Animation Mistakes

Why avoiding animation mistakes is so important.

Animation Mistakes
Making a mistake when creating an animation could result in impacting the integrity of your brand. Whether you stray from your brand’s style or fail to construct your animation around your audience, making an animation mistake risks your brand being poorly received by users. To help you create a successful animation that will effectively reflect your brand’s message, we’ve compiled a list of the most common animation mistakes and advice on how you can avoid them. Whether you’re creating an explainer animation or an animated GIF, use our advice to review and improve your animation.

Top 10 Animation Mistakes and How to avoid them:

Animation Mistakes

1. Inconsistent Branding

The first time you create an animation video for your brand is undeniably exciting. It’s a process filled with new colour palettes, fonts and styles you’ve never seen before, or always wanted to use. Yet, as with every other aspect of your business, your animation needs to be consistent with the rest of your brand’s image. This means, while you may be drawn to a new font effect, it is best to use the font you would normally use for your brand. In doing so, your animation will more smoothly integrate into your marketing campaigns and encourages your brand to be one that is instantly recognisable to users.

2. Poor Targeting

As with all other forms of online marketing, such as blog content and social media posts, your animation needs to be targeted towards your audience. Too often do businesses use animation as a way to reflect their expertise in a certain area. Yet, as with all marketing material, viewers are more interested in what they can get from a brand. While your knowledge may be impressive, to avoid this animation mistake, your video needs to be targeted towards your viewers’ interests and needs, and clearly display how your brand can benefit them.

3. Lacking Strategy and CTA’s

Before you begin an animation video, you should have a few goals in mind to avoid your animation falling short. What message do you want to convey to your audience? How do you want them to react? What action do you want them to take? By planning out and answering these questions, you should be able to build your animation around a strategy and encourage your viewers to interact with your brand beyond the animation. However, if you find you need help planning and developing our animation, feel free to get in touch with Magenta.

4. Forgetting Audio

While animation may seem like a visual experience, audio is not something to be forgotten. This animation mistake happens far too often, as creators forget the sensory power of audio and how it can completely alter the tone and style of a video. In order to create an effective animation, it is important you use audio and video alongside each other to create a complete animation experience.

5. Suitable Voice Over

If using a voice over to narrate your animation, it’s important that the speaker is both fitting with your brand and the tone of the animation itself. You can’t use an upbeat voice if talking about a serious topic! Likewise, you don’t want a sympathetic voice when promoting a product or explaining a business offering. Translate the tone of the video across to the voice over actor, as well as suggesting for a few versions to see what fits the best.

6. Long-Winded Explanations

It can be challenging to know when enough is enough in animation, especially when it comes to knowing what information you should include. Yet, avoiding this common animation mistake is vital to creating a video that is engaging to viewers. When planning for your animation, choose a topic, product or service you want to promote, and plan a focused script around it. The shorter and more concise an animation is, the more likely it is to be watched in its entirety.

7.  Sloppy Details

As an animation should be short and direct, there’s no scope for silly mistakes to be made. Are the lighting and shadows consistent? Are there any spelling mistakes in your text? Do your characters move seamlessly? By not carefully considering the details in your animation, you risk creating a video that reflects negatively on your brand. So, to guarantee you’re presenting the best version of your brand to viewers, every aspect of your animation needs to be spot on.

8. Not Sharing

Forgetting to share your animation through social media posts or email campaigns is a rookie animation mistake. If you simply post your animation on your website, it is likely to remain unseen by the majority of your target audience and would therefore fail to communicate with a wider range of viewers. Once your animation has been created and is ready to share, start posting it on all platforms to generate more viewers, more engagement and more brand awareness.

9. Unflattering Dimensions

Your animation video dimensions aren’t a one-size-fits-all when it comes to sharing online. Ensure that you set out where this video will be viewed, and cater to each of these social platform dimensions. Think about Instagram Stories, Facebook Video and LinkedIn thumbnail previews. Ensure there is consistency of the visuals throughout every platform for a strong visual animation.

10. Copying

While you may have been inspired by an animation video you saw online, you still want your own animation to stand out and accurately represent your brand. Copying other successful animations won’t guarantee your own animation will be well received and could result in you straying from your brand’s style and personality. This would be viewed as a huge animation mistake and could risk compromising the individuality of your brand. To uniquely present your brand through an animation, contact Magenta.

Get in touch with Magenta.

If you’re interested in creating an animation video for your brand, free of these common animation mistakes, take a look at our available services or get in touch with our team at Magenta.

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Animation Mistakes