Using animation to promote a cause

Promoting a cause or a serious message can be quite a challenge, particularly when you’re trying to communicate to different audiences, maybe even different cultures and languages.

Creating the right content is crucial for compelling and convincing your audience to respond. However, content is only as good as its execution, which is where animations can help.

Using dynamic content, you can bring any concept to life. Animated video is cost-effective, easy to manage, and will enable you to put your key points across. It offers all the benefits of a visual medium but with much smaller resource requirements than you might expect.

Case Study:

We were commissioned by Medical Aid Films to produce three concise videos explaining what malaria is and how individuals can protect themselves from it. The animations focus on Zimbabwe as a location. However, the advice is non-specific and can be applied to any malaria-endemic region across Africa, as Fight Malaria discovered.

Animated video is a great medium for giving context to even the most complex messages, allowing you to strike the right tone. When communicating about a specific cause using standard film, it’s easy for the message to be confused or lost in translation, possibly even failing to explain the topic at hand.

With an animated video, you can remove all those factors and strike a wider range of emotional tones. This can help cover difficult subjects effectively without causing your audience to put up their defences.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of using animated video is the ease with which you can visually capture abstract details, as in A Midwife Like Me.

A Midwife Like Me film

If you have ever shot a live-action video, you’re probably aware it’s a complicated and sometimes frustrating process. You have to worry about the location, actors, props, equipment, and sets, and that’s not even considering the weather!

With an animated video, you’re not constrained by any of these factors. You can switch backgrounds, add or remove characters, and even change audio elements to adapt to different languages. This makes it easy to test different ways to communicate your message.

This visual medium appeals to the senses and offers an easy and effective way to communicate important messages. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.

There’s something about moving images that appeal to the human brain, and this naturally extends to animated video. And the best part is that because visuals are consumed a lot more easily than text, they leave a lasting impact on your audience

Animated videos also allow for more flexibility because they’re easier to update. You can go back and change text, edit animations, or even do a complete overhaul of your entire video; you can use rich media (movement, music, sound effects, visual elements, etc.) to highlight specific points.

In summary

Animated video is a dynamic and versatile medium that can elevate your organisation’s cause and message to a new level. It offers an engaging and fun alternative to text content and is not impeded by traditional constraints surrounding live-action video.