Hello, this is Cristi. In this video, I
want to show you how you can use animation in Descript Storyboard. Animation is fairly new
in Descript and it's a little underdeveloped, but I'm hoping it's going to be developed
more in the future, but you can still do some basic animation with Descript. In addition to the
zooming in and out and panning and all that stuff, you also have a custom animation that you can
use to create any type of animation you want, move objects from A to B in a straigh
t
line. So this is what I will show you today. And as an example, I will show you how you
can animate a lower third on a video. This is a webinar that I have run recently
about how to create social media clips with Descript. And I want to show you
how I can add my name at the bottom of the screen, coming into the screen,
animation, and then going out again. And we will use my logo for that, as well
as my name and stuff like that. So let's get to it. So you have the video here. It
has to b
e a video composition, of course. Animation, you do it in Descript in the timeline,
because that's where you can see where the beginning and the end of the animation happens,
you can control the key frames. And animation in Descript behaves like a lot, like other
applications where you have keyframes, basically. The state of an object in one time, and then later
it is in another position, or size, or whatever. And then Descript will interpolate, it will
create the motion between these two k
eyframes. That's how animation works. So I'm going to
reveal my timeline. If you don't have it visible, go to the bottom left of the screen, show
timeline. And I am going to make it larger, just so you can see what I have here. So in
my video right now, I don't have any other elements except for the video itself. So you can
see my video on the screen, there on the canvas. And at the bottom, there is the script track,
which has the transcription and the audio. That's all I have. So I would l
ike to have
a lower thirds animation with my logo and my name showing at the bottom left of the screen,
coming in from the left side, so from outside the screen and sliding in, and then staying
there for a while, and then sliding out again. So this should be pretty straightforward
and we will actually use two animations on the same object because you can do
that in Descript. So before I do that, I would like to identify the portion of the script
or the video where I want my animation to st
art, and I will create a scene there. It's easier
to use scenes for animation because you can control where the particular clip that
you want to animate starts and stops. So I advise you to do animation with scenes
and just put your objects inside of a scene and stay with them there and then animate
them inside of that scene. You can of course expand the scene if you want to and
extend the duration of those clips. So let's have a look. This is the very beginning
where I say, welcome, my na
me is Cristi and so on. So that's where I want my lower thirds to
show up, right at the beginning. I'm going to say that probably it's going to stay on
the screen for about 10 seconds altogether, including the animation coming in and
going out. So I may actually play it until the second paragraph is ending. So
right there, I've highlighted that portion. So I want to create a scene that stops here.
So I'm going to go in here at the end of this paragraph and press slash on my keyboard. You ca
n
also press slash on the timeline down there. And look, I have just created a scene in here.
If I zoom out with command and mouse wheel, control mouse wheel on windows will
zoom you in and out on the timeline. You can see this gray area. This is my
first scene. And then I have another scene, number two, and you also see the
thumbnails on the sidebar there that show you the scenes. So now this is
where I will have my animation happening. So the animation is going to be my logo
sliding in
from the left. Let's bring that in. I have it in my Media bin already. So go to
the Media bin at the top and there's my logo in here. It is a transparent PNG, which makes
it very nice and easy to put it on top of other things. So if you want to animate some elements
or if you want to bring in some elements for your social media clips, like logos and things
like that, and you want them to be see through, they need to be PNGs with an alpha
channel. So PNG with transparency. So I'm going to ju
st grab this logo
and drag it down there into this scene, scene number one. And as you can see, I'm going
to close the Media bin now. As you can see, Descript will just make it, you know,
place it on the timeline in there. Usually it should have put it on the
entire scene, but it doesn't. It just puts it here. By the way, if I delete it,
and instead of dragging it on the timeline, I move this media bin out of the way, it
docks itself on the left, I will move it out of the way and I will gr
ab the logo and
instead I will place it on the screen here. And there you go. Now, if I close this, you see
now my logo, the clip, the duration of the clip spans the entire first scene. Before I start
animating it and doing other things with this, I want to size it to the place that I need it
to be. So first of all, I'm going to drag the corners of this logo and make it smaller
because I don't need it to be that big. I think that's a good size. And my principle
in animation is that I need
to first put the object in the place where it's going to
stay on the screen, not the place that I start with. That's a good way to approach it
because then you place it on the screen, you have full control of where it ends up when it's
sitting there, you know, for you to look at it. And then I take care of the other parts
where it's going out and coming back in. So I'm going to move the logo right here.
