Animation production is an investment that fails quietly. A poorly briefed project can cost thousands of pounds, take months to produce, and still miss its learning objectives entirely. The problem rarely lies in the production itself. It lies in what happens before production begins: the learning outcomes, the audience mapping, the content architecture. Getting that strategic foundation right is what consultation is designed to do.
Michelle Connolly’s animation and learning consultation service works with government bodies, commercial learning teams, universities, and specialist organisations across the UK and Ireland. Her background as a primary school teacher, combined with over 3,300 animations produced for LearningMole, gives her a practical understanding of what makes learning content work. That experience is available to organisations planning animation projects before a single frame goes into production.
Educational Voice, the Belfast-based 2D animation studio behind LearningMole, offers consultation as a standalone service separate from production. Whether your organisation needs a clear brief, a structured learning framework, or expert guidance on format and approach, the consultation process produces written outputs your team can act on immediately. This article explains who the service is for, what it covers, and how to access it.
Table of Contents
Why Consult Before You Produce
Animation production is an investment. A 60-second educational animation, produced professionally, costs several thousand pounds and takes four to eight weeks. Done well, it will work for years. Done without a clear strategy, it will need to be remade or will simply not achieve what you needed it to do.
Consultation solves this problem before it becomes expensive.
Michelle Connolly’s animation and learning consultation service exists to give organisations the strategic clarity they need before production begins. Whether you’re planning a single training module or a full learning series, the consultation process maps the learning outcomes to the animation approach, identifies the right format and style for your audience, and produces a clear brief that any production team, including Educational Voice, can work from with confidence.
The result is animation that does what you actually need it to do, not animation that looked right on a mood board but missed the educational mark.
Who Michelle Connolly’s Consultation Is For
The consultation service works for a specific type of organisation: one that takes learning seriously, knows it wants animation, but needs expert guidance on exactly how to approach it.
Government bodies and public sector organisations. Government communications teams increasingly use animation for public information, training, and citizen-facing content. The challenge is that most government projects involve multiple stakeholders, complex sign-off processes, and tight compliance requirements. Michelle’s consultation experience with government clients across the UK and Ireland means she understands how to structure a project that survives committee review and delivers on its communications objective.
Commercial learning and development teams. Businesses rolling out mandatory training, onboarding programmes, or skills development content face a consistent challenge: how do you make employees actually engage with the material? Michelle’s background as a primary school teacher gives her a direct understanding of what engagement actually requires, and it goes considerably deeper than making something visually attractive.
Educational institutions. Universities, further education colleges, and independent schools that want to use animation for curriculum content, student support, or marketing often don’t have an internal production team with the knowledge to brief an animation studio effectively. Consultation provides exactly that bridging expertise.
Independent organisations with unique learning needs. Some organisations don’t fit a standard category but have a genuine and complex learning challenge. Specialist charities, professional membership bodies, healthcare trusts, and research institutions have all worked with Educational Voice on projects that started with a consultation call and ended with content that reached audiences in genuinely new ways.
If your organisation fits any of these descriptions, get in touch to discuss what a consultation would involve for your specific project.
Michelle Connolly: The Background Behind the Consultation
Understanding why this consultation service is different requires understanding who is delivering it.
Michelle Connolly founded Educational Voice in Belfast after a career as a primary school teacher. That experience is not a footnote, it is the defining characteristic of how she approaches every animation and learning project. She has spent time in classrooms watching how children actually process information, where attention drops, how concept introduction needs to be sequenced, and what the difference is between a child who has been taught something and a child who has genuinely understood it.
Those same principles, she discovered, apply directly to adult learning in professional and corporate settings. The neuroscience of attention and retention does not change significantly between a seven-year-old learning long division and a 35-year-old learning a new compliance process. The production techniques change. The principle does not.
Educational Voice is also the studio behind LearningMole, one of the most widely used educational platforms in the world. The scale of that project, over 3,300 animations produced, gave Michelle and the Educational Voice team a body of practical experience in educational animation that very few studios anywhere can match. Patterns about what works, what doesn’t, and why emerged from thousands of hours of production and the audience data that came back from millions of viewers.
That experience informs every consultation call. You’re not getting generic animation advice. You’re getting insight drawn from one of the largest educational animation production programmes ever undertaken.
What the Consultation Covers
The consultation is structured around your project’s specific needs. No two organisations have identical challenges, so the process adapts. That said, most consultations cover a consistent set of strategic questions.
Learning outcome definition. What specifically should your audience know, believe, or be able to do after engaging with this content? This sounds straightforward but most organisations find it surprisingly difficult to answer precisely. Vague learning outcomes produce vague animation briefs, which produce animations that feel busy but don’t actually teach anything.
Audience mapping. Who exactly is watching this content, and what do they already know? A compliance animation aimed at frontline NHS workers needs a completely different approach to one aimed at the board of trustees of the same organisation. Animation that tries to serve both audiences simultaneously serves neither effectively.
Content architecture. How should the information be structured? What comes first, what comes second, and why? For multi-module learning programmes, this involves mapping out the full learning journey before any individual module is planned. For single animations, it means identifying the exact sequence of ideas that will move the viewer from their starting point to the intended learning outcome.
