Create Animated Explainer Videos with PowToon

1. Promo: are you interested in learning how to create your very own explainer videos? Hi, my name is Mary, and I'd love to teach you how to create visually engaging explainer videos using power tune videos. Just like this, one can highlight your brand or product or present your ideas in a more memorable way. I have over seven years of experience working as a freelance video producer and designer and have created hundreds of explainer animations in this course. The goal is to learn the basics of how to use power to some advanced techniques within the program, discover valuable resource is and approach the designing of explainer videos with a more artistic eye. Explainer videos are great for all types of businesses, and even for teaching, you can have little to no video production or animation knowledge to get started. Learn how to get your story out and captivate your audience is attention by learning pattern in my course today 2. PowToon Intro : Hi, My name is Mary and welcome to my Power Tune course. I'm a freelance video producer and designer, and I've been using Power Tune for a few years now. It's super easy to get started, no matter what level of knowledge you have when it comes to creating videos. Pau Tune is a browser based animation program. This means that you don't need to download or install any software to your computer. It works right within your browser using HTML five. The great thing about Pau tune is that it is designed for anybody to use. Even if you don't have any video production, design or animation knowledge, you don't have to be artistic at all. Pau Tune is already loaded with various styles of stock assets, graphics and characters that you can use for whatever project you are creating. So if you don't know how to draw or have no artistic bone in your body, even you can create colorful, vibrant and engaging animations. Pattern utilizes a dragon drop style of animation creation, so it really is so easy to use and create something interesting quickly. And if you are familiar with power point already, you will be right at home in Power Tune. You can start from scratch and create your own scenes. Or you can even select pre made templates scenes. That pattern already has and customize your video from there. There, ready made templates can help you get started. Faster pattern allows you to create awesome animated videos and presentations for practically anything. You can create videos for marketing, advertising, training, education, school assignments, personal assignments or whatever you can think of. Video is proven to be more effective than any other form of visual or text content to grab viewers attention. Anyone can get their message animated with Pau Tune. 3. PowToon Subscription Plans: Pau Tune offers a variety of different tiered subscription plans. The best one to start out with when you are just starting out and learning the program is, of course, the free plan. With the free plan, there are some limitations, like limited access to the more advanced animation capabilities and limited access to visual styles within the program. The free plan has no commercial rights or third party resell rights, which you would need if you plan on selling the videos you create to other companies. And most noticeably, with the free plan, the power to logo will be over laid in the corner of whatever video you create. You also have basic quality and resolution output and are unable to download the video as an MP four file. Your max length for video production is up to five minutes, and you would not receive 24 7 premium support. I will briefly talk about the other plans, but you can check out the full list of what is included and not included in all of the plans on the pricing section of the Power Tune website. As with any service, pricing is subject to change over time, so the prices and even what features plans include shown here, maybe a little different in the future. Premium plans are more tailored to businesses, companies or individuals who want to create commercials after the free plan. The next step up is the pro plan, which includes commercial rights but still has some limitations. After that is the business plan, which includes third party resell rights and commercial rights. And their most inclusive plan is the agency plan, which has all the bells and whistles. Next Power Tune offers educational plans, which are for teachers or instructors, not for commercial creation. As a result, all of these plans do not have commercial rights with an education plan, however, classroom plans students can be given private accounts that are shared with teachers. Finally, we have the paper export feature, which is similar to a pro plan except instead of billed annually and being able to create unlimited videos and export them. This pricing plan is basically a paper video plan where you Onley pay for the videos you export. These are currently sold in bundles and have no commercial rights, as I mentioned before, if you are just starting out, I recommend just starting with the free plan so you can get a feel for the program. Give yourself time to learn it, and eventually you can choose the subscription plan that works best for you. 4. Sign Up & Login: signing up is, of course, the first step. Once you've input your sign up info and verified your email to activate your account, you can choose what you'd like to use power tuned for. Or you can even skip that step by default. You have the power tune free account. When you sign up and log in, the first thing you'll be brought to is the My Power Tunes Page. This is where all of your power tune projects will be saved and where you can create new projects, open older projects, export projects and even search by keyword through your previous project titles. The layout is subject to change over time, of course, as Pau Tune updates their