This is where I want my logo to be when it's on the screen. So you can see now that
the
, the entire clip is highlighted. What I want to do is also go to the beginning and
decide where do I want this to come in? That's where I will add my
animation. So, now you can see, I want to give myself like three or four
seconds to say hello and stuff like that. And this is where I want to start bringing
that logo in, about the four second mark. Here's how you add animation in Descript. Select
the clip you want to add the animation to. And on the sidebar, on the right side, you should
s
ee Animation. There is a section there, Animation. And, if you don't
see the sidebar, by the way, a recent version of Descript allows you to close
it and open it again using this little thing there at the top. Click on this Animation
and then you have this thing here, plus. This plus means add an animation. And
the animation will be added to what? To the selected clip. And to make sure
that you know where you're adding it to, look at the top and it tells you right
here, MM Club Logo 1 PNG.
That is the clip that is selected. That is the clip that
is going to have the animation added to it. Let's click to add '+'. And Descript is asking,
what type of animation do you want? Normally, if you're adding an animation to a,
let's say, a recording of your screen, you may want to do a zoom and pan, zoom in.
There is no zoom out. This is a common request, but I don't want any of these. What I want to
do is I use a custom animation because I want, I don't want the animation to be
built
from, you know, by Descript. I don't want a prebuilt animation or
motion. I want to build my own motion. Click Custom then. That's what I want. Click
Custom. And if you look at the bottom left, you will see now that on the timeline, I have
two little frames on my clip. Those are the key frames, right? That's the beginning of the
animation. That is the end of the animation. And the beginning of the animation was added where
my playhead was. You see this little line here, this is my playhead
and the animation was added
in that place. So, what I want to do is actually, I want to grab this animation keyframe
and move it left a little bit. So it's going to start animating around this
here, three and a half second mark. And then I want to move the second keyframe
to about the five and a half second mark. So that may be a long animation, but we
can shorten it after. So you see these two key frames control the position of that
logo on the screen. So the second key frame is where my
logo will end up, which is
great because that's where I placed it. I don't need to mess with that.
I don't need to change it. So, I need to click on the first keyframe, this
one, and I need to move the object outside of the screen because I want it to start off
off screen. So, the way to do that is you can, you know, click on the keyframe and
then grab your object and move it out. But you see how Descript kind of jumps
around and, you know, makes you kind of snap to things and so on. So,
you may not
actually end up moving it in a straight line, which is what I did here. So, what I prefer
to do is two things. You can click on the object and then use the arrow keys
and you can see the object moving. On the left, so you can use the arrow keys
to slide the object on a straight line until it goes out of the screen like this. And if you
hold down the shift key and you push the arrows, it will go faster. So here we go.
I am selecting the first key frame and moving this object out
side of the
screen until it's not visible anymore. Now let me play. Let's see. Is this moving
in now? Play. 'Session today. I hope to cover everything I planned about'. There
you go. It took about two seconds. So the animation might be a little slow. So that
means if I need to animation to be faster, all I need to do is just grab these key
frames and push them closer together. So I'm going to grab the second key
frame and push it close to about half the distance that it was before. So
now
if I play again from around here, you're going to see the animation
move faster. 'This session today, I hope to cover it.' There is my logo coming in.
Now let's take care of bringing the logo out. So that is happening at the end of the clip right
here, about the second, 16 second mark. Again, these things you can, you can change them later.
You can slide them back and forth. Click on the clip again, and you can notice that the
animation has closed. It's still there. And you can actually se
e this little shade here
that shows you that you have an animation there. It might be very hard to see, but it doesn't
matter because I want to add another animation in here. And again, I have to go to this
sidebar. You see where Animation 1 is, that's my first animation,
and I need to click '+' again, to add another animation. Click '+'. And
again, I will choose a Custom animation. And this time, Descript just puts it at the
very end. I believe a default is five seconds, but I'm not sure.
So, I'm going to move this
first keyframe back a little bit and move the second keyframe closer to it. And, you guessed
it, I now need to modify the second keyframe because that is the point where I want
my logo to end up outside of the screen. I don't need to modify the first keyframe
because that's where the animation starts. That's where it's, you know, the
logo is still on the screen. So, I will click on the second keyframe and
then click on my object and again, shift and arrow keys t
o move it outside of screen like
this. There you go. I'm done with my animation. I'm going to place my playhead before and see if
the animation actually works correctly. 'CapCut, you can use other online tools that
even have AI'. There it is. It's going out of the screen. That was easy,
right? So that's my logo coming in. How about animating another object?