Format and style recommendations. Should this be character animation or motion graphics? 60 seconds or 3 minutes? A single piece or a series? Does it need subtitles, multiple language versions, or screen reader compatibility? These decisions have significant budget and production implications and need to be made with a clear rationale, not guesswork.
Brief development. The consultation produces a clear, detailed written brief that can be used to commission production, whether with Educational Voice or another studio. This document alone is often worth the consultation investment because it eliminates the ambiguity that causes most animation projects to go over budget or miss their objectives.
To book a consultation or discuss whether it’s right for your project, contact the Educational Voice team.
The LearningMole Context: Why Scale Matters
Most animation consultants have worked on a handful of learning projects. Michelle Connolly’s reference point is fundamentally different.
LearningMole is an educational platform built around the belief that every child deserves access to high-quality learning content, regardless of their background, learning style, or ability level. The platform has grown to serve millions of learners globally, with content that covers curriculum subjects, SEND-specific learning approaches, and broader educational development.
Educational Voice has produced over 3,300 animations for LearningMole. Each one was developed through the same process Michelle uses in consultation: clear learning outcomes, careful audience mapping, content architecture that sequences ideas correctly, and production that keeps the learner’s engagement at the centre of every creative decision.
At that scale, patterns become visible that simply don’t appear in smaller bodies of work. Michelle has seen, in direct audience data, which animation approaches cause children to rewatch content until they understand it, and which ones result in viewers clicking away before the key concept is introduced. Those patterns inform her consultation work with commercial and government clients whose learners are adults, because the underlying mechanisms of attention and comprehension are consistent across age groups.
This is the depth of practical knowledge behind every consultation call. See the breadth of work that experience has produced in our animation portfolio.
How the Consultation Process Works
The consultation service is deliberately straightforward to access. It runs via video call, which means organisations across the UK, Ireland, and internationally can access it without travel or logistical complexity.
Initial discussion. A short call to understand your project scope, timeline, and the specific questions you need answered. This is not a sales call, it is a genuine assessment of whether consultation is the right next step for your project and what format would serve you best.
Consultation sessions. Depending on project complexity, consultation may be a single focused session or a series of working calls. Government and institutional projects with multiple stakeholders typically benefit from a structured series that works through each strategic dimension in turn, with written outputs after each session.
Written brief and recommendations. Every consultation produces written outputs. These include the learning outcome framework, audience mapping, content architecture, format recommendations, and a production brief. These documents are yours to use however your organisation needs them.
Production pathway. Where it makes sense, consultation naturally leads into a production conversation with Educational Voice. But this is never the precondition. The consultation service exists to give your project the strategic foundation it needs, regardless of who produces it.
For government bodies, educational institutions, and commercial organisations with complex learning design needs, the animation consultation service represents direct access to one of the most experienced educational animation practitioners in the UK and Ireland.
Book a consultation call with the Educational Voice team.
FAQs
What types of organisations does Michelle Connolly consult for?
Government bodies, public sector communications teams, NHS trusts, local authorities, universities, further education colleges, charities, commercial L&D teams, and independent educational organisations. The common thread is a genuine commitment to learning outcomes rather than simply producing video content.
Do I need to use Educational Voice for production after a consultation?
No. The consultation is independent of the production relationship. Many organisations use the outputs to brief their own in-house team, a different studio, or return to Educational Voice for production once the strategy is clear. The goal of the consultation is your project’s success, not a production sale.
Can consultation cover projects that are already in production?
Yes, though the earlier in the process the better. Consultation mid-production can diagnose why a project isn’t tracking toward its learning objectives and recommend course corrections. It is more expensive to fix problems mid-production than to prevent them at the brief stage, but it is considerably less expensive than completing a project that doesn’t work.
How long does a typical consultation take?
For a single animation project with clear scope, a single two-hour session often produces the clarity needed. For a multi-module learning programme, a series of three to five sessions over two to four weeks is more typical. Government and institutional projects with complex sign-off requirements sometimes involve ongoing consultancy across the full production timeline.
Is the consultation available outside the UK and Ireland?
Yes. The consultation runs via video call, which makes it accessible to organisations internationally. Educational Voice has worked with clients across Europe, the Middle East, and North America on consultation and production projects.
What makes Michelle Connolly’s consultation different from a generic animation agency brief?
Most animation agency briefing processes are designed to get a project into production as efficiently as possible. Michelle’s consultation is designed to make sure the project is worth producing in the first place, and that when it goes into production, it will achieve what the organisation actually needs. The combination of classroom teaching experience, educational psychology principles, and over 3,300 animations produced for one of the world’s leading educational platforms is not a combination you’ll find in a standard agency brief process.
Ready to talk about your project?
Educational Voice offers animation and learning consultation with Michelle Connolly for organisations across the UK, Ireland, and internationally. Whether you’re planning your first learning animation or overhauling an existing programme, the consultation process gives your project the strategic foundation it needs.
Contact the Educational Voice team to discuss your requirements.
