The 8 Steps of the Animated Explainer Video Process (Full Guide 2026)

Hi, I’m Victor Blasco, Co-founder of Yum Yum Videos. Over the last 14 years, my team and I have produced over 1,000 animated explainer videos for the US market. We’ve learned a thing or two along the way.

As you might guess, our animated explainer video process didn’t just stay the same. We tweaked it and optimized it over time to get the absolute best results—balancing top-tier quality with smart production times.

The idea behind this article is to walk you through exactly how our explainer video production process works. Whether you just want to learn how it’s done, or you’re about to start your own project and need to know what to expect, this guide is for you.

Who is this guide for?

Marketers, SEOs, founders, and startups thinking about making an explainer video. If you want to understand the inner workings and what to expect during production, keep reading.

What Makes the Explainer Video Process Different from a Regular Animation Process?

I’ve produced several animated series, TV pilots, and animated commercials in my career. But let me tell you, the explainer video process is a completely different beast. The storytelling goes in another direction, and you have to focus on entirely different things.

When you look at a standard animation process:

• Highly technical scripts and storyboards: They are built strictly to help professional animators do their job.
• Hyper-focus on continuity: A lot of the animation steps involve tracking camera movements, backgrounds, and visual continuity to avoid errors. These just aren’t big priorities in an explainer video.
• Dialogue-heavy mechanics: Since there usually isn’t a single “narrator,” the team has to deal with complex lip-syncing, mouth sets, and deep character acting.

On the flip side, the explainer video process requires a different mindset:

• Simplified for Marketers and CEOs: We need our clients to easily pre-visualize the video so they can give feedback and imagine the final product. This completely changes how the script and storyboard look and read.
• Abstract and corporate focus: It relies heavily on motion graphics and design. We spend less time worrying about specific character facial expressions, camera rotations, or continuity, and more time on the core message.
• Narration drives the action: The voice-over dictates both the timing and the overall “acting” of the video. That rarely happens in traditional animated series or commercials.

The Explainer Video Process Timeline (TL;DR)

Don’t have time to read the whole breakdown right now? Here is a quick look at the stages and how long they actually take.

I broke this down into 8 clear phases. These are the stages our clients actually see. We handle a lot more internally—like file prep and micro-corrections—but if you’re a marketer, CEO, or founder, you don’t need to get bogged down in those technical weeds. Let’s get right into it!

Step 1: Research and Kick-off Call

Before we officially start the explainer video process, we ask our clients to fill out a creative brief. Then, we jump on a kick-off call with the project’s art director and scriptwriter. You simply can’t produce a video if you don’t know the exact message, the goals, and the company’s vision. This is the bedrock of your video’s storytelling. We need to nail down the core idea right here before we do anything else.

Expert Tip: If you partner with a professional explainer video company, they absolutely must have a kick-off call. If they don’t, you aren’t getting a custom job. The animation might turn out fine, but it will lack the tailored details your video needs to actually drive business results.

Production Time: 1 day.

Choosing the right partner matters as much as the process itself. If you’re still comparing vendors, you can also check our guide to the best explainer video companies to understand what to look for before hiring one.

Step 2: The Script

In traditional animation, scripts focus heavily on visual cues. But in our explainer video process, we focus mostly on the voice-over. Our videos aren’t always linear and rely heavily on design, so an explainer video script full of notes like “a square flies in and morphs into a wavy curve” doesn’t help anyone. Instead, we zero in on the narration to highlight three main things: What (hooking the viewer quickly and stating the problem), How (showing how your product solves it), and Why (building trust so they choose your company).

Regarding AI: Yes, tools like Gemini or ChatGPT can write a “correct” script. But let me be honest—you don’t want to aim for mediocrity. This video will represent your brand thousands of times. You definitely don’t want it falling flat in front of C-level executives, investors, or potential clients.

Expert Tip: We use a simple rule of thumb: 140 words in English equals exactly one minute of animation. Use this to easily check if your script is getting too long or staying punchy.

