Whiteboard videos are possibly one of the most popular styles for creating simple engaging informative explainer videos. The whiteboard animation style is very popular, as it tends to be quite cost-effective to produce. Whiteboard videos are where you see a hand holding a pen draw out an image on the screen. Usually, this is sped up so the drawings appear quite quickly. Within the animation industry, these can sometimes be referred to as video scribes or drawing videos.
Whiteboard videos are a style of explainer video that some do see as being ‘cheap’ to create. Whilst this can be true to a certain extent, it is surprising how much work can sometimes go into creating a whiteboard video. The storyboarding and visual process is very similar to a more complex explainer video. You still need to understand the script and creating a visual storyboard.
The main difference is the next stage, instead of creating detailed art for the explainer video, we instead trace over the rough visual storyboard board, creating neater more polished line work. This line work is done in Adobe Illustrator, which creates a vector line for each line that has been drawn. The technology with Adobe Illustrator records each stroke and gives it a number, so it know which order the lines are drawn in.
Once the artwork has been fully created in Adobe illustrator, this is then imported into Videoscribe software to be animated. This software looks at the data contained within he Illustrator file and animates the line onto the screen in the same order as drawn. This is done at speed along with a hand overplayed and gives a very real illusion that the hand is actually drawing the artwork.
Whilst typically whiteboard explainer videos tend to be just black lines on a white background, this is certainly the cheapest option. Intermixed with this can be elements of colour and even motion graphic animation. For example the hand could draw in a map of the UK, but we then use motion graphic animation to overlay little locations popping into view. This is particularly useful when you have a lot of information to show, as we can call this into the page quicker than a hand drawing it, which can come slow and repetitive.
For examples of whiteboard videos we have created, visit our dedicated whiteboard video page.
