When creating a video for your non-profit or social cause, there’s one important decision you gotta make first. Yes, before you even write a script or hire a production company:
What TYPE of video should it be? Animation or Live-Action?
Animated videos include illustrated cartoons, 3D graphics, motion graphics (like moving infographics), and even stop-motion.
Live-action is pretty much anything shot with actual video cameras and real people (like Hollywood).
Depending on which style you go with, your ENTIRE production process will be completely different. And so will your end product.
This sounds like a huge, frightening decision. But I’ve found that it’s actually an easy one as long as you’ve got 2 things figured out:
1) know what you want your video to accomplish and who you’re targeting (briefly covered in this post)
2) know the key differences between animation and live-action.
So with the latter point in mind, here’s my super over-simplified way of comparing the two different styles:
Live-action is best for connecting, emoting.
Animation is best for explaining, teaching.
One way to visualize it: imagine you’re at a coffee shop (I love my coffee shop metaphors). You’re sitting with a friend and they’re telling you about their social impact mission.
With live-action, it’s like your friend is looking directly into your eyes as she talks to you. She’s connecting with you, expressing her emotions. The emphasis is not on the words themselves but on the sentiment behind them. You’ll walk away feeling what she felt. And feeling more connected to her.
With animation, it’s like your friend is drawing things out on a napkin as she talks. She’s clearly explaining things, emphasizing key points with her sketches. Helping draw connections and triggering “aha” moments. You’ll walk away deeply understanding and remembering what she talked about.
So with that in mind, live-action might be best if your non-profit needs to put a human face to your cause. If you need to highlight personal stories. Focus on individuals. Get people to empathize with what you’re doing in a more emotional way.
Animation might be best if you need to explain your mission and get people to understand it on a deep level. If you need people to remember key points and take action on them. Or if you want to educate viewers in order to change their behavior.
Now keep in mind, this is a huge over-simplification. Live-action can also explain things really well. And animation can also connect and be very emotional. But I find this broad generalization is an easy way to understand the strengths of each style.
There are tons of other factors to consider also (i.e. budget and timeline, whether the video needs to be updated in the future, if you need to translate to other languages, etc.), but we’ll cover that in a future post.
If you take the above way of looking at animation vs. live-action and you have a clearly defined goal, then it should be pretty obvious which style is right for your video. If not, shoot us a message and we can help you figure that out!
Have any thoughts of your own on Live-Action vs. Animation? Share them with us below.
Illustration by *relajaelcoco.