I really like animation as a means of communication because of its expressiveness, flexibility, and iterability.
Here is one animation ad that I did recently for Twice Commerce.
Horizontal: Check it out in Youtube
Vertical: Check it out in Youtube
I think that the increased consumption of short video content, combined with the AI revolution, makes animation a highly potential and cost-effective way to engage potential users/customers.
The animation stack
I created the above animation with this tech stack:
- Adobe After Effects for creating the animation.
- Figma to access the design teams UI elements in vector format and create mock ups for the animation.
- Adobe Illustrator to edit the vector graphics and make them better 'digestable' for After Effects.
- Battle Axe Overlord plugin for exporting specific layers or collections of layers to After Effects.
- ElevenLabs for the voice over. Super impressive tool!
- ChatGPT to create the ad copy.
- Runway to create the grandmother scene.
- Motion Array for explosions and other special effects.
- Motion Array for the squirrel stock footage.
- Motion Array for the music.
- Photoshop generative fill for tweaking small visual elements if necessary.
- Adobe After Effects Rotobrush 3.0 for making the squirrel look like it is drinking coffee.
- Ableton Live 11 for editing the music track.
Lessons learned
When you are experimenting with different approaches and narratives for e.g. a new product or testing traction for some new feature, it can make sense to create the initial animations in-house.
Once you have the targeting, communications and value propositions dialed in, then it's time to check in with professional animators.
AI voice-over technology has become super good. Highly recommend ElevenLabs.
Motion Array is pretty cool resource as well. The music selection is pretty great.