To make a geopolitics explainer video, explain the structure behind the news rather than the news itself: the institutions, the rules, the map and the incentives each actor faces. Pick one question ("how does Colombia elect a president", "why does the Strait of Hormuz matter"), source every factual claim to an official or well-established reference, describe each side in terms its own supporters would accept, and keep your opinion out or clearly labelled. Then draw it. Maps, seat charts, timelines and flows of power explain politics better than stock footage of flags and crowds, and a drawing never accidentally shows a rally for one side.

Structure ages well, news does not

Geopolitics channels that chase headlines produce videos that are out of date in a week and contested from the first comment. Channels that explain how a system works produce videos that are still useful years later, because the structure changes slowly.

"Who will win Colombia's next election" is a prediction. "How Colombia's elections actually work" is an explainer. The second one will be searched every time Colombia votes, and it does not require you to be right about anything except the rules.

A useful split when planning a video:

Neutrality is a method, not a tone

Neutral does not mean bland. It means you apply the same standard to every side and can show your working.

• Describe each side so its supporters would agree. If a supporter of a party would wince at how you summarised their position, rewrite it.
• Use neutral nouns. The words used to describe a group or a territory often encode a side. Use the official name, and where names are disputed, say both and say who uses which.
• Separate what happened from why it happened. "Turnout fell" is a fact. "Turnout fell because voters were disillusioned" is an interpretation. Attribute interpretations to whoever makes them.
• Same scrutiny for everyone. If you fact-check one candidate's claim on screen, fact-check the other's.
• Watch your visuals. Colours associated with parties, flags, and choice of photographs all signal sides. A neutral drawing in your channel's own palette avoids most of this.

Sourcing that holds up

Politics is the subject where a single wrong fact gets your whole video dismissed. The source hierarchy for a video like this:

1. The official body. The constitution, the electoral authority, the legislature's own site.
2. Established reference works and election observers. Election guides from bodies like IFES, the Inter-Parliamentary Union's parliamentary data, major encyclopedias.
3. Reputable national press, from more than one outlet, for anything about recent events.
4. Never another explainer video as the only source for a fact.

Read sources in the original language when you can. For Colombia that means the Registraduría and the Constitution in Spanish. Translations of electoral terms are often slightly wrong.

Worked example: how an election works in Colombia

Here is the fact base for a six to eight minute video, checked against the Colombian Constitution, Colombia's electoral authorities and election reference sources as of October 2026. It is organised the way the video would be, one scene per paragraph.

Scene 1, the question. "Colombia elects its Congress and its president in separate elections a few months apart. Here is how both work." Drawing: a calendar with three marked Sundays.

Scene 2, who runs it. Elections are organised by the Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil, which handles registration, voting and the vote count, and overseen by the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE). Voting is not compulsory. Drawing: two labelled buildings with arrows to a ballot box.

Scene 3, the calendar. Congress is elected first, in March. The presidential first round follows in late May and, if needed, a runoff in June. In 2026 those dates were 8 March, 31 May and 21 June. The new president takes office on 7 August. Drawing: a timeline with those four dates.

Scene 4, the Senate. 100 senators are elected from a single nationwide constituency, so a voter in Bogotá and a voter in Leticia choose from the same national lists. Two more seats are reserved for indigenous communities, elected in a separate national constituency. Drawing: one large map of Colombia feeding one seat chart.

Scene 5, the Chamber of Representatives. Representatives are elected by department, with Bogotá as its own constituency, and each is guaranteed at least two seats. Special constituencies add seats for Afro-Colombian communities, indigenous communities, the Raizal community of San Andrés and Colombians living abroad. For the 2022 and 2026 elections only, 16 transitional peace seats (the CITREP) were also elected by victims of the armed conflict in regions hit hardest by it. Drawing: the map split into departments, each with its seat count.

Scene 6, turning votes into seats. For the Senate, a party list needs at least 3 per cent of valid votes to win any seats. Seats among lists that clear the threshold are shared out with the cifra repartidora, the D'Hondt method: each list's votes are divided by 1, 2, 3 and so on, and the seats go to the largest results. Parties can run a closed list, where the party's order decides who gets in, or a list with a preferential vote, where voters can mark a specific candidate. Drawing: three columns of votes being divided, the largest quotients lighting up as seats.