Production Time: 2-3 days for a 60 to 90-second script.

Step 3: The Storyboard

A standard animation storyboard is loaded with complex camera movements and internal notes meant only for production crews. At Yum Yum Videos, we simplify things. We build our storyboards so our clients can easily read them with simple directions like “zoom in.” We want you to see and approve every stage of the explainer video process. The last thing we want is to confuse you with a messy, overly technical document. Usually, we put 9 frames on a page, with the director’s notes and the voice-over text right underneath each frame to set the rhythm.

With this piece we made for Amazon, you can get a clear picture of how the storyboard becomes a video:

Rookie Director Mistake: Leaving way too much voice-over on a single visual frame. You might not notice it on paper, but once the video is finished, that shot feels like it lasts forever, and the video becomes boring. Keep the visuals moving so the audience stays hooked.

Production Time: 1 week for a 60-second storyboard.

Step 4: Voice-Over

We actually handle this step in parallel with the storyboard. We use platforms like Bunny Studio to find native voice actors for the target country. About 90% of our clients are in the US, but we often get requests for British English, or languages for the Philippines, Korea, Qatar, and many others. We’ve even translated a single video into 9 different languages during our explainer video process. As for AI voice-overs, I’d only consider them right now if you literally have zero budget. The spirit, force, and cadence a human brings is entirely different from an AI. People notice the difference.

Expert Tip: Translating a video into another language isn’t just about swapping words. We learned this the hard way translating a project into Arabic. The language naturally takes longer to speak, so a 90-second video suddenly stretched to nearly 2 minutes. You have to adapt the pacing, not just synchronize it.

Production Time: 1 day.

Step 5: Style Frames and Moodboard

Like I mentioned about the kick-off call, our art director meets with you to talk about the visual direction. We build a moodboard packed with ideas, references, and color palettes to lock in the aesthetic. Once you approve that, along with the storyboard, we deliver three style frames. This is where you finally see what the characters, backgrounds, and props will look like in full color and quality. We don’t move to the next stage until you are completely happy with them.

Expert Tip: Both the moodboard and the style frames save you massive headaches down the road. They let you visualize the final product early on. Imagine getting all your final illustrations—or worse, the finished video—and realizing you hate how the main character looks. Changing the protagonist at that point means re-drawing and re-animating everything they touch. That easily causes a 20% spike in budget and massive delays, just because you didn’t catch it early.

Production Time: 2 to 3 days (We usually do this in parallel with the storyboard so it doesn’t eat up extra time).

Step 6: Illustrations

Once the storyboard and style frames get your green light, we start illustrating. My team builds everything in vector formats (like in Adobe Illustrator) and separates them into layers. I’ll be honest, this part is highly technical and probably won’t interest you at all. The bottom line is we get all the visual assets ready to move. Regarding AI illustrations: if a professional artist uses AI to test quick variations or sketch ideas, that’s fine. But the final assets always need to be built on original art. Letting an AI generate the visuals alone means you get something people have seen a million times. It won’t have the original punch a professional explainer video requires.

Expert Tip: Don’t skip the layering process. If your team or agency tries to animate flat images without properly breaking down the character joints and background elements into distinct layers, the final movement will look incredibly cheap.

Production Time: 1 week for a 60-second video.

Step 7: Animation

It’s exactly as simple as it sounds. We take every single element from the previous steps and make them move. This is the core engine of the explainer video production process. Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: AI animation. The landscape changes every single day, but I’ll give it to you straight. Right now, you just don’t have enough control. If you try to animate a custom character with current AI video tools, it looks weird. We still lack professional AI tools specifically focused on precise, controllable character animation.

Expert Tip on Evaluating Animation: When you get a video draft to check, look closely at the characters. Do they feel alive? If the video is poorly made, background characters will move like robots, or the protagonist will freeze with the same exaggerated face for too long. Imagine they are real people. Do they look like stiff puppets? Your target audience needs to feel represented and identified in the video, and that goes straight in the trash if your characters move like androids.

