Whiteboard Animation
Inventing the Art of Clarity: How We Pioneered Whiteboard Animation to Simplify Complex Ideas.
Our Founder Andrew Park is credited with pioneering the use of whiteboard animation for RSA Animate. This combination of recorded real-time drawing, illustration, and voiceover to explain complex concepts became a hallmark of whiteboard animations. The style gained widespread attention around 2007. These 10 minute-long animations, which feature hand-drawn illustrations synced with thought-provoking talks, brought whiteboard animation to the mainstream, creating a viral sensation and launching a new medium and industry. Some of these videos include work by notable thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson and Daniel Pinker.
If you want to harness the power of Whiteboard Animation to simplify your complex story, obviously, you’ve come to the right place! Since inventing and innovating the medium we have been honing our craft since 2008.
How can whiteboard animation help you?
Whiteboard Animation: The tools of our trade
Whiteboard animation is an organic process. Like any creative process, new ideas and technology have informed our storytelling methodology over the 16 years since we made our very first one. Sometime these steps have been incremental and at other times we have made giant leaps.
Leveraging the learning environment
Whiteboard animation taps into something we all recognise from our days at school. Whether it was a blackboard or whiteboard, we’ve all been in that space where ideas come to life visually. This format naturally engages our minds, putting us in “learning mode” and primed to absorb new knowledge and insights.
“Whiteboard animation’s roots draw from traditional animation, visual communication, comic strips and graphic facilitation, but it was the rise of YouTube helped solidify its place as a valuable storytelling and educational tool.”
Framing the detail in context
We like to make sure that we can zoom in and out of your content, focusing on the details where necessary and keeping a sense of that big picture, contextual narrative in the audience’s minds. This creates a joined-up thinking approach
The Guiding Hand
The hand in our whiteboard animations serves several functions. An artist, a teacher, a guide, and a magician. All of these functions create engagement and help to capture the audiences’ attention.
Unpacking information in space
Whiteboard animation taps into something we all recognise from our days at school. Whether it was a blackboard or whiteboard, we’ve all been in that space where ideas come to life visually. This format naturally engages our minds, putting us in “learning mode” and primed to absorb new knowledge and insights.
Humour as an emotion
Using humour in whiteboard animation, as our founder Andrew Park exemplified in his RSA Animates animations, adds a layer of accessibility that can enhance memory retention. Humour, when woven into complex ideas, not only makes the content more enjoyable but also taps into our emotional responses, helping viewers connect with and remember the information. By lightening dense topics, humour creates a sense of relief, allowing the viewer to engage more freely without feeling overwhelmed. Park’s approach shows how the right visual puns, comedic timing, and playful illustrations can transform abstract concepts into digestible, memorable moments, reinforcing learning in a way that sticks.
See some examples of whiteboard animation:
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