Scene 7, the president. The president and vice president run together on one ticket for a single four-year term. Re-election has been prohibited since a 2015 constitutional reform. If no ticket wins more than half the valid votes in the first round, the top two go to a runoff three weeks later. The 2026 runoff was decided by 0.96 percentage points (49.66 to 48.70 per cent), which is a useful example of why the second round matters. Drawing: a bar crossing a 50 per cent line, then two bars side by side.

Scene 8, the blank vote. Colombian ballots include a voto en blanco option. Under Article 258 of the Constitution, if blank votes make up the majority of valid votes (read by the courts as more than half) in a presidential first round, or in an election for Congress or another elected body, a governor or a mayor, the vote must be repeated once. In single-office races the same candidates cannot stand again, and in elections for a legislative body the lists that missed the threshold cannot stand again. It has no such effect in a presidential runoff. Drawing: a ballot with the blank box ticked, a loop arrow back to the start.

Scene 9, the runner-up. The second-placed presidential ticket is offered seats in Congress: the presidential runner-up in the Senate, the vice-presidential runner-up in the Chamber. Drawing: an arrow from the runoff loser to a seat in each chamber.

Scene 10, election night. The Registraduría publishes a fast preliminary count, the preconteo, on the night. The binding count is the escrutinio, carried out afterwards by scrutiny commissions, and the CNE declares the results. Drawing: a fast tally on one side, a slower official stamp on the other.

Notice what is missing: no candidate is named and no party is praised or criticised. A viewer of any political persuasion should finish this video knowing more and feeling no more pushed than when they started. If you want to cover a specific campaign, make it a separate, dated video and apply the neutrality rules above.

One more discipline: facts like seat totals change with reforms and special arrangements, so phrase them as "as of" and recheck before you republish or cut a short from an old video.

Drawing politics without taking a side

Four visual patterns cover almost every geopolitics explainer:

• The map, for anything about territory, constituencies, borders, routes or chokepoints.
• The seat chart, for anything about legislatures and coalitions.
• The timeline, for calendars, sequences and escalations.
• The flow, for who appoints whom, who funds whom, and which way power moves.

Draw them in your channel's own colours rather than party colours, and label everything. A whiteboard or poster style suits this material, because it reads as explanation rather than as campaign material. The same patterns appear in how to make a history explainer video, which is useful if your channel moves between current affairs and the history behind them.

Make it

1. 1

   Choose a structural question

   How a system works, why a place matters, what an institution does. Avoid predictions. Write the question as the video title.

2. 2

   Build a sourced fact sheet

   One line per fact, each with an official or reference source beside it, in the original language where possible. Date anything that can change.

3. 3

   Write the script one scene per paragraph

   Describe every side in terms its own supporters would accept. Attribute interpretations. At 150 words a minute, 900 to 1,200 words makes six to eight minutes.

4. 4

   Paste it into openCanviz

   Choose Keep my wording so the narration is exactly your checked script, and pick whiteboard or poster style. Maps, seat charts and timelines suit both.

5. 5

   Check every label, number and name

   Place names, dates, seat counts and percentages. Fix anything the draft drew wrong in the editor, and recolour anything that looks like a party palette.

6. 6

   Publish with sources and a date

   Put the fact sheet's sources in the description and the as-of date on screen. If the rules change, pin a correction.

Common questions

Can a geopolitics video ever be completely neutral? Choosing what to include is already a judgement, so not perfectly. What you can do is apply the same standards to every side, show your sources, and label your opinions. Viewers forgive a visible point of view far more readily than a hidden one.

Should I make the video in the country's language? If your audience is there, yes. A Colombia explainer in Spanish reaches the people most likely to search for it. You can make it once and duplicate the project to produce a second language version.

What about live events and breaking news? Make a short dated update that links to the structural explainer. The update ages, the explainer keeps working.

How do I handle disputed territories or names? Use the name the governing authority uses, mention the alternative and who uses it, and do not draw disputed borders as settled. When in doubt, follow the convention of a major reference work and say so.

Is this the same as a video essay? A video essay usually argues a position. An explainer like this one describes a system and leaves the conclusion to the viewer. Both work, but say which you are making. See how to make a video essay without showing your face.