You may worry about making ineffective new corporate training videos, or you may resort to the same videos you have been boring staff members with for the last 10 years, but these days, you can easily work with a studio to create an animated training video that has high production values and conveys a strong message.
You don’t need to know how to make corporate training videos in a world where you can find online teams designing corporate training videos on a weekly basis. Thanks to the internet, you are able to hire talent from around the world to create amazing animated corporate training videos.
1. It is Probably Your Cheapest Professional Option
The fact is that live action training videos often look cheap and unprofessional unless they are produced by professional companies.
It is true that cheap-looking animation looks as bad as cheap live action video, but the fact is that animation is often cheaper to produce than live-action training videos.
2. Make Your Employees Happy
The sheer weight of employers who take the human element out of the training-video exercise is abominable, and there are many reasons why it happens.
First is that they have to show the training videos, so they are more concerned with the outcome rather than the process.
The second reason why the human element is forgotten is that the people ordering the videos are not the ones who have to sit through them.
Finally, bosses often figure that their employees are at work, and it is not their job to keep employees entertained, but this is a very short-sighted view.
The overall mood of your employees is something that is very difficult to shift. If your team enters a slump, there are occasions where the slump may last for years. It is not that difficult to push the mood of a team so far downwards that they dread coming into work.
Rather than spending money on new equipment, on building extensions, on bonus pay, and whatever other morale-boosting ideas you have, you should simply work to keep your employees happy.
The last thing you should be doing is hiring people and then having them sit in a room for four hours while they watch cheesy training videos with outdated screen wipes and elevator music. These people are human so respect their ability to feel happy at work. A good-quality animated training video may help stop your employees from slipping into a bored coma on their first viewing.
3. The Potential for A Bigger Impact
The best corporate training videos can make an impact with a bar of soap and a bucket full of sand, but for those who do not have the talents of Tarantino or Guillermo Del Toro, you need the tools required to make an impact, and suffice it to say that animation has more potential for impact than live action, and certainly has more than PowerPoint presentations.
The potential for a bigger impact is there, but it needs to be realized through a strong video. For example, the Starbucks four-hour video and 68-page workbook may have an impact, but it is not likely to be a good one when you consider that the staff are there to serve coffee and not to land international aircraft. Perhaps a short video on why the staff get minimum wage when the owner Shultz has a $3 billion net wealth. The “potential” for impact is there, you just need to be sure it is the right type of impact.
4. More Creative Control Over Your Content
One of the best things about animation is the sheer level of creative control you have. You can create wonderful worlds like with Kubo and the Two Strings, and you can create dark and scary worlds like Coraline, and you can dabble with everything in between.
One of the biggest complaints about the Battlestar Galactic animated movies was how little they used the medium, with the consensus being that if you can do “anything” with animation, then why did they do the same boring stuff that happens with live-action movies.
For example, do you want your character to fly over your building during the introduction of your training video? Well, you can hire a rig, set the scene, hire a crew, get insurance, swing a guy over your building and then edit out the strings. Or, you can animate the scene and have it done in two days for 5% of the cost.
5. Greater Engagement with Your Corporate Training Videos – Maybe
It is possible that a creatively and expertly made training video using animation may cause greater engagement, but it is not a given.
There are plenty of examples of corporate training videos that are downright terrible and boring simply because of the way they were directed and written. Animation offers the possibility of greater engagement when compared with live-action videos, but it still relies on a strong script, solid direction, and a useful meaning behind the video.
Conclusion – The Potential Is Limitless
Even something as simple and dull as the explanation of an online puzzle can be spiced up a little with the addition of subtle (even crude) character animation. The director of the movie “The Fifth Element” said himself that if he had waited two years, not only would his movie had featured better effects, it would have also been cheaper to make and far better as a result.
Nobody is saying you should turn your training videos into a science fiction blockbuster, but the simple addition of animation and effects can help improve the quality of your corporate training videos without the demand for a larger budget.
Strongly consider Storybite for your corporate videos and training videos. The level of professionalism and creative control at your fingertips is remarkable, and you may be surprised at how much you can get for a reasonable budget.
