Explainer video style · Munch expressionism

Expressionist painting style explainer videos

Long swirling strokes, a burning sky, a world that ripples. Brief it in one sentence and get a narrated, animated explainer film in the Munch expressionism style, scored and voiced, in about 15 minutes.

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A frame in the Munch expressionism style

What it looks like, and when to use it.

Long swirling strokes, a burning orange sky and a world that ripples, in the manner of Munch's The Scream. Every stroke is drawn in code, and the whole picture sways gently, so the feeling is in the image itself. It is the style for topics where emotion is the point: anxiety, pressure, fear and the mind.

Best for

Mental health and stress
Psychology and emotions
Dramatic moments in history

Try a brief like

“What happens in your body during a panic attack”
“Why we feel anxious before a big day”
“The year without a summer”

The art direction the director follows.

Every style is a full art direction, not a filter: its own palette, type, motion and music. This is the brief the director works from for Munch expressionism.

Look: Expressionism painted in code, after Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893). Every surface is built from long, thin, semi-transparent curving strokes that follow a flow field which twists over time: a blood-orange sky in rippling bands, deep blue water swirling round a point, rust-red walls, floors pulling toward a vanishing point. Figures are flat colour with the same flowing texture inside and a heavy dark contour; faces are simple and sallow. The picture shows a feeling (dread, anxiety, longing), and the whole world bends with it.
Motion: The world flows. The stroke field twists slowly, the sky bands ripple, and the finished frame is shifted row by row and column by column on gentle sine waves, so people, furniture and walls all sway together. Figures move little and heavily; hair and smoke trail in waves. Shots change as a band of sky colour presses down over the frame.
Music: An uneasy, brooding score: low strings, a slow pulse, dissonant swells that rise with the warping.
Type: A worn old-style serif (IM Fell-like), set by hand and warped with the picture. Never a comic or handwritten font.