The Best Untapped Source of Ideas for Animated Product Videos

You just watched a new animated product video from your competitor and it was great. Now you want (a better) one for your product. Or, you love how that top brand used animation in their video content and you want to do something similar.

These are excellent sources of inspiration. But, dare we say, a little limiting. Especially when it comes to all that animation can do for your corporate videos. 

Checking out your competition’s animated videos is a fine way to gather apples-to-apples ideas, but we’re here to offer you a look at the whole produce department.

We’d like to lift up another often overlooked source of inspiration: it’s the movies and TV that you’re already watching. And if you’re like us, watching a lot. 

When you take a step back and use the same keen eye you apply to your product marketing landscape to all the other media, you’ll start seeing great ideas for your animated product videos everywhere. 

And we think your videos will be better for it - exciting, innovative, and on-point.

In this article, we’re going to help you uncover these inspirational nuggets while sharing animation examples from film and television that excel at serving the subject, story, and viewer experience. Exactly what you want your product video to do too.

First, a little context for your great animated product video ideas…

While it’s true we want you to widen your lens of animation inspiration, we also want to point you in the direction that makes the most sense for your product and brand. So to help focus your search for fresh animation ideas, start by considering these questions:

• What do you need your product video to do?

• What animation type(s) most inspires you?

• And how can animation help your video do what it needs to do better?

Animation, after all, is not just an alternative to hiring actors. It's a storytelling style. So it's most effective when the story you're telling calls for it and you answer with a style that fits seamlessly. 

Now let’s unpack those questions…

What do you need your product video to do?

Do you need to capture and educate a new audience? Persuade and convert potential customers? Engage and motivate your existing customers?

When you start here with a clear goal and compelling messaging that connects with your target audience, it's easier to see all the ways animation can bring it to life.

Let’s look at product demo and explainer videos and why so many of them lean on animation. 

They’re meant to educate a top-funnel audience with a short attention span, so they leverage animation’s particular ability to quickly visualize new or complex concepts in a way that entertains and informs.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy perfectly captures (and pokes a little fun at) this standard animated video type in its "Infinite Improbability Drive" explainer: 

Tutorials and walkthrough product videos, on the other hand, rely on animation to provide visual mnemonics, so a more invested audience can easily gain competence.

The opening sequence of Zombieland plays off this capability as it runs through the “rules” for surviving the apocalypse, presenting them in an especially memorable way: 

But don’t let your animation inspiration be confined to thinking about just these product video types! 

If you really want to get your noodle going, consider Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky by Michel Gondry. 

What if you produced case studies and testimonials like this? Or compiled user-generated content and gave it a fresh coat of animation? Gondry uses hand-drawn animation here, but his technique is not too far from the popular (and less time-consuming) whiteboard animation style. 

What animation type most inspires you?

In the wide world of movies and TV - and in video marketing - there are a lot of forms animation can take. But mainly, there are three types of animation. 

(These types can be broken down even further into different styles and techniques, but that taxonomy is a whole other post for another day.)

One of the oldest animation types is 2D animation. Today, it encompasses traditional drawn animation, cel animation, or the computer-generated vector graphics used in motion graphics. This last style is ubiquitous in video marketing and can look like this: 

For marketers, it’s good to note that a motion graphics video like this one that leans on text animation, or kinetic typography, can be particularly useful when working within a smaller budget. 

When it comes to 3D animation, Pixar is often the first to come to mind - but that’s just one corner of this domain. This animation type ranges from old-timey claymation to more technical 3D model animation like this:

3D animation can also take the text, vector graphics, and images of 2D motion graphics and put them in a virtual 3D space, moving the “camera” through it like its exploring an intricate pop-up book. The documentary Icarus takes that approach here:

The third animation type is hybrid or mixed animation, which combines 2D and/or 3D animation with live-action video footage. This type of animation has evolved a great deal since film was born, from Melies’ A Trip to the Moon to Mary Poppins to every Michael Bay movie ever.

But again, there’s a huge spectrum of applications of this animation type. It can be as simple as the way film and television depict today’s text message conversations, as we see in shows like Emily in Paris: 

Hybrid animation has become such a standard and subtle film device that we often don’t notice that much of our favorite live-action media is in fact animated. 

How can animation help your video do what it needs to do?

With the different types of animation at your disposal and the various purposes your product video may have, the next question is: What are the many ways animation can help you do it? 

Let’s take a closer look at the top 7 things animation excels at and examples of it doing what it does best across film and television. 

1. It pulls in your audience and tells a vivid story

Naturally, you want your video to capture your audience’s attention. And eye-catching animation that visually tells a story is a surefire way to do it. 

When it comes to examples of how animation does this in film, look no further than the iconic opening sequences created by Saul Bass. He is, for some, considered the father of motion graphics. 

His sparse but dynamic 2D animations are riveting, building suspense from the first frame in movies like Psycho and North by Northwest.

