At this time of year, it’s common for us to look for ways to wish our friends and family happy holidays. Of course, we can choose ready-made greetings, maybe on paper, or templates that we can edit, but we can also choose give our own congratulations, something much more personal and a fun project.
A creative and instructive exercise for this Christmas
The idea for this article comes from the congratulations that my sister Nèlida created this year. Nail animated greeting made entirely from scratch in which all parts of the process were done on Apple platforms and most were done with apps that we all have, or can have for free, on our iPad or Mac.
I must admit my surprise to see what it is possible to achieve using only three applications, apps that aren’t even considered professional: Keynote, GarageBand, and iMovie. Three apps with which you can get a congratulation like the one shown in the video (with audio) below.
Receive our best wishes for the new year! ??
Receive our best wishes for the new year! 🎉#noplaces #Merry Christmas pic.twitter.com/1KXTkmFQS1– No place is far (@ninlugareslejos) December 16, 2021
Without further ado, let’s talk about the process of creating this mini video, since that’s exactly the point of this article: to encourage us to create something similar. The process begins with the drawing of the elements that we are going to animate. In this case, we have a kettle, a cup and a plate. There are plenty of apps that let us draw like this on our iPad with an Apple Pencil, although in my experience Procreate stands out above all the others.
Start of the project in Procreate.
For further editing, it is important to separate the different elements into layers. This way, when exporting, we can create an image with each of the elements. The export will always be in PNGIt is a format that allows you to work with transparent backgrounds, necessary to later animate our drawings in Keynote. A small parenthesis here to point out that, as in the example, we can draw the figures ourselves, but if we are not comfortable with our graphic arts, we can also use images downloaded from the Internet.
Layers of the different elements in Procreate.
Well, once we have placed our images in the Keynote app, we can proceed with the animation. Here what we want to avoid is to shoot too much on the animations of appearance or disappearance of elements. At the end of the day, what we want is for it not to look like a presentation, but rather a handcrafted animation. In this regard, there are two important resources to pay attention to: magic movement and travel.
Keynote slide, with the different animations.
The first allows you to place an item on one slide and the same item in another position on another slide and Keynote takes care of the movement. On the other hand, “Path”, much easier to use on iPad with Apple Pencil, allows you to trace which path an element must follow.
Once the animation is exported from Keynote, we move on to sound effects and music. As with pictures, we can still shoot on the internet, but generating our own sound effects is much more fun. We only have to use the Voice Notes app on our iPhone to record certain sounds, in our case glasses hitting a table and a few shots between them. Once registered, the Voice Notes application on Mac, which is synchronized with that of the iPhone via iCloud, will allow us to drag these sounds into our iMovie project.
IMovie project, with sound effects in every location.
Which iMovie project? The one we create with the video we export from Keynote. In it we can place the sound effects in the corresponding position, we can also copy them and repeat them at different times. With this part complete, we have to add the music. Again, the Internet is a possibility, with a little grace and the application GarageBand, we can record our own melody.
If we don’t have a keyboard, we can use the iPad’s onscreen piano. A simple melody can be adapted, cloned, accelerated and the type of instrument modified for a most interesting effect. Then a automatic drum track will give us a finish More professional. Exported the music track, we also drag it to iMovie and we already have the finished project.
GarageBand project on Mac with the different tracks.
Yes, explained in an article, the process seems like a piece of cake, but it’s fair to say that it depends a lot on the level of detail we want to achieve. Este es un proyecto que bien podemos hacer con nuestros hijos, al animar simplye el dibujo de un muñeco de nieve que hayan hecho, sin música ni efectos, o en el que podemos, como es el caso, generar todo el contenido, visual y sonoro from zero.
Either way, the idea behind this article is to show that you don’t need big apps to make a fun, creative, and informative project. An excellent project for this Christmas, the difficulty of which we can resolve as we please and which, without a doubt, will bring us a smile when it is finished.
