Single-Shot
You can use one only image for your story if you think that image is the most effective one and you can tell all your story with that image. That perfect and exact image must present point of view of your story and at the same time, it must be impressive to keep the attention until the end. Story teller voice and sounds and texts can help to keep focus. Also, you can give some motion this one single shot image in post-production like getting closer or slide.
Photo Series
Photo series contain several photos for your story in a row. The image has to be related what is in your script. If you decide to use this technic, you can start to divide your text into parts for understanding how many and what kind of photos you should take. Later you will unite them all (photos, sounds and texts) with or without motion in post-production.
Stop Motion Animation
Stop motion is a technique to animate to still objects / images. With every image you create a small movement and when you edit, pictures will create a motion. Generally creating a stop motion requires good preparation before start your project. Even though stop motion has many levels in animation world, you can take this idea in a very simple way for your digital story. You can work with the objects/people/text to make them moving. You will need a good tripod to locate camera in a very certain point. For the lighting, you should consider each photo could expose differently, then you can try to be indoor with artificial lighting or you can choose a cloudy day or shadows to have more diffusion if you need to be outside. When your camera, tripod and Object / Subject are ready, start to take photo and move slightly and take another photo and again move slightly through the direction you planned and take another photo. You can repeat this until you complete the motion you planned. After you finish all your photos, you need to unite each still images in video editing program. Generally, human eye recognizes the movement fluently 25 frames still images in every 1 second. In stop motion, there is no rule for frame per second but it always gives good result if you create 25 frames image per second. That is why, take your time, be slow, make your object small movements when you take photos to create as many images as you can.
Animation Production
Having technical knowledge about animation production will help with digitizing your story. In this part, you will be guided to prepare your animation in three steps. These steps include;
- Before starting to Produce Your 2D/3D Animation
- Producing Your 2D/3D Animation
- After Producing Your 2D/3D Animation
1. Before starting to Produce Your 2-D/3-D Animation
For the production process to start, you need to have your story decided. After preparing your story, planning is needed. The planning stage is where you decide how many characters are there, whether will they interact with one another, where the animation is taking place, the music playing, the sound effects, etc. according to the plot. You make all the decisions at this point, including whom you will work with and the applications you will use to exploit the data. The script needs to be broken down into parts. The broken parts are called scenes. You need to eliminate unnecessary scenes or select what is beneficial to use. This process is called “storyboarding”. Here is a description of the animation frames that we designed for the scenario. Making a storyboard is writing down the mental images that correspond to the scenario you are viewing on paper. In these essays and illustrations, your scenery is starting to shape. Everything that has to be in the scene is up to you, including the feelings you wish to convey via your characters, the camera angles appropriate for the scenario, the character’s position, and the scene’s items.
2. Producing Your 2-D/3-D Animation
After having done your storyboarding, it is time for designing. This is the key to creating animation. This process is called “modeling”. You should work out the specifics in this stage, such as designing your characters and the settings where the animation will occur and decorating the 3D models in accordance with colors and textures. You may use a variety of free programs for this. There are some that will enable you to do the best quality work without any knowledge or money. You can get the best results with the program called Blender. If you want to use this program for modeling your story, you can click the link for the tutorial:
Then the most important part of an animation which is movement is the next topic. Adding movement to a modeled character is called “rigging” and “skinning”. The simpler your character is, the fewer mistakes you will make. Rigging can be described as moving the skeleton of your character. After deciding how the skeleton of your character will move, you need to do skinning, which will help your character move more smoothly.
For these two processes, we encourage you to watch these two YouTube videos:
- Character Rigging – Blender 2.80 Fundamentals
- Blender 2.8 Tutorial: Rig ANY Character for Animation in 10 Minutes!
Modeling Rigging Skinning
After completing this step, it is time for the animation process, you will decide how your character is going to move, how it will breathe, etc. Be patient during this process, as it will not be as easy compared to other steps. For this, we recommend watching tutorial videos.
You can check out the tutorial of the program CG Geek prepared, which is called “Become a PRO at Animation in 25 Minutes | Blender Tutorial”
After the animation process, you have completed the hardest parts. Now it is time for the “rendering”. Both in 3D animations and 2D animations, you need to do the rendering. This process means separating the frames for each scene. The purpose of rendering is to create a video clip or a collection of discrete frames based on pixels. For this process, do not be a perfectionist, remember you are just starting to learn this skill. If you want to have a detailed and more qualified scene, you will need to do more rendering.
For this process, you can check out Blender Guru’s video called “Part 6, Level 1: Rendering – Blender 2.8 Beginner Tutorial”
3. After Producing Your 2D/3D Animation
After having completed your animation, it is time to add the finishing touches. For this process, you need to add your visual effects, color retouches, music, and your voice recording. For this step, you can use the program called After Effects. After giving it a final look, you can upload your animation on your preferred platform. If you need a guide during this step, you can check out Tonika Pantoja’s video called “How I use After Effects for my Animation Work”: