Explainer videos earn their place by making complex things simple without making them boring.
Whether you’re introducing a product, launching a service, or telling your company’s story, a well-made explainer gets the message across faster than a page of copy. The format works because it combines three things: a clear narrative, visuals that carry meaning, and a call to action that tells the viewer what happens next.
Here is the full production pipeline, in the order it actually runs.
Step 1: Define Your Objective
Before anything gets designed or written, decide what the video is for. Educating people about a new product, building brand awareness, and driving sales are three different videos — not one video that does all three.
Then define the audience. Who are you trying to reach, and what do they already know? Age, role, industry, and the specific problem they’re trying to solve all change how the script gets written.
Finally, set the benchmark. More site traffic, more demo requests, fewer support tickets — pick the number you’ll judge the video by before you spend anything on it.
Step 2: Research and Gather Information
Good explainers are researched, not improvised. Look at how competitors are explaining the same category — it tells you what’s already saturated and where you can be clearer than everyone else.
Then go to the source. Customer interviews, support tickets, and sales call notes surface the actual objections and confusions worth addressing. Collect the facts and figures you’ll need to back up the claims. The more you know about the person watching, the sharper the video gets.
Step 3: Write a Compelling Script
The script is where the video is won or lost. Structure it in three parts: an opening that earns attention and frames the problem, a body that delivers the substance and addresses the viewer’s pain points, and a close that names the next step.
Cut the jargon. Write short sentences. If a line can be removed without losing meaning, remove it — every extra second costs you viewers.
Step 4: Develop a Storyboard
The storyboard is the script on paper. It maps scene flow so you can see how the video moves before anyone starts animating.
Rough sketches are enough — this is not the stage for polished artwork. What the storyboard has to prove is that each visual supports the point being made, and that one scene leads logically into the next. Catching a structural problem here costs an afternoon. Catching it in animation costs a week.
Step 5: Design the Visuals
Keep the video on brand throughout. Whether the tone is playful, serious, or minimal, pick one and let it drive the characters, backgrounds, and transitions.
Use colour and type deliberately. Colour sets emotional tone and separates scenes; typography needs to stay legible at mobile sizes. Consistency is what makes a video feel produced rather than assembled.
Step 6: Record a Professional Voiceover
A professional voiceover changes how the whole video lands. Choose the voice to match the content — confident and authoritative for a technical product, warm and approachable for a consumer service.
Audio quality is non-negotiable. Poor sound undermines good visuals faster than the reverse. Viewers forgive a rough frame; they don’t forgive a voiceover that sounds like it was recorded in a stairwell.
Step 7: Animate the Storyboard
Animation is where the script and the boards become a video. Focus on transitions and pacing — movement should carry the eye from one idea to the next.
Restraint matters here. The goal is to make the information stand out, not to bury it under effects. If an animation isn’t clarifying something, it’s competing with the narration.
Step 8: Add Music and Sound Effects
Music sets the tempo and the mood; sound effects punctuate transitions and draw attention to specific moments on screen.
Watch the levels. Dialogue has to stay clearly audible over the bed — the most common mistake in a first cut is music mixed loud enough to fight the voiceover.
Step 9: Review and Revise
Before the video ships, get it in front of people who weren’t in the room during production. Stakeholders and team members who see it cold will catch things you’ve stopped noticing.
Then revise properly. Detail work at this stage — a timing fix, a clearer label, a tightened line of narration — is what separates a competent video from a polished one.
Step 10: Publish and Promote
Distribution is part of the production plan, not an afterthought. Your website, social feeds, and YouTube each want a different cut, a different aspect ratio, and a different first three seconds.
Optimise for search: keywords in the title, description, and tags, plus a transcript where the platform supports it. Then track views, watch-through rate, and conversions so the next video starts with data instead of assumptions.
Conclusion
Producing an explainer video is a process, not a burst of creativity. It starts with a defined purpose and ends with distribution and measurement.
Every stage carries weight — research, script, boards, design, voice, animation, sound, review. Follow the ten steps and you end up with a video that holds attention and makes the argument clearly.
Planning one? Tell us what you’re trying to explain and we’ll give you a straight read on scope and format.