How to Tug at the Viewer's Heartstrings with Your Animations

Whether they call themselves filmmakers, painters or writers, great artists know how to make fiction come alive in front of the audiences’ eyes. “Show, don’t tell” has long been the imperative of those who create new worlds for the pleasure of others, and is one of the rules that successful content marketing strategies follow as well.

Online videos might not be as easy to make, but effective social media campaigns rely on them to engage those audiences that have no time, will or patience to read 2000 word long articles. Being just as informative and attention-grabbing or even more so, online videos will continue to pamper those who prefer to scroll faster and interact exclusively with moving pictures.

Marketing aside, engaging videos will always be among most consumed types of online content, which makes them quite suitable for effective storytelling. Regardless of purpose, you’ll need to make yours creative and innovative in order to stand out from the crowd.

If looking for something different, however, a factor that will inform, delight or do both at the same time, animations are your go-to solution. Here’s how to master them.
 
Shorter is Sweeter

Being an artist in the digital era is not the easiest thing in the world, let alone the most profitable. We’re constantly reminded of how indecisive and impatient our audiences have become, but still compelled to create under the pressure of the notoriously shrunken attention span. The last time anyone bothered to measure, it was 8 seconds long.

Consequently, that’s exactly how much time you have to catch somebody’s attention before it eventually bounces away. However brilliant, your animated video story depends on how you introduce it, which is why you’ll need every trick in the book to make the very beginning as exciting and engaging as possible.

Sad Stories & Happy Ends

By definition, attention “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others”; this means your video will have to deliver something powerful enough to silence all other thoughts and overshadow all other sources of distraction. And, what can be more powerful than emotion?

Psychologically speaking, four basic emotions that your story can and should trigger are happiness, sorrow, fear and anger. Each of them is quite potent for grabbing and retaining attention, while subtle combinations provide a truly emotionally intense ride. Though effective video editing services by video caddy can do wonders for the emotional impact of the overall story, most video-makers still choose a less risky alternative.

 
Awaken the Inner Child 

Ever wondered why children smile more often than adults? Wonderfully curious about the world that surrounds them, kids remain completely open toward all influences. Simply because they keep their inhibitory neurons off, catching their attention is so much easier than engaging adults.

Being initially created for children’s delight, animations return adults to less complicated phases of cognitive function. There’s something about animated characters that’s utterly lovely, infinitely interesting and, most importantly, harmless. By reintroducing adults with all these goofy cartoon companions, animated videos allow them to get in touch with their inner child, thus tapping straight into their long-hidden emotions.

Seeing, Hearing, Feeling

Still, emotional video stories need to affect different senses, while animations only trigger visual sensors. The choice of colors as well as the psychology behind them, allow masters of animation to suggest an endless number of messages, thus stimulating emotions on a deeper level. Apart from experiencing fictional worlds with their eyes, people often feel something only by listening.

Animated videos are quite suitable for emotional musical scores and sound effects as well. Though we are grow up now, most of us still remember – “A Whole New World” by heart and raise our cats in the air in celebration of the opening theme from Lion King. These Disney classics only prove what artist knew all along – appeal to a kid behind a man, and the man will crack open.


So, whether you’re trying to reach your bosses with a slideshow presentation or delight your social media neighborhood with another Totoro, keep in mind these simple motion design rules: squash and stretch to give your characters lifelike weight, delay action to keep them on the edge of their seats, communicate attitudes, moods and ideas through effective staging, time your action well and whatever you do, always exaggerate those big, lovely eyes.

Hidden Underlying Ideas of Animation

Who am I? Mr. Krabs? Not sure? I'm not hiding from you!

It is not a secret that the basis of successful animated cartoon is its idea. Idea is the core of the plot of the animated cartoon. You can express the idea with 2-3 sentences. Nevertheless, general result of animated film will be higher if its idea is enthralling.

