How to Create Your First Micro-Video with Doodly
Monday, November 07, 2022
What is Micro-Video Content?
Micro videos are short video clips that are usually less than a minute long and are seen playing on micro-video social media platforms like Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook. Micro-video contents are educational. It provides instructions with the purpose of selling or promoting something to viewers. It aims to raise brand awareness. They are emotionally engaging, despite it being too short. It contains a call-to-action, which is a great strategy to convert your viewers into subscribers or customers.
Doodly is a perfect tool for creating micro-videos. With Doodly, you can turn a 2-minute video into an animated, attention-grabbing, short video without the need to crop or edit out some portions of your video. In today’s article, we will cover the basics of creating a micro-video.
If you are ready, let’s start.
The Script
If this is your first time using Doodly, you might be tempted to immediately work on the scenes right away and just start planning your video skit as you move on. While that can work for others, you might consider working on your script first. By doing so, you eliminate the chance of revising your work repeatedly. You can make use of your time wisely if you have a script ready. So yes, before you start working on your Doodly scenes, get those pens and paper ready and start writing your script.
For our sample micro-video, we thought of creating a simple instruction video.
Here’s our sample script:
As you can see, our script is very basic. It has a swift introduction and then jumps right at the steps on how to fry an egg. Now we don’t have to input all these texts in our scenes. We will only use the main instructions as headings in our video, and the rest will serve as a script for our voice-over.
Creating the Video
Our video consists of 4 scenes. For each scene, we will show you the assets used and the settings applied including how the layers are arranged. All the assets we used in our video are found within Doodly. If you will create your own and cannot locate an asset you like from our list, you can always upload your own file and use it in your video.
If you’re ready, let’s start working on our micro-video starting with our first scene.
SCENE 1
In the first scene, you will see the title of the video and the name of the person presenting it. In our case, the video is presented by Chef Janet. If you noticed, our characters and props are all colored images. That is because we enabled the rainbow feature. Most whiteboard animation creators love to use the classic black and white assets. So, if you are team black and white, by all means, you can disable the rainbow feature.
The Asset’s Sequence
The secret to a successful whiteboard animation is making sure that you get the layers right. We cannot have characters overlapping each other. For our first scene, we placed numbers on each character (as shown below) to show you their order of appearance in the video. So when the video is played, the title comes first, next is Chef Janet, then the text, “Presented by,” and so on.
The Asset’s Sequence
The default animation is 3 seconds for images and 1.5 seconds for texts. This is the duration as to how long assets are being scribbled or drawn by hand. Now we don’t need everything hand-drawn, especially since we are creating a micro-video. Having said that, we need to change the animation duration of most of these assets to zero.
To update the animation duration in bulk, select the assets from the Layers menu. To select all, click one of the assets from the Layers menu, then press CTRL + A on your keyboard. If you wish to choose several assets, press CTRL (Windows) or the Command key ⌘ (Mac) on your keyboard, then click the assets you want to update.
Select the asset settings, which is the gear icon that you will see from the menu. This will appear right after highlighting all the assets in your scene.
Set the Enter Animation settings to zero and hit Apply.
Next is to select only the assets that you want to be scribbled by hand and these are the texts and the main character, Chef Jane.
Voice-Over
Now that we have added all the assets in our first scene and layers have been properly arranged, it is time to add our voice-over. To do that, locate the voice-over menu at the bottom of the timeline. Click the “+” sign as shown below to launch the mic and start recording.
SCENE 2
The second scene will cover the cooking instructions. We used the font style “Acme Regular” and added the assets, “frying pan” and “egg.” Unlike the first scene, this time, we are keeping the animation duration of all our assets and not changing it.
Exit Animation
We want to have a seamless transition when the second scene switches to the third scene. To make that happen, we need to set the second scene’s Exit Animation to “X.”
We now have completed working on our second scene. The next thing to do is to DUPLICATE the second scene to generate our third scene.
SCENE 3
With the third scene, we need to set all the animation duration to zero. We will set it by manually changing the animation duration from the Layers menu. Or, we can again just do CTRL + A, go to asset settings then change the animation duration to zero.
Modify Assets
We want to create an illusion of lifting the cooked egg from the pan using the spatula. To do that, we will replace the egg on the frying pan with another image of an egg. And then, we will put the spatula behind the egg.
SCENE 4
Our last scene is the final step which is to just enjoy the cooked egg. This is where we will place our call-to-action. A call-to-action or CTA is a statement marketers use to tell their audience what to do next after watching their ad.
For our sample scenario, we want the viewers to know that we are launching more tips the next day, and we want them to keep an eye on that.
Preview It First
We are almost done with our micro-video. But before we proceed further, we need to preview the entire video first to ensure that both the voice-over and the scenes are perfectly in-sync.
If one of the scenes is out of sync, you can adjust it by extending the time in the end (see image below) or adding more time to the asset’s animation duration.
Add Audio Track
Another great add-on to your micro-video is background music. We have a great list of audio tracks from the Sounds panel that you can choose from. Apart from background music, we also have some sound effects that you can use. Just like the images, you can also import your own audio track and use it in your video.
TRIM YOUR TRACK
If the audio track is longer than your video, you can cut out the ending portion of it so it can match the video’s timing. We can also remove any dead air at the beginning of the track so the music can start immediately when the video is played.
FADE OUT EFFECT
Do not forget to apply the “fade out” effect at the end of the track, so the music doesn’t end abruptly.
VOLUME
Lastly, lower the volume of your track so it doesn’t overpower your voice-over.
Here’s a quick walkthrough:
Pan & Zoom
We are now down to the last feature that we want to apply to our micro-video and that is the pan & zoom effect. Now, this is something that you don’t really need to add to every video you create, but it does make a great attribute to your video.
The purpose of pan & zoom is to highlight important portions of your scene. This feature directs the eye of your viewers to where you want them to look. In that sense, we can agree that this feature is powerful because we can make the audience focus on where we want them to without directly telling them to do so. Here is how we set up the pan & zoom effect in our sample video:
A. Locate the pan & zoom feature in the timeline and click the “+” sign. This will launch the pan and zoom menu.
B. Drag and move it to where you want the effect to start playing in your scene.
C. Click fx to launch the pan & zoom settings. We want the camera on the first scene to start with everything on screen captured, then slowly panning to focus on the materials used for our recipe (the frying pan, egg, spatula, and seasoning).
D. Preview the video and adjust the pan & zoom on the timeline to achieve the perfect timing. We don’t want the camera to be stuck and just focused on the corner of our scene for the entire video. So, we need to zoom out to reveal the whole screen once again.
To do that, we need to add another pan & zoom and make sure that the camera’s start and end position captures the entire screen. After that, drag the second pan & zoom at the start of the second scene.
E. Add a third pan & zoom effect and place it in the last scene to highlight the call-to-action. This is going to be the last thing that our viewers will see.
Let’s see the actual pan & zoom setup:
And yes, we did it! We have finished working on our first micro-video.
Conclusion
Using micro-videos is excellent for teaching a certain skill or a concept. Just like our sample video, watching it is way better than watching a 5-10 minute cooking video. Micro-videos can easily grab viewers’ attention because apart from being short and snappy, they are also entertaining.
Doodly is a great tool that helps execute our fantastic micro-video ideas. We hope that our walkthrough inspires you to start working on your own micro-video. We would love to see your videos so don’t forget to share your work with us via our FB Doodly page. We’re leaving you now with our finished micro-video. Happy doodling!
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