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Animate a duck

How to create animations

Sam Hazeldine and Siobhan Dunlop

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Why are you making an animation?

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What is animation good for?

Showing and explaining things you cannot film.

Creating examples that are more 'generic' rather than using real images.

Making things that might appeal to particular audiences, e.g. children

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Planning and practicalities of animation

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Styles of animation

2D animation

hand drawn
digitally animated (often vector images)
motion graphics (using effects to make things move)
stop motion (lots of photographs played fast)

3D animation

(there's different methods of 3D animation, but we aren't focusing on these in this session)

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Ways of displaying animation

Videos

GIFs

Games

Webpage animation

Animated slides

You need to plan how you're going to be sharing/showing/using your animation before you go any further with creating it!

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Keep it short!

Typically you have 24 frames (images) per second for animation.

You can use fewer if you want it to look more stylistically simple.

Depending on how you create your animation, this means you might need to do a lot of work for only a few seconds of video!

e.g. 1 minute of video = 1,440 frames

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Animation takes time

Plan plenty of time to create animations.

Think realistically about how long your animation will be.

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Storyboards

Visual representation of your animation

Use paper or make it digitally (e.g. drawing app)

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Finding and creating assets

You might be creating all of your assets (e.g. images) that you'll be animating in the animation tool itself or you might need to find them elsewhere.

See our guidance on sourcing media for help finding media you can use in your animation.

Be careful of copyright with other people's media.

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Originality

A lot of animated videos/tutorials/etc look very similar.

Think about the style of your animation and if it suits your topic.

Don't just use the first stock images/animations from a tool, as other people have probably used these too!

Corporate Memphis style

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PowerPoint for animations

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PowerPoint is for presentations, right?

subjectguides.york.ac.uk/presentations

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And academic posters, I guess?

subjectguides.york.ac.uk/posters

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Example videos

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A practical guide to presentations:

Animation, sound & video

subjectguides.york.ac.uk/presentations/effects

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How to create animations in PowerPoint

Insert content onto slide(s)
Add animation to content (or Morph transition)
Check timings and order (or record timings with clicks and optional narration)
Export as video

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Inserting content

Find appropriate images (PowerPoint icons, stock photos, cartoon-style images).

Edit if necessary (e.g. remove background, crop).

Consider how much text you need.

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Draw

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Editing

You can edit any image in PowerPoint.

Duplicating and removing/moving parts of an image can be used to create animations

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Adding animations

Use the Animations tab.

Four types of animation: Entrance, Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Paths.

Select an item on a slide and then choose the animation to apply it.

Use Effect Options to change how it works and Timing to change how long it lasts for.

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The 'Morph' transition

A slide is created (slide 1) and a red triangle shape is drawn onto it;
The slide is duplicated (copy/paste, or right-click and Duplicate Slide);
On the duplicate slide (slide 2), the shape is modified: it is repositioned, rotated, resized, and given a new fill colour;
The "Morph" transition is applied to slide 2 from the Transitions tab;
The "Morph" transition identifies the triangle in the two slides as being the same object (albeit having undergone some modification) and generates an appropriate animation to bridge the two states;

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Duration and start

By default, animations tend to start On click and are 2 seconds long in duration.

Changing these settings will allow you to create a sequence of animations.

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The Animation Pane

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Export as video

File > Export

On Windows: choose Create a video
On Mac, change File format to MP4

Choosing higher quality will make it look better, but create a larger video file.

Simply, to make a video from any PowerPoint slide deck, go to the File menu, then choose Export. On a Windows device, you will see some options down the side for formats, so choose Create a video to get the video export option and settings. On a Mac, you will get a box appear prompting you to give the exported file a name, and at the bottom of that box should be a File Format drop-down that you can change to MP4.

Both of these methods will give you options about file quality and size, and whether the exported video will Use Recorded Timings and Narrations.

As with video editing, try to think about what the purpose of your video is when choosing an export quality, as this will hugely change the file size. Typically, either Full HD or HD should be fine for a PowerPoint video, as it is unlikely you have very high quality media in your file that would need Ultra HD quality.

If you have recorded narration or slide timings, make sure you have the Use Recorded Timings and Narrations option ticked, otherwise your video won't have these included. If you don't have timings set through this or using animations, you can set a default amount of time for the video to stay on each slide at this point.

Microsoft also have their own guidance on how to turn your presentation into a video.

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Stop motion in PowerPoint

To create stop motion in PowerPoint is even easier.

Take many, many photographs of the things you want to animate, moving them tiny amounts each time.

Then, insert one photo per slide.

Then, set the slide timings to be very quick.

Then, export as a video!