program and grows. But for now we see a few different options of the start. If you know exactly what you want to dio, you can start from scratch. If you have a story in mind, you can build your story scene by scene. If you need some inspiration or are just starting out, you can customize a popular existing template. And lastly, if you want to get social, you can create a square style video rather than the typical rectangular videos 5. Planning your PowToon – The Script & The Voice: before jumping into production of your own power tune. The best thing to do first is have a script ready. A good script is the foundation for a clear and interesting video. It's fine to go in and play around with things for now, without a script while you are still learning. But when it comes time to actually create the video, you want to get your message or ideas across with. You need a coherent and solid script from the start. Rather than bombarding a viewer with a lot of text and ideas, you can try and tell a story that a viewer can easily follow along with. Personally, when it comes to writing, my specialty is more so in writing scripts for commercials and advertisements. Explainer videos. So here is my simple formula for that step one. Start with a question or a problem that addresses your target audience. Step to answer the question or problem with your solution, which is your product service, app or website. Step three. Outline and explain some features or benefits to support your claims. This can even be done with bullet points or a checklist. Try and keep it short and sweet Step four Leslie. And with a call to action, give your contact information like your website, phone number or email, for example. Use action words like contact us today or register now as far as writing for a lesson or presentation. Don't bombard the viewer with statistics. Try and tell a story with your script and take it step by step. Consider how you would plan out your typical lesson or presentation in Power Point, because that will translate well to power tune when you are first. Starting out, I would recommend not adding voice over right away. But when you are more comfortable with the program and are ready to add boys, you have a few options. One. You can do the voice over yourself. Either you or a colleague can record the voice over in a program like audacity. And once finalized, you can import that into power. Tune to you can record directly into power tune or three. You can outsource the voiceover from somewhere like fibre dot com or voice bunny dot com and import that file into power tune. I will explain all of these options for voice overs and Electra later on. In the course 6. Customize a Template or Build Scene-by-SceneoiceScript & The Voice: customize a template or build scene by scene in the My Power Tunes screen. The build scene by scene option will help you with your story board structure and allow you to add template scenes into each section. But let's start with the basics and create our first power tune with a popular template that we can customize. Click customize a popular template. Here you will see a drop down for template category so you can browse different themes to find a template that works for your project. If you want to build a video off of a template, if you'd like to follow along, I'm going to work off of this. Invite guests template. We're going to change a few things up in this template. In order to get familiar with editing text and images, I'm going to click preview to take a look at what it looks like first. So then I'm going to click. Use this template. Pau tune will load up this template with animations and slides in my browser, and once all of the awesomeness is loaded on the left, you will see we have four slides for this file. On the right, you will see some icons, which I will go into more detail later on. But just to touch on what we have here briefly, we can see scenes which are templates of individual slides, background text characters, props, which are mostly objects, shapes. Sound media, which is the section for additional images, and video and specials, which are collections of images around a certain special theme. Clicking on any one of these will expand that section, and you also have a search bar option if you ever want to use a keyword to search for a particular type of character, prop, etcetera. So for this template, if you want to follow along, what I'm going to do is change this character from Brian to Lucy. So first I'm going to click on Brian and click this icon at the top. That is the swap icon. This opens up the character section so I can choose a new character to replace Brian with. I'm going to click pleasant Style and choose this little girl down here. When you hover over a character, you will see different poses for them that you can select from. I'll choose the stand post here for the introduction Now you can see this new character appear in place of Brian. Next, we're going to want to change the text, double clicking. It will allow me to directly edit this text. I will highlight Brian and Type Lucy, and I'll also change her age, too. I'm also going to add an exclamation point at the end. This is for a birthday, so it should be exciting. If I click an empty space on the slide, it will de select the text. I'll also change the number at the top two. Let's work on the second slide. Here we have Brian in a cheering pose that we need to swap Lucy, too. So again I will click Brian, Click Swap and choose Lucy's happy pose. If you want to see how the video is coming along, you can click this play button and it will play the entire slide. The other play button, I will explain later on. Okay, so now we will move to slide. Three. The party will be in our house, but let's say I want to change the time and the address. I'll double click the text to edit this. Lastly, we have slide for I'm going to swap Brian