Explainer video style · Seurat pointillism

Pointillism style explainer videos

A picture built from dots of pure colour that mix in the eye. Brief it in one sentence and get a narrated, animated explainer film in the Seurat pointillism style, scored and voiced, in about 15 minutes.

Make one in this style

Or let the director choose a style for your topic.

What it looks like, and when to use it.

A picture made entirely of equal dots of pure colour that blend in your eye, in the manner of Seurat's Sunday afternoon on the river. Every dot is placed in code on a fixed grid, so the image stays crisp and calm while the water shimmers and boats drift by. It is formal, sunny and patient, and it makes colour and light easy to explain.

Best for

How colour, light and vision work
Art history and museum content
Calm, considered topics

Try a brief like

“How do our eyes mix colours?”
“How a screen makes every colour from three”
“A Sunday by the river in 1884”

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 Seurat pointillism.

Look: Neo-Impressionist pointillism painted in code, after Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884). Every surface is rebuilt from equal round dots of pure colour on a fixed hexagonal grid, and the eye mixes them. Each colour is split into two pure colours placed side by side in the right ratio, with a sprinkle of complementary dots (orange in blue shade, blue in orange light) and a halo where light meets dark. Calm, formal, sunlit compositions with clear profiles and still figures, framed by a painted dotted border.
Motion: Stately and still. The dot grid never moves; dots change colour only where the picture under them changes. Life is small and slow: boats drift, smoke rises, a butterfly crosses, water shimmers as its dots re-roll a few times a second, and a few dots elsewhere trade colours so the light seems to tremble. Shots change as the new picture crystallises into dots.
Music: Formal, sunny chamber music: a small wind ensemble or piano in a measured waltz, poised and bright.
Type: An elegant upright serif, set small and calm, in deep blue. Titles can go through the dot renderer too.