Animated explainer videos and product films that show the detail

An explainer sells an idea or a service. It starts with the viewer’s problem, shows what changes when they use you, and ends on one action. Because it has an argument to make, it usually runs a minute or more, and it lives on your homepage, in sales emails and at the top of a YouTube channel.

A product video sells a thing, and its job is narrower: show the detail a photo misses. That might be how a garment fits, what is printed inside a personalized gift, or how a feature behaves when you tap it. Product videos are short — often under 20 seconds — and they live on listings, product pages and in ads, usually playing without sound.

Many brands need both: one explainer that carries the full story, and a handful of product loops that each prove one point. Designing them together means they share a style, and the shorter pieces can reuse the explainer’s illustrations.

Labseven sells online growth to businesses, and its audience is Italian. The 98-second film opens on the problem — customers search for your products and find your competitors’ sites — and then moves to the pitch in three ideas: “Espandi il tuo business”, “Più ordini” and “I tuoi traguardi”.

Each idea gets its own scene and its own background color — magenta, white, yellow, slate and blue — so a change of color signals a change of point. Simple animated props carry the argument: a laptop showing a site, a search bar over competitor results, a sales chart, a stopwatch. The Italian headlines are short and boxed, so the film still makes sense with the sound off.

It was delivered at 1920×1080, with a 1280×720 cut for places that do not need full HD.

The selling point of a personalized storybook is the child’s name inside it, and a cover photo cannot show that. The 15-second listing video for “Sweet Dreams Little Graham” peels the cover open and turns through five spreads — a cow at sunset, a pony by a pond, a sheep and a guinea pig under the moon, the red barn at goodnight — holding each long enough to read the name in the verse. Marketplaces keep these videos short and silent; Etsy’s listing videos, for example, run 5 to 15 seconds and play without sound.

Fit and fabric feel are just as hard to photograph. The Steralth spec animation reduces a black-on-gray baselayer to its name and two slider scales — Fit, from fitted to loose, and Fabric, from rigid to stretch — with the dots easing to where the garment sits. It shipped in six cuts: 21, 10 and 6 seconds, each at 1500×1950 and 1080×1920.

The script decides most of the result, so we spend real time on it before anything is drawn. A few rules hold for almost every explainer we make.

• Open on the viewer’s problem, not on your company history.
• One claim per scene, with the number or proof on screen.
• Write the on-screen text to be read in about three seconds.
• End on one action — book, buy or visit — not three.
• Leave room in layouts for translation; Italian and other Romance languages usually run longer than English.