From math geek to whiteboard animator

Carole Alalouf proudly calls herself a math geek. When she held strategic roles earlier in her career, she loved diving into analytics and sharing how the numbers informed her proposed strategies.

Often, though, she was met with blank stares. She eventually made a realization.

“I finally understood that I couldn’t just cram the kitchen sink of information down my audience’s throat,” Alalouf said. “I had to learn how to carve out the information they needed to know and to explain why they should care.”

To do that, Alalouf turned to storytelling — visual storytelling.

Today she is the president and founder of Exaltus, a Canada-based whiteboard animation company that turns complex information into compelling stories. The goal is to engage audiences, spark emotion, and inspire action.

Alalouf recently shared with me why she turned to this unique format of storytelling and how her whiteboard animations help her clients tell better stories.

You state on your company website that nothing gets you more excited than the statement, “It’s hard to explain.” Why is that?

Ideas can change the world, but only if you can share them in a way that people understand and respond to. The trouble is that some of the best ideas are often the hardest to explain, especially for the people who are closest to them. And so the work is very challenging but also extremely rewarding. I love the marriage of left and right brain work. The challenge of taking something really complicated and making it simple and engaging.

From your perspective, what makes a good story?

A good story elicits emotion. We used to believe that our decisions were largely driven by logic and knowledge, but studies now show that we make decisions based on our emotions. To move people to act, which is the ultimate goal of the stories we tell, we need to create an emotional connection. We need to make the audience feel something.

I’d also say that these days, stories have to work harder to hold onto the audience’s attention. That means creating a series of moments the whole way through to keep them invested. It also means making your story frictionless — keeping anything out of your story that raises questions and breaks the spell.

What role does music and sound play in how you tell whiteboard stories?

The music helps to create emotion and the right mood. Sound effects can liven up a video and call attention to subtle movements. They need to be used judiciously so that they don’t distract.

How long does an average whiteboard video take for you to produce, from the initial discovery call to publishing the video?

About six weeks.

Most of your videos end with a zoom out to capture all the graphics from the video in one frame. Why did you adopt that visual approach?

There are few reasons:

• They act as a visual summary of the ideas explored in the video and help cement those ideas.
• They end the video on a high note by creating a sense of drama.
• The poster images can double as a one-paged document that our clients can print out and distribute, or send by email.

Our clients love them. Here are three examples of videos in which the closing is (I think) particularly effective: