Animated Guides.

Your product does something clever, but the people who need to understand it keep glazing over. A wall of text, a dense diagram, a support agent repeating the same six steps on every call. An animated guide takes the part of your product or process that confuses people and turns it into a short, watchable sequence they actually finish. We build these at our Southbank studios in London, combining green-screen presenting, motion graphics and clear scripting so the viewer reaches the moment of understanding without you having to be in the room.

What an animated guide actually is

It is a short film, usually one to three minutes, that walks someone through how a thing works. That might be how to set up your software, how a claims process flows from start to finish, how an API call moves data between systems, or how a customer goes from sign-up to first result. The animation does the heavy lifting that a screenshot cannot. Arrows move, labels appear at the right second, a process diagram builds one step at a time so the viewer is never staring at the finished picture wondering where to look. Where it helps, a presenter shot on our green screen sits inside the graphics to give the guide a human face and keep attention from drifting.

How we make it at Disruptive Live

We start with the script, because a guide that animates beautifully but explains the wrong thing is wasted money. We sit down with whoever knows the product best, pull out the steps in the order a real user meets them, and cut everything that is not load-bearing. Then we storyboard, so you can see and approve the flow before a single frame is animated. If a presenter is involved, we record them on the green-screen floor with an autocue, so the words land cleanly and nobody has to memorise a script under studio lights. Motion graphics, captions and your brand styling are built around that spine. You review a first cut, give notes, and we deliver final files in the formats you need.

What you get

• A scripted, storyboarded animated guide, typically one to three minutes, built to one clear learning goal
• Custom motion graphics in your brand colours, fonts and logo, not a stock template
• Optional green-screen presenter segments shot at our London studio with professional autocue
• Burned-in captions plus a clean subtitle file, so the guide works on silent autoplay and meets accessibility expectations
• A clear voiceover, recorded properly, with the option of your own staff or a professional read
• Exports cut for the places you will actually use it, from your website and help centre to LinkedIn and YouTube
• Source-friendly delivery so a single guide can be re-versioned later without rebuilding from scratch

Where an animated guide earns its place

Onboarding is the obvious one. A new customer who watches a ninety-second guide and gets a working result is a customer who does not open a support ticket on day one. Sales teams use them to explain a technical product to a buyer who will not read the documentation. Internal teams use them to roll out a new system or compliance process to hundreds of staff without booking hundreds of training hours. Product launches use them to show, rather than tell, what changed. If you find yourself explaining the same thing over and over in person, that explanation is a guide waiting to be made once and reused everywhere.

Why this beats a slide deck or a written manual

A PDF manual is cheap to make and expensive in every other way. People skim it, miss the step that matters, and call you anyway, so the cost just moves to your support line and never shows up on an invoice. A recorded screen-share with someone talking over it feels quick, but it ages badly, wanders, and rarely matches your brand. An animated guide costs more up front and then keeps paying back every time someone watches it instead of asking a human. It controls exactly what the viewer sees at each moment, it carries your brand properly, and it does not get tired of answering the same question on the hundredth viewing.

Common questions

How long does one take to produce?

For a single guide, plan on a few weeks from approved script to final files. Scripting and your sign-off on the storyboard take the most calendar time, because that is where we make sure we are explaining the right thing in the right order. Once the storyboard is approved, animation and any studio recording move quickly. If you have several guides in a series, we can batch the studio day and share design elements across them, which brings the per-guide time and cost down.

Do we need to provide a script and a presenter?

No. You provide the knowledge, we provide the craft. We are happy to interview your subject expert and write the script for you, then have it checked back with your team for accuracy. A presenter is entirely optional. Plenty of effective guides are pure motion graphics with a voiceover. If you do want a face on camera, we can use one of your people on our green-screen floor or arrange a professional presenter.

Can you keep it on brand?

Yes, and we would rather you held us to it. Send us your brand guidelines, fonts, colour palette and logo files, and the motion graphics are built to match. If you do not have formal guidelines, we will work from your website and existing materials so the guide looks like it came from you and not from a template library.

What if our product changes after the guide is made?

Products move, so we build guides to be updated. Because we keep the project assets, a changed screen, a renamed button or a new step can usually be re-versioned without starting again. It is worth telling us at the briefing stage which parts of your product are most likely to change, so we can structure the guide to make those edits painless later.

If you are weighing this up, the easiest next step is a short conversation about the one process or feature people most often get stuck on. Come in for a walkthrough of the Southbank studio, or have a quick call, and we will sketch out what a guide for that specific problem would look like before you commit to anything.