Written by Colin Devroe – VP Marketing Services.

One of the many creative services One Point provides its customers are custom-made promotional and explainer videos. In the era of Instagram and Tik-Tok, these quicker paced productions that are jammed with information are the very best way to educate a market or inform a customer. And they are super fun to make!

Since we are working on 3 new videos right now, I thought I’d include a little view behind-the-scenes into the process of creating one of these videos and why I have so much fun making them.

We start off with the message the customer wants to share and begin tossing around ideas of the best way to articulate that message in a video. Sometimes they are serious and straight forward, other times they are fun and catchy.

These ideas eventually coalesce into a drafted screenplay that includes descriptive cues, margin notes explaining the environment and things that will be shown onscreen, and of course character dialog. I think for me the most fun is coming up with the situations and context to help tell a story.

Once a draft has been edited and approved we move to the next step; storyboarding. The storyboarding phase accomplishes two main objectives; it helps everyone on the creative team and the customer to get on the same page. It puts visuals to the words. It also helps us give clear direction to the illustrators and animators about our vision for the project.

Here are two frames of a recent storyboard that Vanna Zona, Creative Director at One Point, mocked up for an upcoming video.

I sometimes have the habit of coming up with very particular transitions between scenes or funny little emotes for the characters — by storyboarding these it helps everyone on the team to imagine what the final product will look like. Notice the blur in the above screenshot. It gets the ideas out of our heads and onto the page.

Once the planning phases are complete we can move into production of our video. The first step in production is to scout and hire voice talent to bring the words of the characters or the narration to life. Thanks to the global network of amazing talented voice actors – we can find the right person for any character we can think up. Younger, more mature, male, female, hip, or stuffy… there is an actor that can match any of these.

By providing specific direction to the voice talent we are able to ensure that we strike the right tone for the message or information we’re delivering in the video.

OK, so at this point we have all the pieces we need to begin our animation phase. We have our detailed screenplay, our storyboards, and our narration or character dialog is recorded. With all of this the animators have clear direction to provide us with a draft that is usually right on target.

Of course, we aren’t done yet. The animation phase goes through several rounds of feedback to get the pacing, transitions, and music soundtrack just right.

The result? A fun video that can be shared anywhere online through our website, YouTube, social media, or even in new ways that we hand deliver to our customer prospects… but I can describe some of that in an upcoming post.

To see more behind-the-scenes posts from the One Point team, follow One Point Inc. on LinkedIn!

Note: Storyboard illustrations are from Adobe Stock, used internally only to help the team stay on the same page. All videos are custom illustrated, animated, narrated, and scored by our team.