How to Bring Messages to Life without a Voice-Over

Engaging both the eyes and the ears is important when it comes to communicating your brand’s message, so we are used to seeing exciting visuals with an informative voice-over in order to market to both of these senses. But what if due to budget or localisation restraints you cannot use a voice-over in your animation?

Voice-overs can be great for telling the story of your business, but they aren’t the only way your animation can explain its purpose. The absence of a voice-over may even mean that your audience engages more with your video, as they must read and digest the information they are being fed visually.

Sound effects alone can add depth to the movement on screen. In the series of animations we created for UNIQA the videos are top and tailed with a voice-over, however the portion of the animation where the story unfolds uses clear and easily understandable visuals and sound effects instead. Characters communicate using images in speech bubbles, and the overall effect is very fun and easy to follow.
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Don’t underestimate the power of strong character animation in telling your story. Just like how we can understand what a mime or silent film actor is trying to communicate through a their performance, if an animated character shows clear gestures, movements, and expressions, we can easily understand their stories and motivations.

.If you do not have to worry about translating your video for foreign markets, you might want to consider pairing your visuals with onscreen text. You don’t want to overwhelm the viewer with too much copy as they will not have time to read it, but little snippets of text can actually add to the feel of the video if formatted in a way that matches the style of the piece. We produced an animation for the Commercial Bank of Qatar that shows how nicely animated text can benefit the visuals, and explain the message just as effectively as a voice-over.

Commercial Bank of Qatar – Car Loans from Sliced Bread Animation on Vimeo.

If you would like to find out more about how you can communicate your animation’s message without a voice-over, give us a call on +44 (0)207 148 0526 or contact us at info@dev.sbanimation.com.