Startup Explainer video for Niche Trainings
Marketing Message
Niche Trainings needed a Startup Explainer video. They provide short video lessons made by experts they’ve vetted, on a wide variety of topics. People use it to discover more about their niche. So, what’s new you ask? Read again, bet you missed it. The keyword here is “short”. Their videos are precise and not more that 10-15 minutes long. And this was the marketing message to be conveyed in the Startup Explainer video
How we approached it
We needed a unique approach for this video. The company was a start-up and we needed a way to showcase their service in a never-seen-before way. We did not use humor for this video, instead, we used catchy sentences. Their Startup Explainer video would be impactful, clear and precise —just like Niche Trainings. We decided to portray why Niche Trainings was going to be helpful in these fast-paced times, where the millennials don’t have much patience for anything long.
Style
We used motion graphics style. This was decided upon after rejecting a lot of other styles. But simply calling it “motion graphics” does not do justice to the attention-to-detail given to each frame of this Startup Explainer video. We planned scene-by-scene changes, in keeping with the pace of the script. We were not going to use the character-driven storytelling approach in the Niche Trainings video.
Colors
We wanted to use soothing colors. They’d be a mixture of cool and warm —to cater to all tastes. The background, while soothing, would have darker shades of the same colors in the foreground assets and even darker shadows underneath. Our Startup Explainer video was divided into three sections based on the transitions that had to appear, that is, in-tune with the animation. Now three colors were chosen for each section. The first sections was a very light yellow-to-orange shade. The Niche Trainings logo has a dominant orange color and the first color was chosen to go with this. The next two portions use the logo itself, so we chose colors that were not related to the logo color, to bring out the contrasts. The light blue color that we use is a complementary color of the yellowish-orange on the color wheel. On a triad color wheel, this blue partners with the a wonderful shade of green, which we used for our next section.
Characters
We used abstract characters – faceless and they had to function only as assets to the scene, their nature or role was not established. Hence they were designed and colored just like the rest of the assets in the Niche Trainings video.
Visuals
We had multiple brainstorming sessions before we arrived at the visuals for this video. The big challenge in the Startup Explainer video was to depict visually what the script was conveying, without going into characters. Each sentence had a main word that we chose. This word was like a gist of the sentence, the window to the sentence and this was developed into a visual. In some sentences, instead of a word, the key idea was translated into visuals. Each scene had to have limited assets to give it a neat, uncluttered look.
Animation
The animations were heavily dependent on transitions. A new style of transition was used for the Niche Trainings video. An asset was chosen and it transformed into the next and that into the next. After this was repeated for a number of scenes. We moved to a new section, with fresh color and another key object that would transform for next few frames. Shape changes were fine-tuned to a level of expertise. The assets used shadows and shadings to enhance the animation. Only Shape layers were used in this Startup Explainer video. We did not import any assets, all assets were created in After Effects by our skilled animators.
When after all that effort Niche Trainings Startup Explainer video came out looking sophisticated and sleek, we could finally smile.
Team Involved
Animations : Saravanan,Dinesh
Script : Vimida
Creative Direction : Udhay
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