How long would it take to create animations such as these?

[AnotherMe]

I really admire the animation this company creates: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheInfographicsShow/videos

I know I would have to design all the poses within Adobe Illustrator and bring them into Adobe After Effects. But would it be a time saver to bring them into Adobe Animator CC first as a means of speeding up the animation?

I'm wondering approximately how long it would take to make, say, a 2 minute video.

[Andrew Yoole]

I watched one or two of the videos you linked to, they are extremely simple in terms of the animation.  Just head wobbles and occasional arm moves etc.  The character and environment design is by far the hard part of these jobs.  i didn't see anything that warranted the use of Adobe Animator.

There are a ton of pre-built video components like these available for not much money, if you want to quickly build something without having to design it yourself.  Some samples:

https://videohive.net/item/explainer-video-toolkit-3/18812448?s_rank=2

https://videohive.net/item/explainer-world-essential-graphics-mogrt/22143852?s_rank=8

https://videohive.net/item/explainer-video-toolkit-2/9232039?s_rank=12

[A.I.1]

There are a ton of pre-built video components like these available for not much money

I'm not sure they're very good value for money seeing as the prices are between $49 and $58 for each product you produce. You also wouldn't be allowed to use them where the end user was charged. So if you wanted to use a few elements from the $58 package your final video delivered to a client would need to be >$58 to make a profit (some client's wouldn't want to spend so much). It wouldn't get any cheaper by using them in more projects (ie. you couldn't buy the package then use them in multiple projects without paying the $58 fee for each project). If you wanted to use some elements from all 3 packages in 1 project you'd have to pay the price of all 3 packages for that project (again the cost couldn't  get reduced by using them in more projects - if you want to be paid for those projects -  due to the license prices).

So though $49 or $58 may not sound like much, $49 or $58 (or more if using elements from >1 of the packages in 1 video) would be a lot when that's the price for their use in 1 end product.

[Andrew Yoole]

i'm not accustomed to working in the price range you mention.  $58 is less than I charge for one hour of work, so I don't relate to a process that might have a total production cost which is less than that.

I'm not saying that to be snobbish.  Obviously we all have different clients and different pricing models, depending on who we work for and what socio-economic situations we live in.  What may be expensive to you may be cheap to me, and vice versa.

But I hire people from all over the world to do work for me when I need to, and generally speaking the price is not so disparate that my post above is unreasonable.  I've hired editors in Los Angeles and 3D modellers in Ukraine.  Even if I hire the cheapest labour I can find from a country where wages are low, spending $50 on a template to save a few dozen hours of work is still cheap.

Templates are not a great way to work, and of course the best work is always done from scratch. But they are generally a cheap way to solve an urgent problem, especially for clients who can't afford to pay for bespoke animation.

[A.I.1]

Even if I hire the cheapest labour I can find from a country where wages are low, spending $50 on a template to save a few dozen hours of work is still cheap.

If you look at the cheapest sites (eg. Fiverr) for most of the explainer videos, the budget (where specified) for the majority of projects is under around $50 (and the seller only gets about 80% of the project price). That being the case, for those projects with those budgets (which are the majority of requests on that site) it wouldn't make sense for the seller to purchase a template that cost $50 for use on just 1 project.

Also if you spent the $50 approx on the template from that site, you wouldn't be able to give that template to the person you wanted to do the actual video because the license terms say it is for "yourself or for one client". You'd have to pay the seller an amount covering the cost of the template+the cost of their time etc. and hope they don't re-use (or aren't reusing) the template illegally.

If there are better value templates/stock items that would be better. But the license terms of the videohive site just seem way overpriced (since you can't use the templates etc. on multiple projects for the specified prices). The prices might only make more sense if you work on a much more expensive site.

[P.M.B]

I agree that for a beginner a $50 kit that you can only use in a single video is not the best choice.  I think a better way is a few carefully chosen vector sets from Adobe Stock which can then be manipulated to create different colors, styles, sizes etc..

[Rick Gerard]

Using existing graphics and keeping approximately the same style you’re probably looking at 1 to 2 hours per minute if you have only basic skills. If you are completely new to animation and After Effects, I would suggest you double or triple that amount. In other words for a newbie to create an eight minute animation (the approximate length of the one that I looked at) 16 to 40 hours.

Purchasing templates could cut that time in about half.

[P.M.B]

I agree with Andrew.  Not much animation happening here and the animation that is happening serves no purpose other than being a feeble attempt to keep the viewer from falling asleep & the assets look like stock assets to me.

As for how long it would take, that totally depends on experience.

For me, once I set up the handful of animation presets & transitions & organized the asset library I would set a goal of about 15-30 minutes work per minute of video.  The only reason it would take that long is because of the typing out of the text.  But that's me.

There's not much to admire about these videos, honestly. They're terribly paced, boring, static & poorly laid out.