In this video, I am going to break down how simple it is to make an animated text video with Canva.com.
Generally, I prefer to make videos with people in them or even a voice-over and my reasoning is just that people love people! But animated text videos can be a great way to get a message across especially if you've something concise and informative that you want to share and better yet they are so easy to create and don't take a huge amount of time.
If you aren't already familiar with Canva then I would suggest setting up a free account today it is one of my favorite apps for so many things I create PowerPoint presentations in there - well I create presentations in there and then I can download them and format them then in PowerPoint which is an app I'm more familiar with for presentations. I can create social media graphics in there and everything just looks really really nice when you create it in Canva.
Some graphic designers that I know scoff at Canva but I do find if you're not a professional graphic designer and you're not going out to pay someone to create graphics for you, then it is going to be your best friend.
More recently Canva are moving into the video space and this is really exciting for me because I get to use it and I get to show people how to use it so let's go through step by step how I made the video that you just saw with Canva.
Step 1 is to make a plan. I always tell people in my workshops that your video will only ever be as good as your plan. Usually what I do is I start out with a pen and a paper and I will try and brainstorm ideas about what could happen in this video. I suggest thinking about it in scenes. So Scene 1 will be your first shot or the first video that you'll include and then try to decide what your text will say. Now the important thing here is to keep your text as concise and less wordy as possible because you don't want your viewers having to read a lot in the video. You just want it to kind of flash up and you know be interesting enough for them to want to keep watching into the next scene.
Step 2 is to open up with a hook. You only have a couple of seconds to hook the viewers in or to grab their attention so that they'll continue watching your video so you want to make sure that you take time to brainstorm what your opening text and opening visuals will be. So for example you could start off with an interesting statistic or fact or you could include a question just like I did asking the viewers if they want to learn something new. Whatever you decide to include just make sure to spend a bit of time thinking about this part probably more than the other parts because this is the part that's going to help the viewer to decide 'do I want to continue watching this?' or 'am i going to skip on to the next video?'
Step 3 is now to move on to Canva and start adding videos. So once you go into Canva you click on 'create a design' and then go down and click into video in here you can choose from loads of different video templates and you can see what's happening within them so one of these might suit your brand perfectly. You can upload your own video files which is also excellent by clicking on upload and then choose the media that you want to add. So it will just ask you where do you want to upload it from and usually it's from your device and you have it saved on your computer somewhere. Just try and make sure that the clips are short enough otherwise it will be a bit clunky to be trimming them later, but you can always trim them later on as well.
I tend to prefer to use the Canva videos because there are so many options in there and they're already professionally shot so it's going to save me loads of time in filming. So I might type in 'person on a computer' because I'm showing people how to make animated text videos on a computer. And I like this one especially because there's a lot of empty space so I feel like when I go to add text in the next step it won't be too busy. But you can always change the video later so don't worry about which one you choose just choose one for now that potentially could work and then just continue doing this by pressing plus add in the video for your next scene. And then keep going until you're finished adding your videos.
Step four is to animate your text. So to add text to each scene go back to the left ribbon and click on text here you'll see that there are lots of text options as well like if something already suits your brand then why not throw that over and then you can customize it and then you can make it smaller and you can push it over. I don't tend to use the templates so I'll just click on add a heading here and then I can either copy-paste from my script or storyboard or else I can type it in and I will just highlight it so that I can adjust it and then I can just make it bigger and also change the color.
I spend a little bit of time tinkering around with the text making sure that I can see everything clearly. Take an hour and just learn it and make sure that you're happy with how it looks because you know if you're not happy with how it looks then your viewers probably won't be either.
And before we move on to the next step i just want to show you how to animate the text in. You just click on the animate button here and you can go through block, typewriter, ascend and just make sure to choose the option that you like the best. So i'm going to use Block for this one but I'd suggest you know in each video stick to one or two text animations and then go from there.
Step 5 is to add in some music. Canva has loads of tracks that you can choose from and you know a lot of them are Pro so you're going to be paying 10 euro a month to avail of these. But there are some free songs on there as well so I would suggest going through the three songs first and then if you're like 'okay none of these are working, I want a better song', then potentially upgrade to a pro account for the month that you're making the video and then cancel it afterward - just remember to cancel it. So i'm going to throw in this track Hushed in here so I'm just going to drag and drop it onto the video and you can see the music file here now underneath it now. The one thing that I'm concerned about is how the video will end. Nothing screams unprofessional video more than the music ending abruptly as the video ends. Every video that you make should end when the song ends is the perfect way to do it.
Step 6 is to trim your clips so the duration of each scene is going to be the duration of the video that you dropped in. So now it's time to go and trim those videos down so that they're on the screen long enough for the viewer to read the text. So what I'll do is I'll click on to the clip and I'll click onto the background and then go over to the scissors option here which has 16.2 seconds that's the full duration of the clip.
When I click into that the purple is where it starts and the purple is where it ends so I can just drag this to you know where I wanted to start and end. So i might start it at where the clip just generally starts and then i might end it at say let's give it four seconds and then i'll go back to the timeline and play it and just make sure that you know it's on long enough but not too long.
Step 7 is to download and share. Continue all of the steps for each of the video scenes and then you click download and make sure it's an mp4 video with all pages selected and then click download. It will take a couple of minutes depending on how complex the video is. Remember there are a lot of pixels and a lot of information to compress into one file but once it's finished you I'll have a file that you can share on Linkedin, YouTube Facebook, Twitter and wherever else you want it to go.
Bonus Tip
Say you were making this video for Tik Tok or for Instagram Stories and you're thinking that landscape format is just not gonna fly and instead you are going to need it to be in portrait mode. Canva have made this so easy all you need to do is go over to resize and instead of 1920x1080 it needs to be 1080x1920. In fact, flipping the dimensions so that it goes from landscape to portrait if that makes sense.
So press copy and resize and you can see that it changes the text so the text fits into the screen and then it chooses parts of the clip to keep. If you want to change the clip, you can press crop and you can move it over and back wherever you want it to go and then go through and do the same for each one.
Now you've got a video that you've managed to repurpose for the different social media sites that speaks the language of that site so bravo, you've got a lovely video to be able to share!
You can see now that you'd probably lose an hour or two but it could be something really enjoyable for your audience to watch.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you'd like to watch more of these tutorial style videos about videos and I'll see you next time.