In television, the title sequence for the series Good Omens borrows a bit from Bass’s cutout style but gives it a Monty Python-esque twist:

This variously animated sequence uses dramatic lighting, a frame filled with bizarre settings and characters, and a set of continuously tracking “shots" to create an absolutely absorbing animated story contained just in the intro.

2. It visualizes complex ideas

A common - and big - challenge for tech companies or for multi-faceted enterprise products is to take a new or complex idea and present it succinctly in a product video. Here again, animation is a powerful tool.

Look to the world of science fiction movies for meta-level approaches to taking on this challenge, like this introductory scene in Minority Report:

It layers live-action footage, 3D animation, and explanatory voice-over narration to introduce the central concept and technology of the film. 

As viewers, the complicated, futuristic (and of course, animated) interface begins to make sense to us as Cruise’s character demonstrates the logical relationship of its different components - the workflow -  while the voice-over provides the context and value of the technology as a whole. 

Alternatively, the filmic depictions of the inner workings of the minds of geniuses can also be a source of inspiration for this challenge. 

Think The Queen’s Gambit, Sherlock, or A Beautiful Mind. In these examples, a glut of information is visualized with animation and we watch as the pattern literally emerges from it.

3. It creates a character your audience identifies with

Sometimes your product video calls for a central character to lead your audience through your narrative. So it's important for that character to be one your target audience can easily identify with.

With animation, the most straightforward way to accomplish this is to make the character a spot-on representation of your main persona. 

But, what if you’re targeting a broader audience or it contains multiple personas? Animation can help by providing a more generic-looking or anamorphic character that a wider audience can identify with.

The popularity of the Corporate Memphis style is a great example of this, acting as a roomy canvas for buyer personas that can also be sculpted to fit any brand style. 

Another crafty way animation encourages audience identification is to play with the video’s point of view. It can adopt a first-person perspective in a way that is seamless for the viewer’s experience. 

Consider this scene in 14 Peaks:

Here, the viewer is immediately thrown into the story, identifying with his frantic fight for survival, as we see what he sees from his point of view. 

4. It overviews product features & benefits with panache

Likely, you have several product features and benefits you want to layout in your video. 

And usually the goal is to hold your audience’s attention for the entire roll call of features so that they learn and are excited about what they can do for them. 

Well, characters are to movies what features are to products. So any good ensemble-cast movie with a character intro montage can offer some great inspiration. 

In Army of Thieves, they use animation to visually punctuate each character's intro, acting like bullet-points in a list: 

They’re also using animation to uniquely stylize the shots for each character, giving us a little more visual information about their personality and background that supports the voice-over narration.

This approach can be adapted to not only enumerate multiple features and benefits, but also differentiate them in ways that make them personable and memorable. 

5. It showcases great product design

When you have a beautifully designed product, of course you want to show it off. And while you may think the product design speaks for itself, it can also be elevated by judicious use of animation. 

In this scene from Fantastic Fungi, gorgeous time-lapses of growing mushrooms are intercut with 3D animation to create an immersive and stunning portrayal of the unassuming mushroom:

The live-action footage alone is fascinating. But as it’s intercut with animation, both the immense scope and minute details of the mycelium’s design are revealed in a way that can’t help but impress.

Another way to use animation to put design front and center is to opt for a fully-stylized depiction as we see in The Great British Bake Off showstoppers:

The motion graphics themselves are simple animations, but the illustrations stand out with their bold and artful rendering of the baker’s intended design. 

And as the only slice of animation in the otherwise live-action show, they effectively capture the viewer’s imagination and tease the actual product reveal.

6. It presents product specifications engagingly

We challenge you to do this without animation. 

If you have important specs to share in your product video, you can visualize them with kinetic typography, enhance live-action shots with strategic use of lines and colors in overlays, or animate transitions that propel the viewer forward to the next technical detail. 

The documentary The Alpinist uses all of these animation techniques to great effect in this scene:

Viewers are drawn into the story of his lightbulb moment with animation that mimics both the scrolling of a computer screen and the gathering momentum of a new idea. 

The flat text of articles and social media posts, the photos and stats of a certain climb - basically the pretty uninteresting act of the director/narrator doing internet research -  is transformed with motion graphics. 

Imagine pumping up your screencasts, product shots, and footage with these simple and effective techniques…

7. It brings your brand to life

This one goes without saying - to animate literally means to bring to life. So when you choose to use animation in your product video it portrays and codifies your brand whether you intend it to or not.

That’s why it's crucial to take your exciting animation ideas - the types, styles, and techniques that inspire you - and wrangle them into alignment with your brand style.

For instance, if your brand is more formal and much of your existing design is fairly minimalist, then simple animations like 2D, text-based motion graphics might be the way to go. 

Or, if your brand is more adventurous and your design more stylized, then maybe a striking mix of animation types and styles is more on point. 

Your animated product videos can be whatever you need them to be. The brand inspiration here is all you - your voice, your mission, how your business sees itself and what it does.

How will you use animation to capture your brand?