and Lucy. So Lucy is on the tallest present. Now we will see we have a little problem here, where Lucy and Brian's height seems a little off to resize an image. Click on it and you will see a boundary box. Click and drag one of the circle corners to resize the image to be smaller or larger. You can also click and drag this arrow in the corner to rotate an image to moving image, click the center of it and drag the image to where you want it to be. You can even click the flip icon on an image to flip its orientation. Remember, all of the work files you work on in Power Tune are saved right into the my Power Tune section on the pattern website Power Tune. Actually, auto saves your work pretty frequently, so that is always helpful. But of course, it doesn't hurt to save manually once in a while. You can do that by clicking save at the top. You can even edit the title by clicking on that text at the top. Once you are ready to preview the video click preview to view it 7. Image & Text Settings: in this lecture, I'll be going over image and text settings. I'm still working on this Lucy's birthday template in Slide one. I'd like to make this bottom text a little bigger. To do that, I can click the text and use the plus sign to increase the font. Size minus will decrease the size, or I can type in a specific number if I want. You can change the color of the text by clicking the circle next to the font size. You'll have swatches of color to choose from, or you can use the eyedropper to pick up and select a specific color that is already visible on the slide. You can add this color to your own swatch list to easily access this color later on. If you want, by clicking the plus sign under my colors, and you can remove it by hovering over it and clicking the X. If you click a section of text, then clicked the gear icon. You will see more specific settings. Controls pop up. You can select the font change size again, bold italic or underlying text. Change the alignment color opacity, which is the transparency effects, which is the animation at an A to B animation, which I'll cover later on. Arrange the layering of where this text should be. For example, you might want text to appear over some images, and there is a link function, which allows you to type in a Web page. You are l. So that clicking that specific text will bring someone to that you are L. Page. However, the link function does not work when the video is exported as an MP four file. A link will only work when you choose to export the video and create a personal pattern player page for the video. Props and characters have a settings controlled to some settings can be changed, and others can't depending on the image. So looking at Slide four thes presence actually have an animation, but by default in this template there animation was turned off in order for the character to seem like they're standing on these still not moving presence. So I'm going to turn on the animation for two of these presence so you can see what I mean by clicking this present clicking settings, then clicking animation. We see that no animation is selected, so the president will appear with no animation. Not all props have animations, but the's presence in particular Dio. So we can either choose to have the animation play a certain number of times, and then stop or plain loop. I'll select playing loop here. You will also see some settings controls we've seen before when editing the text and characters like swap flip opacity effects A to be arranged and link. I will also add the plane loop animation to this other present. As I mentioned, characters also have a settings control lots of the same functions here, except there is a pose icon clicking. This will open up this character's specific set of poses so you can quickly change. Oppose for a character this way, another way to edit some settings on a character or prop is by right clicking it. You can cut, copy and delete from here or by using the typical keyboard controls. Control C Control V Control X, For example, on PC, you can also undo or redo your previous actions, and there are some other functions in here is well, now, if I preview this slide, you will see the two presence. I changed the animation settings on are now looping in their programmed animation, which adds a little more excitement to the slide, in my opinion. 8. Backgrounds, Adding Media & Editing Images: changing the background in power tune is pretty easy. First you click on a slide, click the background icon, and from here you will have various options like upload a background image file, pick a background solid color, selecting a background from your uploaded media, or choose a background from one within power tune. There are also video backgrounds from storey blocks, which is a stock video website, but I will talk more about that in a later lesson. You can also search for a background at the top if you are looking for something specific, even if you are looking for a specific color for now, I'm going to pick a new background for this slide. On the top left, you will see a gear icon, which is the settings control for the background. After clicking it, you will have options to swap flip blur, change the background to a solid color or change the opacity. If you are using an image you uploaded from the My Media section as the background, you will have the option to edit image. So if I go into my media while in the background section, I will see all of the files I've uploaded and I can upload a file I want to incorporate by clicking Add media. Here you can see you can upload JPEG, PNG and GIF files as well as MP four. If you are uploading a video MP four file, it can Onley be added as a background. Currently, other non video media can be added and treated like a regular character or prop, in which you could move around the scene, scale up or down and change various settings on. To add the