Thirty-thousand years ago our distant ancestors daubed pictograms of wild animals and proud hunters on their cave walls. These powerful totems would spring to life in the flickering firelight, recounting great triumphs, and sharing cautionary tales that would educate, inspire and bind together early social gatherings.

Such rich, visual storytelling has shaped the way we all communicate ever since – through drawing, painting and sculpture, and, for the last two centuries, the moving image. Today, whether it’s via a TV box-set, a blockbuster film or a Google Doodle, we’re all drawn to and captivated by visual stories that engage us in their narrative.

Engaging audiences with the moving image

The moving image taps into something deep in our brains, it stimulates our senses, and harnesses our creative and rational faculties like no other medium – which is why it’s an essential tool for engaging audiences, and especially employees. After all, if a picture paints a thousand words, how many can be captured, shared and embedded through a simple, engaging, memorable film?

Animation – flexible, adaptable, imaginative

The challenge for organisations is what kind of moving image to use. We believe that one of the best vehicles for achieving cut-through of employee-focused communication is animation. Animation is inherently flexible, and easily adapted to different messages, audience needs and localisation requirements. Its style and scope is limited only by your imagination, and it’s significantly more cost-effective than creating live-action video. Furthermore, the growth in internet bandwidth supports easy digital distribution of animation, even via mobile platforms.

An illustrative style – whether 2D hand-drawn or 3D computer-generated – also lends itself to simple, warm communications, and (where required) a lighter, perhaps even humorous visual approach, all delivered with a subtlety that’s much harder to achieve in live action.

We’ve created animated solutions that have delivered real cut-through with many clients’ employee and stakeholder communications challenges. For SEGRO we crafted a clean, hand-drawn world and characters, which were brought to life in a series of animated films and other collateral to help colleagues champion information security across the pan-European business. View the launch animation here.

And for FCC Environment we created a 2D animated campaign that delivered a very serious message around workplace health and safety using a humorous tone and dynamic visual scope that could only really work through animation. Watch the animation here.

If you’d like our help to get a little animated, get in touch via our contact page.