Explainer video style · Vaporwave

Vaporwave aesthetic explainer videos

Neon purple dusk, glowing grids and a worn VHS tape. Brief it in one sentence and get a narrated, animated explainer film in the Vaporwave 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.

Purple dusk, magenta grids rolling to a striped sunset, neon signs, old computer dialog boxes and marble busts, all played back from a worn VHS tape. Vaporwave is drawn in code, with the colour split, tracking noise and scanlines built in. It is hazy, ironic and nostalgic, for internet culture, music and the recent past.

Best for

Internet culture and nostalgia
Music and media history
Playful tech and product films

Try a brief like

“How a VHS tape stores a picture”
“Why the early internet felt so strange”
“What happened to shopping malls”

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 Vaporwave.

Look: Drawn in code, no generated images: early-2010s vaporwave. Deep purple dusk walls, magenta perspective grids rolling toward the viewer, a striped sunset sinking behind wireframe mountains and palm silhouettes, neon tube signs, retro computer dialog boxes with progress bars, white marble classical busts. All of it is seen through a worn VHS tape: RGB channel split, a rolling tracking-noise band, scanlines and an on-screen PLAY and timecode display. Figures are dark flat fills with a two-colour neon rim, pink on the lit side and cyan on the other.
Motion: Dreamy and glitchy: grids scroll forward without stopping, the striped sun drifts, palms sway, neon letters flicker out at random, progress bars crawl, a tracking band rolls down the frame and tears it sideways, the colour split breathes. Scene change: a VHS tear and roll.
Music: Slowed, chopped 1980s smooth jazz and elevator funk washed in reverb, a lazy drum machine and saxophone. Nostalgic and hazy.
Type: Wide-spaced caps in a clean sans (letter-spacing ≈ 7 px), a pixel font (Press Start 2P-like) for the VHS display and dialog boxes, and neon tube letters drawn as glowing strokes.