image, you can click the computer icon to choose the image from a folder on your computer. Or you can import an image from Facebook, instagram, Dropbox or Google photos if you choose to integrate those accounts with your power tune account. Lastly, and most simply, you can just dragon image file. You have opened in another folder on your desktop to this box to upload. Once it's added, let me show you the edit image function, which I mentioned earlier, which Onley works for uploaded image files. After clicking at it image, it will bring up this image editing box in which you could do a lot of various things to the image like add filters and effects even crop, So I'll add a frame to this image and click apply to add. That cancel would remove the effect once you are happy with how the image turned out. Clicks save, and it will add that new edited image to your slide. Every time you save unedited image, it will add a new copy of that to your my media section so you don't have to worry about losing the original background design after editing. If you want to delete an image from your my media section, you'll have to actually go to the media section on the right, and when you hover over the image and dots here, you will see the option to add the images, background or remove image from your my media library. 9. Starting a PowToon from Scratch: Now that you have a good basic understanding of how Power Tune works, let's move onto a new project where we start from scratch from the my pattern section, click start from scratch. First, you are asked to choose a look for your power tune. This will load up props and characters similar to that type of style. You are still, of course, free to use images from other styles when creating the video. This is just to help you get started. I'll select cartoon Look. If you ever want to change styles, you can do that on the top, right? The scene section contains pre made template versions of different intros situations, concepts and more You can use thes and edit them as you need if you want to incorporate some of these into your slides, even if you are starting from scratch, so I'm going to try and build my own office Seen here First, I'll start with the background next, I'll at a desk by searching for desk in the props section. Then I'll skill it up a bit. Now I want to add a character typing on a computer. The search box still has office typed in, since it will search each section for related content to that keyword, depending on which section is clicked. And it was the last search term that I used. Click the X to remove the search keyword, and you will be able to see the default sections again. I'll go to the office character set and choose this character typing. You'll see that he was added on top of the desk, as the newest content you add to a slide will layer on top of each other to move this character behind the desk. There are two ways you can do this. You can right click the element and click send to back, or you can click the settings icon and click. Arrange back will send the image entirely to the back front entirely to the front, whereas backward and forward will only send the image one step up or down. This comes in handy if you have multiple images on a slide and are needing more control over arranging the layers for what I need. I'll just send him to the back, scale him up and flip him and make him Lupin animation. Now I'll add a laptop to the scene in props. I'll type laptop because of the angle he's at. I'll need a laptop that is facing to the side, more towards him. I'll move that on top of the desk and send that backwards so he looks like he is typing on this laptop. I'd also like to move this character and props, So if you want to select multiple objects, you can hold shift on your keyboard and click all of the objects you want to manipulate. This will select all of the objects you've clicked, and now you can move them and scale them together. You'll also see there is an alignment control here in case you need to line up some content . I'll show you that real quick, but in my case I don't need that. So I will undo it with Control Z and just a quick side note. If you ever want to manually line things up, there are grid guidelines that can be turned on and off with this button here. Now let's add some text to the scene. Click text on the right. In this section, you'll see Add title and subtitle, which is smaller text add body title which is even smaller text and some various designed text elements. I'm going to choose this thought bubble in the Text Elements section to help me get started . I'll rotate this thought bubble so it looks like he is thinking something, and I'll edit this text a bit. Some props style images can have their solid color changed. To do that, you can click the element, then click the color swatch and choose a new color. The slide is coming along so far. In the next lesson, I will talk about tweaking the timing and enter and exit effects for the elements of the animation. 10. Timeline & Enter/Exit Effects: in this lecture, we will first focus on the timeline, which you've probably seen at the bottom here. When you're working from a pre made pattern template, the timeline will be invisible by default. It can be turned on and off with this button here. So if we preview the power to now, you can see that the timing is a bit off and some objects aren't appearing how I would like them to down in the timeline. If you drag this triangle, you can quickly scrub through the animation to see the animations. You can also click this second play button to play and pause the animation from where you have the triangle, which represents the current point in time in your animation. So I like how the desk comes in, but I'd like to change how the character appears. If I click the character and click this button right here in the timeline, we can change the enter effect. A proper