Where do I go if I need an explanation video?

We ended up working with a someone on Fiverr / upwork. It went really well and the quality was great!

Go to Upwork. You will find plenty of high quality freelancer. We are currently in process of hiring somebody for one of our client and have vetted out bunch of freelancers. Let me know if you want to see vetted list of freelancers from upwork.
P.S. We have n't hired anybody yet.

Not 100% the same but i'm working on a video editing tool for screen recordings. Currently it's very basic but it's already been used by quite a few companies for feature previews e.g. Supabase https://supabase.io/blog/2020/08/05/supabase-auth - you can check it out here https://glitterly.app/

We spend about 1 month working on our video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv5am2q6m4A. We started by writing a script, then shooting first version of scenes, reshooting and rethinking what did not work, making first voiceover by us, improving further. My co-founder @VitKalisz also had to learn how to cut video which will be later useful for other materials. Finally we hired voice and music from Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/jonathanluhmann/give-you-a-great-bass-voice-for-anything) for about $100, it was very well and quickly done.

The CircleCI video was most likely made in Adobe AfterEffects and It's quite a good job. I think if you shop around, $1k might get you there. That would definetly be less than your average agency price, but an individual might be able to do it for that.
Just something to note, a lot of the fiver videos etc. The creator will specialise in a style and just work within those confines, which is fine, but can be limiting.
Also, stop motion, whiteboard videos can be a lot easier to make than a video in the style of CircleCL i.e. lots of vector assets, 3d dimension digital assets, effects, plugins etc.
I'm not an animator but my background is in design, so have worked in studies that offer animation as a service.

Good luck!

Oli

That video from CircleCI is a bit hard for me to watch -- It's just a bunch of floating objects that don't really seem to tell a story. Just IMO.

I generally like videos that I can watch without sound, and generally understand what I'm seeing.

We had a couple animated videos done (in 1:1 format) that we're using as a complement to an article.

Here's one of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbmQqJxyBjk

This is the person who handled it for me:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberttatoi/

Cost was fair too -- don't want to publish the actual price publicly because every video is different, but if you want to know how much we paid, you can just email me.

A custom video like that can be pretty expensive. For indie hackers just getting started, I don't think I'd recommend it unless you are 100% sure your product is going to be successful. A friend of mine spent ~$500 for a much simpler video.

It might not be as glamorous, but you could start with simple screen recordings, and use a free app like kdenlive, or whatever the Apple video editor is, etc, to clip it up to show the important bits. While it won't be as pretty, it will have the benefit of getting straight to the point.

I'd love to have better voice overs for my videos, but right now I just use my own (which is scary and embarrassing to me, but fighting to get over it haha).

Once you have a screen recording, you can do a lot with it. A fellow San Diego IHer said he had a good experience with RenderForest to combine screen recordings with nice transitions.

And yet another fellow San Diego IHer is building https://storycreatorapp.com, which might be able to create something decent for you.

I'm building https://brisa.io/videos/, but, sadly, I don't think it'd be a great fit for you, although I'd be happy to give you some more info if you want to give it a try :)