And I'm going to do this faster now. I want to bring my name also, in the view with my
logo. Assume that this logo in here isn't on th
e screen. So, you know, we're not being redundant.
So I'm going to show my logo there and my name. So very easy. I'm going to stay in this scene.
I can maybe click away. So I've deselected this, you know, I can deselect that clip and you see
the both animations get collapsed at the top. So now I'm going to add my name. Okay.
So I'm going to the top. T icon. Just make sure you place yourself in the same scene
because I want to stay in there. And I'm going to go to the T icon and press subtit
le.
I'm going to add my name like this. It's a little large. It's not a problem. I can
customize the size of the font from here. And also I can maybe align it to the left.
That's your choice. What do you do? Maybe make it all caps and even smaller, like this.
All right. Let's assume that's fine. Again, before I add any animations, I need to
move it in place. So as you can see again, because I added this object to my scene, it
just makes the title span the entire scene. So I don't need to d
o anything to change its
duration or anything like that. So I'm going to click away, and click on it again, and
move it down in the position I want it to be in the final stage, you know. So I'm
also going to make the text element not so tall. So it's going to kind of
match whatever the logo is doing. And, yeah, just make sure that it aligns
nicely visually like that. Here we go. So that's my name right there. I want to
animate that. Before I animate it though, I'm going to turn it yellow.
So I'm going
to go to Fill and use the color picker and I will use one of these colors
from my logo, maybe this orange. Here we go. I know it's not very visible, but
we will fix that in a moment. And before I animate the text, what I want to do is also,
I want to put a background behind it. I know you can actually turn on a background for
the text like this, but it just stays with the text. So I like to not use that. And I like
to put my own rectangular background behind it. So there you g
o, a third element to animate.
So click again on the top where it says Shapes and use a Rectangle. Click on that and let's
keep it white. And I will move it in position, put it in the bottom left corner, make
it not so tall, and move it to the right side. Now I'm covering everything. And by
the way, I can right click on it and say, Layer order, Bring to front, Bring
forward, Send backward or Send to back. I will use this one, Send backwards, Shift
and left bracket once and press again, Shi
ft left bracket twice. That's
when I see now both of them. And you know what? I would like my name to
be red, in fact. So I'm going to click on my name and go to the picker and pick
that color from my logo. There you go. That's my name color right there. So maybe
it needs to be higher a little too. Yeah, not the best placement, but anyway, you get it.
So now I have everything in place. It all looks good. I just, you know, I can use the arrow
keys to just slide some things around. And this
is the final, this is like the main
stage, the main state of my lower thirds. Now I need to bring them in, right? So
I'm already bringing the logo in around this portion. So if I go here,
you see the logo is coming in, but everything else is already there. So I would
like to maybe animate those as well. Let's try to animate something else. Along with the logo,
I would like to bring the rectangle in as well. So I'm going to go to the beginning of that
logo animation, select the rectangle cl
ip down there. If you need more room, by the way, you
can pull this up like that to make it taller. And I will go to the animation. Now you see
I'm adding an animation to the rectangle and click '+' and Custom again. So now I've
added an animation to my rectangle clip, pull that key frame back, and pull the second
key frame back. Because I want the animation for the rectangle to be exactly the same
duration as the animation for the logo. So go to the first key frame, the
starting point of
the animation, and click on my rectangle and use the arrow
keys to shift it left until it goes out of the screen. This is another, an easy way
to slide things around. So let's see now, 'play this session today. I hope
to', here we go. Now it's coming in. So again, I'm clicking on
the object, click animation, it keeps coming out of that context. Click
on the second keyframe here and make sure the object is in place. Now there, there is a
little bug here where, although I have placed the obj
ect in the screen on the second
keyframe, it keeps going for a while too. So maybe I want to go in that keyframe and
slide the object back left. It looks good here, but if I play, it goes to the right.
