Every organisation has something different to communicate, and the way you bring it to life should feel just as considered. Animation gives you the freedom to create a visual style that feels like you, while making sure the message connects with the people you need to reach.
The key is finding the right approach for the story, the audience and what you want the content to do.
To bring that to life, here are a few different animation styles we’ve used, where each one tends to work best, and a guide on how you can use animation for your next project.
The hybrid approach
You don’t always have to choose between live action and animation. Sometimes you need a real person to create connection or credibility, but you’re also talking about ideas that would be difficult to show with footage alone.
Combining the two lets each format do what it does best. A presenter can guide the audience through the story, while animation can step in to explain, visualise or simplify the things we can’t easily see.
Our work on UNSW’s 3 Minute Genius series does exactly that. Each episode pairs a presenter with animated graphics that help unpack the more complicated ideas, keeping the human connection while making complex information easier to follow.
The mixed media approach
Some stories call for a little more visual freedom. Mixed media lets you bring photography, illustration, typography, texture and other elements together, which can be especially useful when you have lots of different ideas, information or existing assets to bring into one piece.
It can also give a video a more tactile, handmade feel, helping content feel warm, approachable and full of personality.
Our video for B Corp Global is a great example. Created to introduce their new standards, it mixed real photography with illustrated elements, hand-drawn flowers and leaves, and bold yellow backgrounds. The result felt warm and human, while still giving us plenty of room to communicate the information clearly.
The character-centric approach
A character can do something graphics and text alone often can’t: give your audience someone to connect with. By seeing an idea, experience or challenge play out through another person, information becomes less abstract and much easier to relate to.
It works particularly well when you’re communicating lived experience, health information, behaviour change or sensitive topics, where understanding how something affects a person can be just as important as understanding the facts.
Take our video for Arthritis Australia, which follows a mum navigating everyday moments where arthritis quietly gets in the way. Rather than simply explaining the symptoms, we see how the condition can affect someone’s day-to-day life.
The 3D approach
Some things are much easier to understand when you can actually see how they work. 3D gives you depth and physical space to work with, so you can move around an object, look inside it, pull a system apart or turn something abstract into a world your audience can follow.
That makes it particularly useful for explaining systems, processes, technology, products or ideas that are difficult, or sometimes impossible, to capture in the real world.
When the Australian Digital Health Agency needed to explain the digitisation of a previously analogue system, 3D gave us a way to make that change feel tangible. Instead of asking the audience to imagine how the system worked, we could show the process unfolding in front of them.
