Animation with ''In A Nutshell''

I decided to research explainer motion graphic videos. They are explainer animations which use the type of visuals you often see in infographics. They can express a lot of complicated information,

in a small package. Usually they are fun, upbeat, and sure to get the point across. Many different kinds of companies, and organizations, benefit from making them.

Some design studios focus mainly just making these kinds of animations. The one design studio like that is Kurz Gesagt, which is German, and can be translated to their English title ‘’In A Nutshell’’. They are quite well known from their Youtube channel and have over ten million subscribers there. Quite recently Kurzgesagt uploaded a video explaining Corona-virus which became the most viewed video on the channel with over 28 million views.

I can say from personal experience, that their videos will easily make you go down in an endless rabbit-hole, where you click one video after another. The topics make you curious, and the animation is very appealing to the eye and has very smooth and creative transitions. The illustrations are packed with bright colors and clean shapes. There are a lot of diagrams and information to grasp, but the flow of the animation makes it very engaging. Some of the videos are lighter on their topics, and some of them are explaining extremely complex things, and make you question your whole existence.

They still don’t want to be too serious with their videos. Their signature characters are little birds who guide you through the video and keep things more light.

In a nutshell makes their main content live for free. They still need income from somewhere, so over the years they have relied on a number of different things to stay afloat. Still their most important source of income, is from their viewers directly, like from their Patreon supporters.

Trust?

Explaining complex things, in as simple way as possible, is an ambitious and tough thing to do. They want to give fact based answers but it hasn’t always worked. They even have a video about this, admitting they have had their moments, when not always sufficient research was carried out for the videos. They can be biased towards some topics, and are working on overcoming them.

Workflow of creating their animations

1.Topic

First what they need is the topic. They usually have a lot of ideas where to start already or they make videos on what their audience asks them in their channel.

2. Script

They read a lot of books & scientific papers and talk to different experts about the topics. First rough script is written and edited over and over again until they are happy with it.

3. Illustration

Then it’s time to create storyboards and draw every element for the videos. They use Adobe Illustrator for that. A small team of animators works on illustrating over 200 panels of one video.

4. Narration

When the whole video is illustrated the narration is recorded.

5. Animation

Then it’s time for the animation. Kurz Gesagt creates their animations using Adobe After Effects. They are also experimenting 4D modeling with Cinema 4D to add more depth into their characters.

6. Music & Sound Design

After the music and sound design, the video is ready to be published. In the end the process is not really that diagonal though. They review and tweek the content a lot until it feels just right. Then they finally upload the new video.

And that's around One Thousand and Two Hundred hours (1200) of work for single ‘’In a Nutshell’’ Explainer Video!

Me studying animation and making a piece of animation with their tips:

I really wanted to experiment with their style of animation, and started to plan a little explainer animation myself, based on how they do the work.
On a much smaller scale of course. :D

They have some videos on Youtube where they nicely explain their workflow and the programs they use.

They also sell their animation skills in Skillshare, in a video series called Motion Graphics With Kurz gesagt. There’s a Seven day free trial in Skillshare, which became quite handy to me. :)