When trying to communicate a business’s marketing messages a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words, and an animation is often worth volumes. Many businesses have existing PowerPoint presentations that they use for marketing, product development and training. Such PowerPoint presentations often include photographs, diagrams, charts and illustrations in order to try to clarify various concepts. While these pictures can help in many cases, a simple picture may not be enough to clarify some of the more complex topics that a business needs to communicate. In these cases marketing animations can often clarify such complicated concepts far more effectively than a PowerPoint presentation with simple pictures ever could. Marketing animations can strengthen your marketing efforts and in turn increase your ROI.
Gather Existing PowerPoint Presentations and Other Materials
The first step in creating marketing animations is to create a rough breakdown of key steps to map out the animation that will need to be produced. Fortunately existing PowerPoint presentations, like the sample slides above, can often serve as a launching point for such animation projects because they typically include the major steps needed in the form of bullet items along with photos, diagrams or illustrations. Working with the marketing and/or product teams gather and review all available PowerPoint presentations, white papers, videos and other existing material that help describe the products and/or processes that need to be animated. Also gather any specific branding or corporate identity manuals, guidelines and media assets such as corporate logos, product logos, color pallets, etc.
Create an Animation Storyboard to Serve as a Blueprint for Marketing Animations
Pinpoint the specific products/processes that need to be animated and list every step/motion that needs to be shown along with any related call-outs and/or voice-over for each step/action. Use the corporate standards guidelines and media assets to design a visual template for branding the marketing animations in a consistent and cohesive manner to further the overall corporate brand strategy. Using an iterative back-and-forth process with the marketing and product teams flesh out a detailed storyboard that may be used as a blueprint to plan and create the required marketing animations. Such a storyboard may also be used for budgeting and scheduling any work that may need to be outsourced to an animation studio, such as DreamLight. At DreamLight we can work from your detailed storyboard or we can create the storyboard for you based on your existing materials as we did in this project.
Create 3D Product Models from Existing 3D Engineering Files
If the marketing animations will include 3D animated product videos then you can create 3D product models out of any existing 3D engineering files from CAD/CAM software such as SolidWorks. You can start by translating and importing the SolidWorks files into your 3D modeling software such as Modo, LightWave 3D, Blender or other similar software such as Maya, 3D Studio, etc. We’ve published a previous blog post with some tips on converting SolidWorks files. At DreamLight we can work from your CAD/CAM files or create models completely from scratch if necessary.
Create Marketing Animations from the Storyboard and 3D Models
Armed with a solid storyboard and any necessary 3D models it’s time to proceed to create the marketing animations in your favorite software. 2D animations and motion graphics can be created in software such as Apple Motion or Adobe After Effects. 3D animations can be created in software such as Modo, LightWave 3D, Blender, Maya, 3D Studio, etc.
CGI animation is one of our specialties so if you’d like DreamLight to create fantastic marketing animations for your next project please don’t hesitate to contact us! We’d love to make you one of our satisfied customers among our growing list of valued world-class clients!
Quality:
Service: Value:
“We were very happy with the resulting animation.
The Animation was a HUGE hit. Thank you so much!”
– Yuki Honjo, Chief Operating Officer, McLane Research Laboratories
The DreamLight CGI Animation Production Process
A previous blog post includes more information about our DreamLight CGI Animation Production Process.
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