Overshoot that a little bit. Here we go. Now it's staying. Now it stays in place. Okay. Now the third object I want to animate is my name, but I want my name not to
slide or come in from anywhere. I want it to just fade in. Now you could
obviously fade it in with a transition, but I want to s
ee if I can animate the
opacity of the object. Okay. So again, I'm going to click my title and I want it
to fade in around here when the animation has finished, the sliding of the rectangle
has finished, the logo has stopped moving. This is when I want to fade my name in. So,
if you, if it doesn't work with the animation, we will just use a fade in, but I will insist
in doing the animation here. So go again to the right side, my text is selected, and I will
add an animation to my text. Cli
ck on it. And I will use Custom. You notice that text doesn't
have, like, a pan and zoom and all those things. You can do just Custom, right? So, let's
hope it works. And it's going to start off here. And the first keyframe was
selected. And in the first keyframe, I want my text to be invisible. So I will
go to click on the text and go to the top and turn Opacity to zero, like this,
all the way down. I don't see it now. And now let's click on the second
keyframe, and now click on the objec
t, and go to the top and Opacity 100, which it was
before. So, now, I want to move these playhead, uh, these keyframes, I want to
move them closer to each other, because I don't want the fading in to
take that long. So, I think I'm done. Let's see if it works. Start here. 'session today.
I hope to cover everything I planned about', and there you go. You see the text fading
in. Now to bring everything out. Okay. I'm done with these. And at the very end
here, when the logo starts going out,
I will fade the text out before that
happens. So click on the text again. Around here, and scroll down, click '+' to
add another animation to the text, '+' Custom, and this time I will modify the second
keyframe, I will drag it into place, and I will actually move them before
the logo starts moving. Here we go, and right here, click on the text,
and Opacity zero. Here we go. Let's hope it works. And here I can see it. After
the animation, I don't see it. So if I play this, 'Capcut, you can
use other online.' So you see the
text fading out and then the animation starts. And finally, I will click on my rectangle object,
and again, add another animation to it, custom, and this time I will move it out, I will pull this
second keyframe there, and click on the rectangle, and I will use my arrow keys to go
and slide it all out of the screen, and you can slide it into the other direction
if you like to, it's not, you know, required, and you know, be creative as much as the animation
allows you to do that. And you can see here, it's going out of the screen right now. I have no idea
why it's slowing down, but anyway, I'm pressing it. It's gone. Here we go. So everything's out
of the screen now. So this is my, this is my, kind of, my workflow with lower thirds or
animations. I like to place things on the object, on the screen first, where I want them to be in
their nice finished position. And then I deal with the beginning and the end, bringing it in and
taking it out o
f the screen. So now let's play the ending here. 'Capcut, you can use other online
tools that even have AI and select the clips.' There we go. So now comes the challenge.
Animation is done. It's kind of working. Okay. I'm going to just make sure that this
clip stays inside of that scene. So you see, everything is in the same scene right here.
So right now, if I want to do something like, I don't want to have to build
this animation all over again. I don't want to create it from scratch late
r
in my project if I want to use it again, right? So let's see if it works to actually
replicate this animation in another place. You can copy the clips and so on, but I'm going to try
and copy the scene. We need to go to the top left, where the scene is, the scene thumbnail,
right click on it, and Copy layout. Let's see this, let's see if
this works. And then, I will go, let's suppose that I want to put this at the
end of my video, right there, scene number four, I want to bring this anim
ation back in here and
show my name again, before I finish my video. So scene number four, I'll scroll down,
right click on it and say Paste layout. Let's see if the animations come in. There
they are. Okay. So I see some animations there. Of course, scene number four is
longer than scene one. So as soon as you, if I scroll this up, you see
these little shady segments, these are my animations. And after those
segments, the scene goes on for quite a while. So I don't care about these becaus
e
these are already out of the screen. But let's see if the animations are
still playing fine. 'And by the way, this will be available in the Media Makers
Club. You will also have access to it. The address is on the screen right now.' So
there you have it. I have now created a scene with three clips, logo, name, and a
background, and the animation in, on them. And technically, I can now use this
as a template. On future projects, if I want to add this animation again and
put my lower thir
ds and my name on it, I don't want to have to build it all over again.
