Every explainer dies the same way: one more feature, one more benefit, one more stakeholder slide — until ninety seconds holds four minutes of ideas. On the Fairway Loop film we installed a circuit breaker before drawing anything final.
The five-viewer test
We boarded the whole film to a scratch voiceover and showed it to five people who had never golfed. Then we asked them to explain the app back to us. Anything nobody repeated got cut — no appeals, no "but marketing loves that line."
Two entire sequences died in that room. The film got shorter and, perversely, started saying more.
One idea per swing
The surviving structure is three chapters with one idea each: find a course, book in two taps, play more. Each chapter ends on a redrawn screenshot so viewers recognize the app the second they open it.
If your explainer needs a pause button to be understood, the boards are telling you something. Listen early — it's much cheaper than listening in animation.