material for some of the obstacles that you're going to talk about in your script. And so that's what makes that connection so important. A tip if you're at a larger business and you maybe have a customer success team, those are the ones you want to talk to as a resource for your writing because they're the ones who are going to give you honest opinions about how your audience is experiencing the product or service, how they're feeling about it.

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Speaker 1
They're always up on that particular know-how.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, they're on the edge of knowing. They're on the edge of glory with your customers. So, yeah, so they're going to be, you know, talking about challenges, too.

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Speaker 2
Yes.

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Speaker 1
Number two, you want to gather inspiration. So sources here are important. Gathering imagery is nice, but you want to be specific about what you're looking at in those images. You want to make sure that you can communicate that effectively to your team. What am I looking at in this particular image that I really like? What stands out when you gather these sources?

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Speaker 1
You may want to organize them in a certain way. Maybe you want to tag them. Maybe you want to use an airtable, and tag them up with a couple of different tags to communicate that to your internal creative team.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, sorry I laughed because it reminded me of the, I think it was an infomercial or like this old meme back in the days, in my old media, there was a, there was some kind of like HSN shopping network thing going on, and there was a picture of like a painting and it was a butterfly.

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Speaker 2
And the guy like straight-faced was just like, look at this horse. And like he's like, you just saw a horse in the painting, and everyone was like, What? Like, so, yeah, it's important to, like, if you're going to provide imagery, also provide some like text or some communication about what it is about the images that, that are speaking to you.

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Speaker 1
Try to break it down. Yeah. A pro tip here. If you have time, you can create something called a mood board for yourself. A mood board is a blank digital canvas. Often you can make a real one, but you know who uses paper anymore?

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Speaker 2
Just throwing that in there.

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Speaker 1
Save a tree. So. So it includes visuals, and it includes words. It can include videos. It can include sounds. It can include all kinds of things that create a feeling of what you're trying to convey within your video. So this is how you want people to feel before, during, and after that experience. Putting these things together is a great way to get everyone involved.

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Speaker 1
Super simple to do. Lots of tools online, too, to help you do it. We can name a bunch, but we will.

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Speaker 2
Lots of places to gather imagery from for research.

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Speaker 1
Exactly. If you don't have enough time, you can always look at your competition or a company you admire. You know, they don't have to be necessarily in your own sphere, but there's a lot of folks doing a lot of different kinds of animations. And you want to look to see what they're doing to gather inspiration from those other places.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, we gather inspiration on a daily basis. Yeah.

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Speaker 1
Really big inspo.

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Speaker 2
Oh yeah. Inspo. I just feel like I had to sit with it for a moment and be like.

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Speaker 1
Inspo I've heard of Inspo is like, Oh, I've got to get some Inspo, bro.

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Speaker 2
It's like the Cool Kids. Yeah.

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Speaker 1
I'm pretty sure cool kids say Inspo. Don't lie to me.

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Speaker 2
We're always keeping cool.

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Speaker 1
Another thing to remind yourself of is that everything is a remix. Everything is a remix. It's a great film. By the way, if you haven't seen it, but find... Everything is a remix? It's called Everything is a Remix, a documentary about how music gets sampled and resampled and resampled. But you can apply that to anything in the world that is artistic and creative.

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Speaker 1
You gather inspiration, you remix it up, and then you come up with something new anyway. Find something that speaks to you and share that as well.

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Speaker 2
For sure.

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Speaker 1
Yeah. Number three, you want to brainstorm ideas, brainstorm creative ideas for your brain, so talk to your respective teams depending. So if you're selling, you're going to talk to sales. If you're educating, maybe you have trainers, and you're going to talk to your training people. A pro tip here is to get creative early on in those conversations. Sometimes it's as simple as a one-on-one conversation.

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Speaker 1
You've got a complex thing you want to talk about. Here's how I'm trying to visualize it. Maybe I don't have an idea, but I need to visualize it somehow. Get someone in the room that knows how to do that.

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Speaker 2
The sales team might understand the product deeply.

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Speaker 1
But in the end, the problem.

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Speaker 2
Is going to know how to show it.

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Speaker 1
Yeah. As a salesperson, I've always, you know, we're gathering information that isn't tangible. I'm not writing it down, but I understand how my customers feel about my product, my service, the thing that I'm selling, and they're going to have pains. I know that they're going to have pains because I'm sure that's how I sell my stuff. If you're a communications person at a nonprofit, you know your members, you know your donors, you know what they care about.

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Speaker 1
So you want to talk to those people who are at the front lines of those conversations? Mm hmm. Last tip here. I know it's not great. As much as we think ChatGPT is evil.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 1
It can be a source of inspiration and new ideas. It depends. We don't necessarily recommend you using it to write your entire script.

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Speaker 2
Definitely.

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Speaker 1
Although it can do a generic version of that, but that's it. It'll be a generic version, and it won't be very specific to your audience or your or your markets. So it could get stuff really, truly wrong, and especially if you're giving it simplistic prompts, it's not going to give you the thing that you're actually looking for.

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Speaker 2
Right? That is confidently wrong.

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Speaker 1
But they could give you a really it could give you a really decent pass, at some creative ideas that might be useful.

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Speaker 2
So yeah, I want to say that's a double-edged sword too, because, like, it could give you ideas, but then if it's giving everybody else the same exact ideas for their stories, you might run into everybody doing the same stuff.

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Speaker 1
It's the same problem with templates. Yeah. Like everyone's using the same template, and therefore everyone's selling the same crap, right? Like it looks the same. Therefore it is like, you know, it's not it... you're not differentiating in any way.

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Speaker 2
Yeah. It's similar to how, even in animation, we use reference, and there's a reason why it's called reference and not copying. So keep that in mind for sure.

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Speaker 1
So that's it, that's the hack. So conduct research, gather inspiration, and brainstorm your ideas once you're ready. With those three things, you can start to really get a sense of what your script is going to entail, how it's going to feel, what's the tone, and that'll give you kind of a nice, really good start. So, you know, you're going to get pains from your people you interview, you're going to get visual ideas from the things you gather, and you're going to get ideas for the language based on your brainstorming with other people.

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Speaker 2
So and all of that tied together with your values, tone, and voice, and all that good stuff. Yeah.

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Speaker 1
So thanks for listening.

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Speaker 2
Yeah, I hope this is helpful. Yeah. Go write awesome scripts.

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Speaker 1
Go write out some scripts.

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Speaker 2
Or you know, we'll be around when whenever you want a script.

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Speaker 1
Thank you to E Media for producing this podcast. Our producer is Jackson Foote. Our music is created by Hidden license through premiumbeat dot com. And until next time.

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Speaker 2
Stay honest.

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Speaker 1
Stay creative.

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Speaker 2
Stay open.

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Speaker 1
I wouldn't balance.

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Speaker 2
Forgot I almost forgot it's coming back around.

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Speaker 1
Now. The tables are turning.

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Speaker 2
They are who knows what will happen next time?

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Speaker 1
We'll see you in the next episode.