So, finally, let's turn this into a Template. I will go to this scene, number four, and you
can right click on it and say Save to template. You can also adjust that from here. You
can access this from here, the three dots, save to template, and it's going to save
the current scene, to a template that you can apply to future projects. Okay. Save to
template. And it's asking me what template, I'm going to create a new one,
and I'm going
to, it's creating a new template projects. That's how Descript works with template. They're
actually a different type of project. They're a template project. So this has taken
a while because it's actually copying all the video and stuff into it. So this
is my template from that scene with the animation on it. You can see the animation is
still playing here, and you can see my video. But when I apply this template to another project, my video is not going to be there. So befo
re I
save this template, I want to make sure that I have 16 by 9 landscape. I don't know why
it came up with that layout, but anyway, so there's my animation down there, all the
three elements in it, in this particular scene. I'm going to rename this and call it
Media Makers Lower Thirds, LT. Enter. And that is my template project. Before I
can use this though, I have to publish the template project to my Drive. So go to the
top right where it says Publish template, click on it, it shows m
e a thumbnail
here as a preview. I can give it a name. let's call it MMCLT, lower thirds, and
Publish template. You can see it's private, which means I am the only one who's able to
access this and use it. You can also make it available with the people who have access
to your drive. If you have collaborators, you've added to your Descript drive,
you can give this and publish it with the drive so they have access to it as
well, so they can use this template. Or I can even share it publicly,
if I want
to share a link with someone else. Maybe if you're creating templates and you're selling
them, that is how you want to publish that, because people need to be able to click that
link, import that template into their own drive, their own projects. Okay, I'm going
to keep it private, it's just for me. Click Publish Template, and that takes a few
seconds, and now Descript is going to assemble this template and make it available for me in
other projects. And let me show you how you
add it to another project, and I'm done. So, go
back, I'm going to click this project and close it. Template project. This is an entire
video, so I'm gonna switch compositions. I'm going to go to the very end of this
composition, which has the closing remarks on their own. I don't have anything on the
timeline here. I don't have my animation, I don't have anything. So I wanna
apply that template in here and boom, come up with my lower thirds automatically. Let's
try that. Go to the top whe
re the five icons are, the last one is templates, click
on templates and go to private, because that's where I have my template saved
in my private area. So if I scroll somewhere, I should be able to see it, right here.
This is my template. Thumbnail is still being updated. It takes a while to do
that, but the template is right there. If I click on it, you can see the
MMCLT template that I created, and look at this. If I click on it, I'm
not going to wait for the thumbnail though, click on
this, And look, Descript is applying
that template to my video. All right. So I'm going to now see if this works. So you
see if it's preserved all the animation, all the placement in the right
place and everything works fine. The video has not been replaced. Let's play
this. 'Cover everything. And by the way, this will be available in the Media Makers Club. If
you are a member' and let's go to the end of it, 'today, you will also have access to it.
The address is on the screen right now,
mediamakers. com.' There you go. That is how
you create animations in Descript Storyboard. That is how you move elements on the
screen. That is how you use key frames. And that is how you create that into a
template that you can reuse like that. So from experience, I found that animations
don't behave so nicely when they span different scenes. So if you have an animation that goes
in different scenes, because Descript controls the layout of objects in within every scene
separately, it migh
t confuse the animation. So try it at your own risk. Another thing that
I need to mention is Animations in Descript, as you've seen, they're a little buggy, don't give you perfect control of the
placement. You have to kind of fiddle with it a little bit until you get it to respect
the geometry of the objects, and their location. So I'm hoping this is going to be something
that Descript will develop more. And also there is no easing. So you can't have
natural movement easing like in other ap
plications where the object speeds up and
slows down during the motion. So the motion is always constant speed, at least for
the moment. I hope this video was useful. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for watching. And
if you would like to learn more about Descript, check out in the link description below. I
have a membership where you can subscribe for a fixed price every month. And
you have access to all of my courses, including a massive Descript course, eight
hours of content, and I'm a
dding more to it. And also several mini courses on how
to create social media clips, how to use scenes and templates and all those little
tricks in Descript. Plus, updates on Descript, whenever they release a new version, I put out
a video showing you what's new, what's changed, where has stuff moved, all those things that
maybe confuse you when they update things. And that happens a lot, by the way. And in my
membership, you also have access to Camtasia courses and mini courses, if you are
using
Camtasia or if you're an instructional designer, and you also get discounts for one on one
coaching sessions. So plenty of reasons to sign up, make sure you click the link in
the description and I hope to see you there. Thank you for watching. Feel free to subscribe to my channel if you haven't already,
and I will see you on the next one.
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