In this episode of Speak PR, Jim James introduces animated explainer videos as a powerful alternative to traditional static presentations. He walks through his experience using Doodly, a whiteboard‑style video creation platform from Brixton, demonstrating how even a non‑technical user can produce engaging, animated content within minutes. Jim outlines the various use cases—sales pitches, partner introductions, training, and customer‑service FAQs—showing how motion, voice‑over, and music increase audience retention compared to PowerPoint. He details the workflow: selecting chalkboard styles, adding characters and props, timing animations, recording or importing voice‑overs, syncing music, and exporting to lightweight MP4 files for platforms like Vimeo and Thinkific. Pricing tiers ($39/month basic, $69/month plus an enterprise option) and licensing savings are discussed, along with a brief comparison to PowerPoint/Keynote, highlighting Doodly’s flexible timeline and lower file size. Jim shares testimonials from professionals in medicine, real‑estate, and education, reinforcing the tool’s credibility. The episode concludes with a call to action to join his Speak PR Mastermind, subscribe to the newsletter, and consider his PR services in Singapore, China, and the UK.
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Hello, this is Jim James. Welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is from the Shed Studio, and I am fresh from making an animated explainer video. And I wanted to just get on the mic and share the power and the simplicity of making an explainer video. And I've been using a platform called Doodly by Brixton. And I want to share that because I've been able to take a presentation that normally I would be sitting there with a group of delegates and students talking for 4.5 to 5 minutes about something and hoping that they're listening, and maybe with PowerPoint, some static pictures. But with Doodly and with an animated explainer video, I can create characters, I can create motion, and I can get engagement well beyond the static presentation. So welcome to Speak PR. This is the program where I share tools and tips on how companies and entrepreneurs can get noticed without a large budget. In fact, often without any budget at all. I've been running a public relations firm for over 25 years, and I've set up 8 businesses on 3 continents. So what I'm doing is sharing tools and technologies that I know work and that big companies pay agencies to do. But what I'd like to do is to share that with you for free as part of the Speak PR program. So let's just look today at the opportunity to create an explainer video. Now, explainer videos we can use in sales, for example, for potential customers that might be thinking about a product or service. We can use them for explaining what we do to partners, but also for training and for helping on customer service where we've got people that maybe have bought and coming back for repeat questions that we can answer where it isn't necessarily possible to use a bot, for that because you may want to actually give some pictures as well to show. Now, the explainer video on Doodly— and there's another one called Toonly, which is like PowerPoint animated videos— but Doodly is really enabling you to create videos of any length, to add audio, be that voice or music. Or both. So the platform is actually remarkably simple to download and to use, and even a novice like me can create a video really within the first 10 minutes. I've created something I can use. So the, the idea behind this is that if you want to introduce a concept, as I'm doing for the Speak PR program, I'm introducing the concept of engage, and I'm introducing this concept of content being engaging if it is new And if it is simple, then it's shareable. But if it is old and it's not new, it's not shareable. Quite a simple concept in a way. But I'm able to animate this and then show the people that are listening to me a buildup of the concept over a period of 2 to 3 minutes. And I can introduce different elements and I can show and create then a list What I've done in this particular video is to choose a green chalkboard. You can have a clear chalkboard, a black chalkboard, or a white chalkboard. You can then choose whether you have an arm, a person writing, or if you don't want anybody actually doing the writing on the screen, but you just want the writing to appear. And you can animate from left to right. You can choose how quickly the animation comes in, and you can choose different objects. So you can choose person characters, you can choose a piece of furniture, for example, you can choose office objects, and you can introduce all of those in the same way that you might with PowerPoint. But then you can animate them, and you can choose the sequence, the time that it takes for them to build in and out, and also for the relationship between these different elements to change. So this is fantastic. What you could do is create a scene, for example, an office, and then you can introduce a person, and then you can have that person with a dialogue box, and then on the next chalkboard have the beginnings of what you're trying to share with your audience. So plainly, this is going to be very useful if you've got something that you have as a repetitive presentation. So then what I've done is I have created the, the moving images and the chart to show the engaging content being in the top right-hand corner and able to then do an arrow and show that this is where it's going to be. So for emphasis, the audience will see not just the text but see motion around the text. And also then I've been able to embed a couple of pictures because you can upload pictures from outside. And put them onto the, onto the chalkboard or the whiteboard, whichever board you choose. Then you can create different scenes. So I guess just in the same way that you would with a PowerPoint, you create a different slide. The departure from PowerPoint is that PowerPoint is always the same size and it's static, and you animate onto the page. But with this, you can extend the timeline for each scene, so you can have a scene that is 2, 3, 4, 5 seconds if you like, and then where you can control the introduction of different pieces of information over time and create, if you like, scenes, some short, some long, and that can create a pace to the presentation. So now once you've entered all of your content with these different icons— straight lines, drawings of people, drawings of office furniture, cars. There are a number of them you can add, and if you upgrade, you can get over 1,000 of these different images, plus you can add your own images. Then you can also change their composition, so you can change them to be line drawings, or you can change the color of the lines. You can have them filled in and scale them big, small, and so on. So very flexible. Then once you've created the, if you like, the framework and the content in the drawings and the text, then you can add on the audio. Now this, I had some fun. It did take me a little bit of time to do this, but what you can do is you can record your voice directly underneath the film and the slides as they're playing. Had a little bit of a challenge with getting the timing right because