Fourteen places a short animated film earns its keep

The test for whether a film is worth making is not "would this look good" but "how many times will somebody have to explain this, and to how many people". If the answer is more than a handful, the film is cheaper than the explaining.

Explaining the product

• The sixty-second version of your front page. Most visitors do not read; a film can be watched.
• A process nobody can see. Logistics, settlement, a supply chain, a data flow, anything where the value is in the sequence.
• The thing that is hard to believe. Numbers, scale, speed. Motion makes a claim concrete.
• A comparison. Two ways of doing something, side by side, in fifteen seconds.

Selling and being bought

• A tender or a bid. A film survives the meeting you were not in.
• An investor update. The same film, every quarter, is a series people recognise.
• A trade fair loop. It runs while you talk to somebody else, and it is in your colours, not the venue's.
• A price explained. What is included and what is not, without a table nobody reads.

Inside the organisation

• Onboarding. The same twenty minutes, told identically to every new person.
• Safety and compliance. The one place where being watched to the end actually matters.
• A change nobody is happy about. A new system, a merger, a move, explained once, calmly, in advance.
• Internal training that keeps being re-run. A film does not get bored of the fifth group.

Where nobody expects it

• Recruitment. What the job actually is, before the first interview.
• A press or analyst backgrounder. The facts, in a form that can be embedded and quoted.

How to tell if yours is worth it

Count the explanations. If the same five sentences are being said by three different people, in slightly different ways, to rooms of different sizes, you have a film. If the answer is "it would be nice to have", wait, a bad film is a permanent explanation of the wrong thing.