The Rise (and Fall?) of the Explainer Video

Back in the mists of time, long before starting Myth, I cut my teeth as a freelance animator. At least, that's how I thought of myself. In reality, my main focus was Motion Design, or Motion Graphics, as the job was fluidly known. Another title, however, could have been more accurate: Explainer-Videologist.

Back in the early 20-10's, After Effects and the Adobe Suite in general had reached a point where it was commercially viable, indeed, commercially savvy, to create various types of animated content for the primordial youtube and facebook feeds.

The internet was an innocent wyrmling back then. A technology that promised to upload democracy to the globe and compress the barriers of entry into capitalism. A world wide web of entrepreneurship, streamed from every corner of the globe. It was all too easy to look at the ultra-successful start-up bros like Mark Zuckerberg, donning their simple black t-shirts and sneakers, and think, if they can do it, why can't I?

The burgeoning, flat-white guzzling, start-up culture of the millennials had just begun in earnest. And how else could you bring your new online directory or SaaS accounting tool to the masses.

Enter the explainer video. 60-120 seconds of animation, wrapped up with a voiceover and royalty free soundtrack.

The styles varied. Popular was the pose-to-pose, hieroglyphic-like, flat vector character aesthetic dubbed 'Corporate Memphis'. This was largely driven by the fact that it was easy to draw in adobe illustrator, and quick to transfer into an animateable setup in after effects. Add some subtle grain, a soft-light blending mode, and you were away.

Another explainer-a-la-carte would be a motion typography piece. This style was popularised by Apple, with Google and other tech or phone companies quickly following behind. Quick, snappy, text driven, this approach is designed to reach out from a feed and throttle your attention. Well made motion typography has a mesmerising, resonant effect. By getting the timing of the words perfect, transitions, the negative space in the design, the colours exactly right for the audience and product, you can hit the perfect frequency and visual pitch. Indeed, the pitch-perfect motion typographical piece rolls its stencilled message straight onto the wet plaster of the viewer's cerebrum like an upstart digital graffiti artist fuelled on pay-per-impression ad dollars.

It is no wonder then, that the real driver of explainermania was not the startup-bros, but the corporate juggernauts in need of a reliable communication method that can both hold and retain large amounts of material, as well as the attention of management consultants or stakeholders. Enter the cog, the brain, the globe, animated in quick succession, or sometimes all together, vectorised and colour matched to the client's brand guideline.

And so, an avalanche of briefs were available for those After Effects monkeys willing to swing a few shape layers around. And for many, the times were good. We may not have thought about it in those terms, but After Effects and motion design in general was a new technology. And at the vanguard of any new technology, prices can command a premium. But as is the case for many a good thing, decadence can surely lead to decline.

As a young Explainervideologist, with designs on one day becoming just Animator, I've always taken my explainer video briefs far too seriously. A new Brexit regulation? A niche insurance product? An employee handbook for expats? Like an overeager town-crier with a graphics tablet pen and a Macbook nicknamed 'The Beast', I set about perfecting my drawing skills, finding haughty art-deco references from the 1920's and obsessing over animation fundamentals.

Sure enough, the Corporate Memphis bubble eventually burst. Clients and creatives had been locked in a love embrace for too long, recycling the same aesthetic over and over. After all, the brand guidelines had come down from The Mount, and creative heresy was too difficult, too risky, not rewarding enough. And so, when the floods of demand for the Explainer Classique began to dry, many freelancers and studios that relied too heavily on its seasonal bounty found it difficult to adapt.

Fortunately, I never focused too much on a specific style. The bud that would eventually flower into the full Myth Studio website was heavily skewed towards personal work. That meant a tendency towards large over-the-top environments, mixed media, historical worlds. All tropes that would reappear in some of our favourite work, from the Euro 2024 title sequence, to the piece for Sky's Grow.

And the truth is, the Explainer Video has never really gone away. The term itself is just corporate pidgin for Branded Storytelling. Brands still need to communicate in a number of ways to a multitude of audiences. Animation and motion typography remain an incredibly versatile and budgetarily efficient way to make a message memorable. What's more, when working with a passionate, art loving animation studio like Myth Studio, branded storytelling, or Explainervideology, can be down right fun.