As part of the final stages of animation production, all creative digital assets and individual frames go through rendering. This is where the illustrations, animation, transitions, effects, and timing are combined into a single video file according to the animator’s specifications.

Production Time: 1 week for a 60-second video.

Step 8: Music and Sound FX

We usually show our clients a few music track options and build custom sound FX to give the video more impact. In an explainer video, the music should be something simple that pleasantly accompanies the story or highlights specific emotions. But remember, this isn’t a blockbuster movie. The music and sound effects shouldn’t steal the spotlight. What about AI music? Sure, it could work. But there are great platforms where amazing professionals license their music for very cheap. You get a high-quality track made by a human. It’s just not worth the time and energy to use AI to save a few bucks on the cheapest part of the whole animation process.

Rookie Mistake: Never let the music and sound FX compete with the voice-over’s volume. If you crank the music too high, people won’t understand what’s being said. Imagine an investor watching your video to decide if they’ll drop millions on your product, and they can’t even hear the pitch. Priorities matter. This is a corporate video with clear goals, and the message needs to be crystal clear.

Production Time: 1 to 2 days.

A Quick Note on Client Review Times: After step 8, everything comes together and you have a finished video ready to publish. But keep in mind, the times I listed above are strictly production times. When you plan your project, remember that you need to review and approve each stage. That takes time—usually 1 to 2 days per review on your end. At Yum Yum Videos, we give you multiple rounds of revisions. So, you can easily add at least 8 extra days to the timeline just waiting for feedback, plus the time it takes us to actually implement the changes you asked for.

Expert Advice for Your Next Animated Video Project

I didn’t want to wrap up this guide without giving you some personal advice. If you’re heading into an animated explainer video process soon, keep these details in mind. They will save you serious time and money.

1. Cheap Costs a Lot Some people don’t realize it, but these videos will represent you thousands—maybe millions—of times. It’s one of the very first impressions you give to the world.

If your video is poorly made, badly animated, or just “okay,” you are leaving money on the table. Let me give you a concrete example. Medvector made two whiteboard videos with us. Each explainer video costs around $10,000 (so they spent $20,000 total). By using them in their pitches, they secured $3.5 Million in investments. You can see the full breakdown in our MedVector fundraising video case study.

If they had gone for a cheaper, lower-quality video, it likely wouldn’t have worked so well. Let’s imagine a cheap video cost half the price, but performed just 10% worse than ours. In that scenario, Medvector would have lost $350,000 in investments, all to save $10,000. Think about that ROI.

2. Spend Time Today to Save Money Tomorrow Take your time to review and correct the early stages, like the script and storyboard. Once the animation process actually starts, changing a fundamental idea from step one means redoing everything. That boils down to two words: Time and Money.

It’s always better to take a few extra days, look at everything closely, and only approve it when you are 100% sure. We don’t see this happen often in our pipeline because we offer multiple rounds of revisions and never move forward until we get full approval. But when clients do change their minds late in the game, it usually means a 20% spike in budget and timeline that could have been easily avoided.

3. Not Everything Belongs in Your Script Explainer videos need to quickly explain the core value of your product or service. Do not try to cram absolutely every single feature into the script. That is exactly what your website is for, or you can just make a series of videos.

A video that drags on means fewer people will watch it to the end. You lose valuable opportunities. There are always exceptions, but we normally recommend keeping your videos under 2 minutes. Ninety seconds is the sweet spot.

Wrapping Up

As the CEO of Yum Yum Videos, I’ve watched thousands of companies go through this process. Some fail by cutting corners, and others soar by doing it right. Over the last 14 years, we’ve had the privilege of creating over 1,000 videos for global giants like Amazon, Walmart, and McKesson, while helping startups like Accelerant and Chargebee become actual unicorns.

You don’t want to gamble with your brand’s first impression. Whether you are ready to start tomorrow or just want to bounce some ideas around for your next project, [let’s talk].