or character can come in from the right, left from up or down, poppin or fade in, or even have no effect when appearing on the slide. I want him to pop in like the desk so I will select Pop. I also want him to appear a bit sooner, so I'll click and drag him in the timeline to appear at the two second mark, and I'll have the laptop appear right after him. So I will also move that in the timeline, and I'll have the thought bubble and text appear sooner as well. If you have multiple elements occurring at the same time, Mark clicking that number in the timeline will select all of the elements occurring at that time mark. Now I'd like to edit the text effects. So instead of this text just fading in all at once, I'll change it to animate a different way. Text has a few different animation functions than what props and characters have. You'll see there is a right effect where a hand will write out the text, appear scale, type, roll and bounce. And, of course, all of the regular ones air here, too. I'll choose appear, and each word will fade in individually rather than the whole block of text animating feeding in like how it was before. Now I'm going to shorten this slides animation because there is a lot of time from when the text appears to win the slide ends. To remove or add time to your slides length, you can click the plus or minus. Here I will click the minus till I am at seven seconds and let's take a look at what I have so far. Don't forget to save every once in a while I mentioned before that pattern will auto save your progress. But I haven't even given this animation a name yet, so I will do that now and save if you want. You could even save as a copy. Each element can also have an exit animation, so I will do that to the text and thought bubble. I'll click the thought bubble first, right click, click enter slash exit effect, then click exit. I'd like this to animate by popping away so I will select that you can tweet where this happens in the timeline as well. I'll also add the same effect to the text and make sure it happens at the same time in the timeline. The final thing to go over in this lesson is the A to be animation effect. With this feature, you can enemy changes in an object, size, location and orientation. I'll add a question mark element. Next in settings, I will choose A to B. Once I've clicked this, everything else fades out so I can focus on this one element A represents the first image here that will appear first and be represents the second duplicated image here. So a the image with the dot, which is where the image begins, will animate to be the image with the triangle, which is where the image will end. Hence the name A to B. You can edit these images as you see fit by moving, scaling and rotating, and to get back to editing the rest of the video, you can click off the image anywhere else on the slide. You can change the duration of the A to be animation in the timeline, so the effect can happen faster or slower. Click and drag the end of the dark blue bar to change the length of the objects. A to be animation effect you can preview to see how it looks, and you can always go back and tweak it some more by clicking on that element again. Or if you want to remove the A to be animation effect, click this icon with the slash on it to cancel the effect 11. Adding Slides & Transitions: If you want to add a new slide, simply click. Add slide on the left. It will be blank with just a background, and you can start from scratch again. Or use a scene template. The max length of a slide in power tune at the moment can be 20 seconds. This could be a bit limiting when you want to create a more elaborate or longer scene. But one trick for dealing with this as by cloning the slide. If you right click the slide, then click Clone slide. It will create a new slide with all of the elements of the slide you cloned from. When it ended, I noticed that the thought bubble in text are gone because they were no longer there. At the very end of the slide, I just cloned duplicating A slide, on the other hand, will copy the slide exactly as is elements, and even the timeline will be exactly the same. So it will play exactly like the slide you duplicated from deleting. A slide is also easy. Hover over a slide and click the trashcan icon to remove the slide. I'll make a quick news seen here and next. I'll talk about transitions between two slides. Now that I have two slides in between the slides, I can add a transition animation from one slide to the other. Clicking it will show all of the available transition animations hovering over them will play a quick preview. I'll choose one. And finally, let's preview what I've got here so we can see the transition animation in action. 12. Additional Media Sources: Let's take a look at the additional media sources Pau Tune has access to. You are, of course, free to upload your own content through the my media button. Make sure it is content you have either created yourself or have the rights to use. In a later lecture, I will talk about some great royalty free and Creative Commons. Resource is that have content you can incorporate into your videos. Flicker gives you access to stock photos that can be used within your videos. Storey Blocks is a newer feature that I really like so far, since it's fairly new. There are still some bugs being worked out, but I will give you the rundown on this feature. In this story block section, you have stock videos that you can use within your power tune creations. However, these can only be used as background images. Hovering over a video will give you a small preview of it. The reason I like it so much is that it opens the door to some varied backgrounds and dynamic looking backgrounds. Some of these are just hypnotizing looking, so one thing you can do is search by color. Let's say I want a blue animated background. I'll type in blue, and I'll pick a