Day 2 at CUE Rockstar offered more opportunities for creative expression using animation. Recently, I’ve been playing with creating animation and it was really nice to have dedicated time to explore and create today. In Corey Coble’s session on 20% Time and STEAM we used Google Slides to create animation. I’ve used Google Slides with Drawings in the past to create animation but never created anything close to having 109 slides!! My previous methods were less than efficient. Prior to this session, I created Google Slides and then would screen cast the slides with me advancing through them to create the animation. It worked ok especially when I was narrating the slides but you can hear the clicks in the background. There will be no more background clicks in my future. Corey showed us a much better way. If there isn’t a need for audio, the efficient method is to publish the Google slides and then change the URL at the end from the default “ms=3000” (or 3 seconds) to “ms=125” (or 0.125 second). This is so much easier than creating a screencast!! In the future if I need audio, I can still screencast the animated slides and then add narration in a video editing program. Amazing!
Speaking of editing programs, I spent the afternoon creating with Doug Robertson in his Adventures in YouTubery session. I entered the session wanting to play more with the photo slideshow feature thinking I could animate some sketchnotes. However, when I saw that you can place images in the YouTube editor, I shifted gears. Rather than taking pictures of images drawn using pen and paper I decided to use Google Drawing. I learned my lesson from the morning project that lacks balance and proportions because I didn’t start with the end in mind first. This time, I sketched my ending scene on a post-it before starting my first Google Drawing. Only then, with a vision for my final product, did I create a new Google Drawing file. First, I chose a custom canvas size (600 px x 450 px) and picked a background color and made sure the title name had a 1 in it. Next, I made a copy of that file and changed file name from 1to 2 and added the circle for the sun. Made a copy, changed file name from 2 to 3 and added a ray of sunshine, aka triangle. I repeated this process until I had 23 Google Drawing files. I easily could have created more Google Drawings which would have led to smoother animation but it was only a 2 hour session! Then, I downloaded all creations as .jpg files (I think .png would provide better clarity for next time), uploaded the image files into the YouTube Video editor, inserted the images into the timeline (this is why using numbers in your naming conventions is so critical) and adjusted timing as desired. Quickly, I added some music to the track and then published. It’s a lot of steps for 23 seconds of video but the final product looks cool for a first attempt. Moving forward, I can see myself applying this technique for different projects.
I look forward to playing with both of these animation options in the future, especially using YouTube as this particular option was very new to me and others. I’ll have to put this on my blog calendar for an upcoming post to include more step-by-step directions with accompanying visuals as I refine my technique and process with creating cartoons in YouTube using Google Drawing.