In a world overflowing with content, keeping users engaged is essential. That’s where animations help by breathing life into your story.
Animations wield a powerful emotional impact, skillfully using visual elements like color, movement, and character expressions to weave compelling narratives. These elements are harmoniously blended to evoke specific emotions, effectively communicating stories that resonate with audiences.
In this article, we’ll cover eight tips and tricks to animate your stories. By the end of it, you’ll know how to turn ordinary stories into memorable animations your audience will never forget.
Let’s dive in.
1. Graphs and charts for brand stories
The ’About Us’ pages aren’t cut it anymore. To wow your audience, it’s time to tell your brand story through engaging animated videos.
90% of video marketers say video has helped them increase brand awareness. A captivating animation can elevate a user’s experience, leaving a memorable mark on your audience. It also has amazing reuse value.
Animated videos can be repurposed in the following ways:
- Used as engaging social media content
- Embedding on your website
- Put on YouTube
Pro tip: Use a video editor to chop them into smaller clips for Instagram stories or TikTok videos
Getting users to concentrate on facts and figures is one of the hardest parts of content creation. Weaving statistics into a narrative contextualizes them, and with animation effects, you can take things a notch higher.
Animated bar graphs are a compelling storytelling tool, especially when illustrating performance increases over time.
By transforming static data into a dynamic visual narrative, these animations can captivate users, guiding them through a journey of growth and progress.
Like the above bar graph, where each bar smoothly rises, it visually represents an upward trend in performance metrics. This simple animation holds the viewer’s attention and makes the data more relatable and understandable.
In fact, modern marketing books emphasize the pivotal role of visuals in breaking down complex information into more digestible tidbits. By animating stories with graphics and other elements, marketers can encapsulate complex messages into engaging, visually stimulating experiences.
2. Animated diagrams for children’s stories
Animated design elements help children recall and remember things over static images — at least according to a 2016 study.
Your design team should consider using animations in children’s stores, particularly those designed to educate and entertain.
For example, the animation below would be a great starting point if you wanted to help children understand the Earth, where it sits in our solar system, how it rotates around our sun, and so on.
3. Timelines for history books
Study the history of anything, and you’ll find it’s full of rich details. Sometimes, online course creators might wonder how to condense a historical event to communicate its key parts — here’s where animated timelines help.
Animations like the above are easily editable. Simply swap out the icons (we have plenty of them) and edit the text. This will help students visualize the chronological order of events in an easily digestible manner before creators go into the meat of things.
4. Expressions for emotional storytelling
As that saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Complementing text with animations brings a story to life. You can use this to great effect when expressing emotions. For example, when communicating happiness, you may use words like “overjoyed” and “ecstatic.”
But when paired with the animation, the real sense of happiness is communicated. Take the below, for instance, which can be used to express friends being reunited.
Such animations help readers paint a picture in their heads, which makes the entire novel memorable.
5. Communicating abstract concepts
We love writing and reading stories because it lets our imaginations run wild. Authors can bring any idea or concept to life.
The challenge? Using words to help readers grasp something abstract or nonexistent in the real world. Especially the latter, because how do you help someone visualize something that doesn’t exist?
Say a mythical beast is running loose as the characters of your story go camping. You can bring this animated character to life by setting the scene visually.
Animations help readers imagine your characters differently from characters from other books they may have read — even if they’re the same — such as animal characters used across a wide range of books (like goblins and elves).
6. Animations to set the mood
If a character has set out on a journey, you can help your readers set the mood.
Whether they are driving on a dark stormy night or casually venturing through country roads, the animations pull the reader into each scene.
[Design: design that uses this animation idea[Embed this animation]
7. Using text-to-speech
Text-to-speech (TTS) is a powerful tool that can take your animations to the next level.
How? By incorporating TTS into your animations, you can:
- Ensure accessibility for all viewers (including those with visual impairments)
- Convey a wide range of emotions through the tone and style of speech
- Easily cater to a global audience by supporting multiple languages
- Generate custom sound effects to add depth to your scenes
- Offer clear and engaging narration to guide your audience
- Bring characters to life with unique voices
TL;DR. TTS allows you to create immersive and inclusive animated stories that captivate and resonate with your audience.
8. Integrating animations into existing apps and tools
You might already be using apps and tools that support animation integrations, such as:
Thankfully, your animation process is more seamless with the help of LottieFiles plugins or integrations.
Wrapping up
With Lottie, you no longer need to be a professional animator, exhaust your creative juices, or resign yourself to using boring stock videos.
Our library of free and premium animations is everything you need to overcome the designer’s block and find inspiration for any type of story — be it social media, a book, or a commercial brand video.
Our animations are editable and available to export in a variety of formats, including JSON, PNG, and SVG.
There’s no harm in checking out what Lottie could do to superpower your stories!