The world of animation is mysterious and contains many secrets and hidden ideas. Not only children but also adults watch cartoons. We like to watch them in our free time but seldom think that funny running pictures have some king of hidden sense. Our aim in this article is to discover hidden underlying idea of animation by the example of some cartoons.


1. SpongeBob SquarePants. Let us start with the famous cartoon of Nickelodeon “SpongeBob SquarePants”. This cartoon is object of adoration and imitation by many children. However, do you know that every character of this cartoon symbolizes one of the seven mortal sins? Audio comments to the episode “Plankton” on DVD with first season of cartoon series prove this fact. Every hero got one sin. Can you guess which one got every character?

Mr. Krabs is impersonation of greediness. Avid chef of SpongeBob impersonates himself black side of capitalistic system. Mr. Krabs thinks nothing else but profit, economizes on all and even sings a song that how he loves money in one of the episodes.

Envy in the cartoon is Plankton. Plankton compensates his little size over and above with the help of huge envious ego not giving him a peace even for a minute. All his life is embodiment of plans about the ownership of krabsburgers’ secret recipe. According to his opinion, they are personation of all that, that he is unfairly deprived.

Laziness is Patrick Star. Patrick is so lazy that he lives under the stone, does not work and almost all the time sleeps or plays games. He even gets reward “For the biggest laziness than anyone other” in the episode “Big pink loser”.

Squirrel Sandy Cheeks has pridefulness. It is enough of one look at the squirrel in order to understand that it is impossible to find prouder creature. She is proud of her Texas origin and fact that she can live under the water and is always busy with self-improvement.

Anger is Squidward Tentacles. It is quite understandable explanation: Squidward does not rage on SpongeBob, Patrick, his job and life only when he sleeps.

Gluttony is another name of SpongeBob’s pet, Gary. Domestic pet of SpongeBob sleeps and meows. However, it meows because of hunger. Once when SpongeBob was not in time for feeding him, Gary ate off half of sofa. It managed to find yearly food reserve for sea snails in other episode and ate it at once becoming pathologically fatty.

The main character got lust. This analogy is the least obvious, as we get used to realize the word “lust” only in sexual meaning. Another meaning of word “lust” defines as “passionate wish of something”. SpongeBob is possessed by the lust of life and impressions. He passionately wishes that all like him and he quite often goes to all lengths for achieving of his aim.

2. Adventure Time. Another cartoon, which contains in itself hidden idea, is Adventure Time. The main characters of cartoon series are Finn and his friend, dog Jake. They live on the tree in magic country – The Land of Ooo. When they want, they save princesses from The Ice King, if they do not – they fool around. Adventure time amazes the imagination from the unexpected side. It is practically impossible to guess what will happen in the next moment. Cartoon series is direct inheritor of animation during psychedelic revolution.

Land of Ooo is magic world of developed childish consciousness, which has stopped in a footstep away from inevitable growing-up through the hell of pubescence and that is why does not understand its borders. Courage of imagination occupies all surroundings and stumbles only occasionally, when ruins of reality appear thanks to fictional landscapes. Ruins do this series unique.

The first shot of the title sequence hints that disaster happened in fairy-tale. Pushing off from swamped with industrial trash glade, show runs to the world of fantasy as well as frightened kid hides from fears in his consciousness. Spooky world of rusty machines, destroyed highways, flooded cities and burning deserts is shown from episode to episode on the background of engrossing adventures of childhood.

The world after doomsday has become the cartoon. If these were playful hints in the beginning, soon after they turned into main narrative line. We learn after the final episode of fourth season that boy, which is similar to Finn, sits on the debris of the broken adult world in backwoods. Our hero has mechanical prosthesis instead of arm and silent dog sits next to him.

