One of the most important basic principles for making explainers is the idea of building in layers: starting with a rough version of the film and slowly adding graphics and music, leaving time-consuming tasks such as animation and stop-motion until the end.
The layers process I go through is analogous to the process used in making feature films: drawing a storyboard, making an “animatic” (a slide-show video of the storyboard with audio), the first assembly, and so on. (Here’s an example of an animatic for Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel.)
If I’d gone to film school, maybe someone would have taught me about the importance of building in layers. Instead, I had to figure it out the hard way.
The main reason for building in layers is to save time. As you edit and animate the film you’ll find yourself wanting to make lots of changes. Making changes is a good thing — most explainers start off bad, and become good only by being reworked and rewritten — but the problem is making changes to a film or video is very time-consuming. I can redraft a written paragraph in minutes, but doing the same with film can take hours. (And then you watch it back and decide you want to change it again!)
One of the key skills in the process of building in layers is your visual imagination. In other words, your ability to watch something rough and see the finished film in your mind. If you can do this then you’ll be able to make decisions about whether something is working earlier on in the process when it’s quicker and easier to make changes. Someone with no such capacity (e.g. with a client who is inexperienced with video) will have to finish the whole film before they’re able to decide what they think of it. This is a time-consuming way to work.
(If you are working with a client or commissioner who finds it difficult to imagine the finished film, one tip is to finish a small section — maybe at the beginning — at high quality. This can be used as a sample that will reassure them about the rest of the film.)
My process for explainers
Here’s my current workflow:
- Written script Make as many changes as you can now! Text is so easy to change. Reading it out loud will also help you spot weak points.
- Written script with visuals column A classic television documentary script has a column for voice over and a column for visuals. This column helps you think about what you are going to see at each point in the film, and to write accordingly.
- Interviews and further research I try to write a script before I interview so I know what I need (though, inevitably, interviewees always surprise you with new material!).
- Rewrite with interview clips
- “Long-assembly cut” A long, rough video with minimal graphics (example below), this is essentially just interview and script with no other video. Documentary maker Ken Burns calls his “blind assemblies” and I’ve sometimes heard it called a “string-out”. My long assemblies are usually twice the length of the finished film.
- Rough cut A rough version of the film at roughly the right length. You’ll usually end up with a number of rough cuts as different versions are tried.
- Final cut Once this version is signed off, the script is “locked”, no more fundamental changes.
- “Fine cut” Final visual polishing and audio mix
(People in television and filmmaking often use jargon in different ways, depending on their workplace and country, so expect to come across different names for all these stages.)
An example
As an example of this process, I thought it might be useful to see a recent film I made in three stages: the long-assembly stage and two of the rough-cut exports.
Long-assembly cut
After the initial script and the interviews, the first stage for me is the long-assembly cut. This is super-rough and basic. I use screenshots, quick images from the internet (the Copy Pasta plug-in on After Effects is great for this), and sometimes don’t even record the voice-over but just put text on screen. The idea is a rough sketch of the whole thing to see how it feels.
When making this film, the way I’d structured it on the paper script wasn’t really working and making this assembly allowed me to see that. I ended up changing a lot about the beginning and the ending.
Rough cut 1
A lot has changed by this stage since the long-assembly cut. The script is much closer to the final version and I’ve cut one of my contributors. Now I’m starting to put more graphics in place and play with music options.
Rough cut 2
At this point I’m filling in more of the details – the motion graphics, adding more music, and storyboarding the stop-motion sections.
Final film
The final film, now with polished graphics, stop-motion and random puppets!