it seems to keep starting from the beginning, but you create little clips of audio underneath the slide itself, so you can actually talk to the build-out. So from a presentation point of view, this is really, really handy. If you try and do this into PowerPoint, which I believe you can do now, and also into Keynote, you've got so much going on on that one screen that it can be quite a lot, and the file gets very large. But with this, because it's in a in a film strip presentation. It's really nice because you can see what came before and what's coming afterwards, and then you can articulate the pitch as the slides are unfolding. The next part is that you can add in an audio— so music track— underneath the entire piece. You can also drag and drop audio MP3 files of your own, for example, sound recordings. So then you have your buildup of the text on the slides, then you have the voiceover, and you have the music. Now, the, the one problem I found was that when I then changed the animation duration on an element in one of the pictures, it would make that frame shorter, but it didn't make the audio any shorter and didn't make the music any shorter either. But that's not the end of the world. It's a very easy drag, slide, cut and paste process to get the voiceover and the audio track to all be in sync. So the secret, and I guess the polish, will come when you're getting the voiceover pacing to be better with the animation pacing and the level of the music all to be in alignment. So these are some skills that I've got to learn, and having learned how to use GarageBand, I know that this is really a case of diving in at the beginning, making some mistakes, not being afraid of it not looking too good, but just learning and practicing. And I've certainly found with the podcast, now up to episode 225, that I've got a lot better, a lot more fluid at using the technology, and worry less about the technology and more about the content. And this will be the same, I think, with the Doodly. So I've already found that I've been able to create several Doodly videos, one very short. I started off with just a 1-minute one, and I suggest that you do that as well. Just start with one very simple, very short, with no voiceover to get the hang of the animation first. And then I've made a longer piece, and now my third piece, I'm trying to add the voiceover. So just building up slowly but surely. But Doodly, which is just doodly.com, is available with a $39 a month package and a $69 a month package. For $39, you can create unlimited videos, and I guess there's a, a euro or a sterling price as well equivalent. You can use on multiple computers, which is great. One login, of course, and one account. You get support. You get 803 characters I've been using a lot, which is, um, one of the people who, you know, looks bemused, looked happy, and so on. There's adults, children. There are women and men of different races and nationalities, for example. There are 1,157 prop images, 84 scene templates. For example, there's hotels, there's bedrooms, there's offices, and so on. And 100 royalty-free music tracks. And there's also a Facebook group, which I have to confess I'm not that interested in joining a Facebook group. If you go for the Enterprise, then you get, you know, turbocharged 3,000 prop images, 150 royalty tracks, and so on. Um, personally, I've got enough to manage with, with the 803 characters. I shall stick to one or two to start with, but nonetheless And I think that I actually paid a one-off fee to pay for an annual license as well. And if you do that, then you save nearly 50%. So it's expensive to go to a third party to have them make an explainer video. I saw on LinkedIn someone was advertising for making a 3-minute explainer video about £600. So that is great, but I'm going to be making a lot of these, and if £600 per time, I've also got to brief them. And what I found was I was creating a lot of the content as I went along. And because the software frankly is so easy to use, it's perfectly easy to have a little storyboard or some notes offline and then be building the content online on the fly. And for me, that would save the time of outsourcing briefing, outsourcing, getting it back, reviewing, and so on. But we're all different, and I just use a MacBook Pro using standard Safari. So all works pretty quickly. And then when you've made the video, you can export that to an MP4 file. They come down quite light, actually. They come down 20, 30 megabytes, so not too much. In fact, much less than if you make a movie on iMovie, for example. So I was able to download the movie and it's all ready to upload to Vimeo, or in my case, I'm using it on the Thinkific site for the SpeakPR.co Mastermind. So here I am trying to build a training course around how to create compelling and engaging content. Moving images are multiple times, 30 times more engaging than static images, and creating a PowerPoint where you sit there and train people while PowerPoint is both repetitive for the trainer but also not particularly engaging for the people that are watching. So a tool like Doodly— and there's a sister one called Toonly, and this is also the company that has an application called Talkia, which I go into another day— but basically you enter the content, the text, and it will create a voiceover. And you can drag and drop the audio files into your Doodly, and therefore you can have a third party narrate for you if you don't want to do the voiceover yourself. So an interesting suite of services and tools, all from this Brixton company. Have to say, so far I'm enjoying it, and I want to share with you a tool, a practical way that you can create content yourself that's not that expensive Frankly, pretty easy to use. Even a non-techie like me can use it. There are some other testimonials on their website. Amy Killen, who's a medical doctor, says fun videos for patient care. They had someone here had used VideoScribe, and they say Doodly's better. Someone says thank you for making me look like a rock star. And someone in real estate says, make your business grow, invest a small amount. And another doctor is teaching medical students with this as well. So there are many people out there already using this tool, and I share this because if you haven't heard of it, you might find it a useful way to get what you're sharing to be animated with voiceover, and if you want, with music too. Thanks so much for listening. If you're interested in even joining us on the Speak PR Mastermind, this is where I'm creating these doodly videos for. Let me know. It's at speakpr.co. If you like this podcast, please rate it and share it. If you'd like to subscribe to our newsletter, we have all of these podcasts transcribed and made into articles, and they go out in a weekly newsletter on a Friday. You can subscribe at eastwest. So I do run a public relations agency. So if you think I can be of any assistance to you, I have offices in Singapore and China and the UK. But in the meantime, I hope that just by sharing what I know, I'm adding some value and helping you on your way. So thanks so much for listening. And in the meantime, until we come together again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you animate some of your ideas into a, into a video.
