How To Use Photos In Your Whiteboard Animation Videos
Wednesday, November 02, 2022
Due to short attention spans these days, people tend to get easily bored and skip videos. As a result, we need to become more creative in making sure that viewers will pay attention to our videos. Using whiteboard animation is one way to grab attention. With Doodly, we don’t just get awesome preset assets. It also supports the ability to import images. Yes, one of Doodly’s most powerful feature is the ability to add your own assets to it. Apart from photos, you can also import drawings and other kinds of illustrations.
Adding photos to a video presentation is a great way to capture people’s attention. It conveys messages quickly. On the other hand, whiteboard animation like Doodly makes explaining complex and serious topics easy to understand and fun. It takes away the boring part of the presentation.
Having photos to your whiteboard animation is definitely a sure head-turner for your viewers. Using the right assets in your animation and great photos can turn your video into a hit.
In today’s blog, we will talk about how you can efficiently use your imported photos for your Doodly videos.
HOW PHOTOS ARE USED
There are several reasons and ways to use photos in your Doodly videos. Most of us use a photo as a background in our scenes. It is added on videos without the traditional Doodly elements like the characters or the drawing hand.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Sample 1:
Sample 2:
Apart from using it as a background, we can also use the photos as elements within the whiteboard screen by mixing and matching them alongside various characters and props.
Sample 3:
Sample 4:
Some use photos and illustrations as part of a greeting card-type video or as background elements.
Sample 5:
Sample 6:
RESOLUTION
Doodly requires photos to be either in the JPEG or PNG file format with a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080. Keep this in mind when downloading photos from sites like pixabay or any other 3rd party royalty-free sites that provide size options prior to downloading an image.
ADDING A PHOTO
Here’s how we add photos in Doodly:
1. From the Assets pane, select Props and click the blue “+” sign at the bottom.
2. When you see Add new prop, click “Browse Files” and select the file from your laptop.
If you can’t seem to import your photo, try to move it to your Downloads folder and import it from there.
3. Rename the imported photo and click “Continue”.x
It is a good practice to rename your photo as soon as it has been uploaded so you can easily locate it.
4. The imported file will be available on top of your Props list.
Navigating away from your images will sort your assets in alphabetical order so if you can’t find your imported photo, just locate “My Library” and you should be able to locate your imported photos there.
THE SCRIBBLE EFFECT
Unless you are uploading an SVG file, photos, when imported to Doodly, makes that scribble effect. A scribble effect is the up and down hand stroke when trying to draw your uploaded photo.
It’s okay to use a scribble effect but if you don’t like your photos being scribbled, as shown above, you can either create your own paths or use a fade-in effect instead.
DRAW PATHS
Creating your own draw path is fun. The only problem is, it takes quite some time to finish especially if your image has too many lines and details. If you don’t have the time and patience, you may want to try applying the fade-in effect instead.
THE FADE EFFECT
The fade effect is one of the many updates of Doodly which really helps provide a great transition to photos when added to scenes.
Here’s how you can disable the draw path effect and add a fade effect to your photo:
1. Select your photo and click the pencil icon.
2. Locate Reveal Paths and select “Fade” from the dropdown menu.
You will also find on the same screen the animation duration. This lets you set up the duration of either the drawing or the fading of your image. By default, the revealed path is set to 3 seconds.
3. Hit Save & return.
The “Save & return” button should turn green for you to save the changes made. In case it remained grayed out and won’t let you save your changes, try changing the path size bar. This will then turn the “save” button into green and will allow you to make changes.
OPACITY
When working with inspirational quotes, it is great to reduce your photo’s opacity. By doing so, your texts are given enough attention and not being overpowered by your photo. It adds a nice ambiance to your scene.
Not though that reducing the opacity of your image is always up to you. If you think it will look good on your image, just go for it and add some opacity effect to your photo.
Here’s how can set up your photo’s opacity:
1. Select the photo from your scene and click the gear icon.
2. Reduce your photo’s opacity settings.
There’s no preferred percentage when reducing opacity. Whatever looks good in your photo is fine. For our example below, we used 70% opacity.
ERASE MODE
Noticed the hand erasing your image before it gets drawn? It looks a little odd to have an image erased before it finally gets drawn. You may or may not want this erase feature but in case you wish to disable it, there is a way to do so.
Turning off ERASE feature
Here’s how you can turn off the erase feature:
1. Go to Video Settings
2. Under Erase mode, select “Off”.
3. Don’t forget to hit “Apply” after making changes.
POSITIONING PHOTOS
Most of the time, we use our imported photos in fullscreen. No doubt, great photos deserve to be in the spotlight of our scenes. But did you know that you can also add a frame to your photo and place it on the side? Adding a frame to a photo helps blend the realism of the photograph into a whiteboard style. This is a helpful technique when doing a tutorial video with screenshots. You can also use the imported image and incorporate them with other props like computers, tablets, or smartphones.
There are 3 ways you can do to add frames in your uploaded photos:
1. Use Doodly’s existing frames and props such as tv, laptop, desktop.
2. Import a frame in Doodly as well as gadget frames. If you are creating an online course ad, you might want to add an image of your course inside a laptop or a desktop which your viewers will use to play your video on.
3. Use a 3rd party app or website that provides smartmockups for images.
Let’s see some examples below:
And that’s it!
That’s all our tips on how you can effectively use your imported photos in Doodly.
Again, do not settle in just using your imported image as a background. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you can also use your image in a lot of ways. Use it on full screen, use it together with Doodly assets, add a frame to it and apply mockups to it.
Be creative and as always, don’t forget to have fun. Until next time!
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