It is not understandable what factors influenced on Finn in order him to leave the world of daydreams. However, it is correct to say that the reason is growing-up. Adventure time is one of those rare cartoons, where space bends under the flow of time and is dependent to the growing-up. The voice of Finn “breaks” in last seasons and kisses of princesses instead of adventures are in his thoughts. His universe becomes darker, more strange and complicated. His imagination just barely deals with its main function – defense from the hell of reality.

Ugliness of present time mostly leaks to the Land of Ooo. Disaster, which had happened once, got name “Great war of mushrooms”. Now we understand that the world of Finn is the space burned with nuclear strikes and radioactive rains. Enough time has passed after cataclysm in order ferroconcrete constructions to cover with grass and gene mutations to change existing forms of life. Finn is the only human in magic land “Ooo”. Other are creatures, whose qualities and ongoings are equal to the monsters of reality. They live in stand-alone enclaves and crowd together in tribes. Sure, imagination of the child processes all input data and creates own unique world where the best friend is mutant with dimensionless structure of the body and forbidden places are the most appropriate locations for adventures. Convertible notional “currency”, which Finn borrows from the present time is unavailable, but famed thanks to items of the past time childish happiness. So candies turn into kingdom, broken Gameboy – in universal gaming console and left in inheritance from the civilization technologies – in magic.

About the Author: Melisa Marzett is professional in the sphere of writing. She has unique writing style, which helps her to create masterpieces of art. Her blog-posts are great example for writers-newbies. Melisa works for http://resumeperk.com/ If you need help in writing of excellent papers then you should read her blog-posts.

How We Met And Compiled This Crazy Post

Here is the funny story of how we met, remember? I am a bug and your a bug and we both wanted to have the prettiest woman in the world as wife and they should be human being. And we decided to meditate in a cave and the Holy Spirit fullfilled our wish that changed us to be human being, wow!

And we wandered and started to learn how human beings behave and we acted as closely as them. We learned how to talk in pleasant manner and we learned courtesy as well. Nobody taught us and we turned out to be the greatest autodidact in the world. Look, it’s somehow funny to get stories of daily life and we just saw people met one another, how we saw the interactiion and it’s great to create a book which could becoe historical guidance later in the future. I wonder if you want to be librarian.

Then we focused on how to make our dream comes true, to meet the girls, our wives to-be. But, in fact it’s crazily difficult to get one. There’s nothing in the world as we expected, we just got lost in this American presidential campaign but we hated to talk about it, there’s no such thing to call funny story here, we just met problems and problems, and then we started a journey to India. We would like to meet pretty actors there and ask why Indians like singing and dancing. But there’s no answer. This stereotype was not we’re looking for.

Then how come, that idea appeared? We would like to go to a temple which has no iron elements in its structure, and no cement. The concrete was used only in the foundation. The rest was made of stone. Marble and granite for the construction was delivered from all over the world. It was processed using special technology, and then joint together. All pillars of the temple are stacked, and all stone elements are turned 90 degrees after being connected. It was done to provide seismic resistance in case of earthquakes, which sometimes happen in India. Imagine the level of precision required for stone processing to assemble this big "puzzle". Wow, we already became engineers here!

But we hadn’t started our journey yet, we thought about some other place, Taj Mahal? Is it funny if we don’t have money but have only dream? Wondering if only the story started here and we met here.

The Taj Mahal was built by a whopping 22,000 laborers, painters, stonecutters, embroidery artists. 2. Legend has it that Emperor Shah Jahan intended to build another Taj Mahal in black marble across the river but a war with his sons interrupted these plans. 3. The changing moods of the Emperors wife are well captured by the changing hues of the Mausoleum at different times of the day. It takes a pinkish hue in the morning, milky white in the evening and golden at night when illuminated by moonlight.

If you were a conglomerate, would you buy Taj Mahal? Maybe for your kid to play around? This going to be great.

But, wait, don’t you think all this is weird. Taj Mahal and the rest? It’s about a funny story of how we met, remember? But that point is missing. When? Where? On what occassion?

Forget it, we already made a unique post!