Explainer Videos in Ireland

Explainer video production for Irish organisations

An explainer video does one job: it explains a single thing clearly enough that the viewer gets it first time. What your service does. How a scheme works. Why somebody should book, apply, sign up or change a habit. We make animated explainer videos in our Dublin studio for public bodies, universities and businesses across Ireland.

The best known of them is the HSE Psychology First series, four short explainers on calm, low mood, loss and stress, written by HSE psychologists and rolled out nationally. You can watch them further down this page.

What makes an explainer video work

Almost always, the script. A good explainer says less than its first draft, in plainer words, in an order that matches the question the viewer arrived with. The animation can make a clear script memorable. It cannot rescue a muddled one.

So the first thing we do with any explainer video is read the script out loud against the clock. Narration runs at about 130 words a minute. A three hundred word draft is roughly two and a half minutes, which surprises people who were thinking of a sixty second video. Better to find that out now than after the voiceover is recorded.

The second thing is to ask what the viewer sees at each line. A sentence like “she notices her breathing settle” takes seconds to write and a whole scene to draw. We ask for the script back with a column describing the visuals, so everyone agrees on the film before it is animated.

Explainer video styles

Most explainers fall into one of three styles, and the right one depends on the subject more than on taste.

2D character animation puts people on screen. It is the warmest of the three and the best when you want viewers to recognise themselves, which is why the HSE series uses it.

Motion graphics use type, icons and data with no characters. They suit software, statistics, financial products and anything that needs to look clean and corporate.

Whiteboard explainer videos draw the idea on screen as the voiceover talks. They are very good for processes, where the viewer has to follow a sequence of steps.

We also make mixed explainers that combine screen recordings of your software or website with animated callouts, which work well for product demos and tutorials.

An explainer video company in Dublin, working nationally

The studio is in Smithfield, Dublin 7, but most explainer projects run perfectly well online. Our clients include the HSE, University College Dublin, the University of Limerick and Benecol, and reviews happen over a shared link and a call.

If you work in the public sector, it may be useful to know that the University of Limerick awarded us their recruitment film on compared quotes and set us up as an approved supplier, invoicing against a purchase order. We also learned on the HSE project that health service devices block some file sharing sites, so we plan draft delivery around that from the start.

Pricing an explainer video

We quote from the final script word count, not from a duration you pick. That way the quote matches the film you actually get. Style, voiceover, music, revision rounds and extra versions such as subtitles, translations or vertical cuts all affect the figure, and we list each one so you can see where the money goes.

Send us your script, or tell us what the video needs to explain, and we will reply with a price and a schedule. For the full range of animation we make, see video production in Ireland.