Institute for Apprenticeships Explainer Animation

The Institute for Apprenticeships wanted to improve the Skills System, so asked the people directly involved in it to find out how it could be improved, as part of #TheBigConversation.

#TheBigConversation is a chance for employers, providers, business representative bodies, apprentices and anyone else who uses or is affected by technical qualifications to give their views and help shape the skills system.

The findings would then be quantified and put into a report, to be released in March 2023.

Defining what the Skills System is was important to the campaign around #TheBigConversation, so an explainer animation to break down the information into its most simple form was a key element.

Explainer animations are the perfect way to convey a set of complicated information in a format that allows a wide range of people to understand it and engage with it.

The problem that the Institute for Apprenticeships faced was that there might not be a universal understanding of what the Skills System is by their definition.

This could be caused by the fact that the Skills System is made up of a number of specific components and that there hadn’t been an in depth discussion with apprenticeship providers regarding the Skills System previous to #TheBigConversation.

The impact of this would be that people would be giving feedback on something they don’t really understand, or more likely not give feedback because of the lack of understanding. For the best survey results, the Institute needed the most reliable results to bring about the most effective change.

Not only do explainer animations mean that your information is more easily accessible and digestible to a wider audience, but it’s also easily distributable.

Once you have an explainer animation, you simply have to upload it to your website and YouTube channel, then you have a link to send to people, rather than having to type out lengthy emails defining the Skills System.

After approaching us with the idea of an explainer animation, we went back with an initial storyboard that would outline key parts of the video and how to display the components of the Skills System.

Once we had agreed upon the final explainer animation and elements such as the voiceover, we then created different sizes of the video that could be distributed across various digital and social media channels.

This shortened, square version can be used across social media channels.

Once the video had been created, it could be sent out to the Institute’s database, embedded onto their website and shared across their other online platforms.

Preeti, who led the project, said

“It’s always fun to work on a NHS project, as making an informative explainer animation is quite rewarding. For this, we lowered the frame rate to give the animation more character. It’s something that we don’t get to do very often but I personally love the stylisation of it.”