background to add. Once you click it, it will add that video to your my media section, and you will get a pop up on the bottom that says, you can add it to this slide. Because some videos go over a certain length, it seems to spill over onto another slide, so I will delete any extra slides. All of the video lengths vary, and when you are hovering over the video thumbnails, you can see in the preview the length of time each animation is. Last. In the media section is image frames. Here is a batch of images in which you can incorporate an image uploaded from your my media section into one of thes framed images. So, for example, I'll select the computer monitor. Then it asks me to select an image for the image frame from the My Media section. Once you've done that, it combines both images together. I'll admit I don't use these very much because if you do any image editing like me, you can combine images your own way in something like Photo Shop or a free image editor like gimp 13. Music & Voice Over: in the sound section. Pau Tune has stock music in their program, organized in different categories. Or you can add your own music file by clicking. Add music at the top. Click the computer icon to choose a folder from your desktop, or simply drag the file to this window to add it. Or you can import a file from Dropbox. Once uploaded, it will go into the my music section that stores your uploaded music files. You also have sound controls Whenever you click the bottom right speaker icon, you can change volume, play the sample or click clear to remove the track. One great source for royalty free tracks is youtube dot com slash audio library slash music . Just be aware that some songs require attribution for adding voice over the accepted formats are MP three A, A. C and O G. If you do the voice over yourself, I recommend recording from audacity, which is free, or a program similar to that. Once you have the audio file ready to import file, click. Add voice over, and you will have the option here to upload directly from your computer by dragging the file to the window or upload from Dropbox. If you want to record directly into power tune, click the record button. A recorder will pop up and you can click. Start and record your voice from there when you are ready. I don't really recommend this option because you don't have any control over editing the audio like you would in a program like audacity. But if you don't have access to audacity or any audio recording software, this will be your best bet. Or the last option is to outsource the voiceover from somewhere like fibre dot com or voice bony dot com and import that file into power. Tune by the method I described First, This is probably the best route to go if you're looking for a professional voiceover. But of course it requires a bit of research and investment on your end, so it's not ideal for everybody. Once you have a voice over imported, the file will appear in your my voice over a section you can choose to use the voiceover on the entire power tune or current slide. The audio controls will show both voiceover and music. When you have both imported or selected, you can choose to play together, and most times you will need to lower the music track so it doesn't overpower the voiceover . Once you've added voiceover, you will have to do a bit of tweaking to the animations timing in the timeline. So it syncs up and matches what is going on with the voiceover. You will need to shorten or lengthen animations accordingly, when I am creating an animation that involves voice over. The voiceover is actually one of the first things I add to the power tune this way. As I am creating the video, I can work on the timing off all of the animations as I go along by previewing my progress periodically. I do not suggest creating the animation first and adding the voiceover as an afterthought because it will lead to you having to do a massive overhaul of the timings for the entire video and all of the slides at that point 14. Export / Collaborate: when you have previewed your animation and are happy with the result and are finally ready to export click export at the top right here you have a few options. First you can upload. You can create your own personal power tune player page for the video. This allows you to create a link to it that you can share. You can copy the direct link you are l to your personal power tune page in the share the awesomeness section by clicking the Link icon. Or you can upload directly to Facebook, YouTube or other sites and platforms seen here. Next you have download. I always download my pattern videos as an MP four video file, so this way I can distribute and share that video file. However I like, however, as a free account you are not able to download as an MP four, so your best option to share your video is most likely through the upload section with the personal pattern player. But you also have the option to export as a PDF and Power Point file. If you download the file is one of these formats, the video will be converted to static images per slide rather than an animated production. Lastly, we have share in which you can share the video directly to one of these platforms through email and even get an embedding code if you want to embed the video directly on a website using Power Tunes browser video player. Next, I'll show you the options you receive in the next step of exporting your video. Once you select the format, you'd like to export the video as a new window pops up asking the category and the power tune privacy category will not affect anything but Power tune privacy will determine the level of video privacy on the Pattern Player page and the visibility of it within search engines and on power tunes servers. I always choose unlisted here so it doesn't show up publicly, and only those who I share the file or link with will be able to see the video. However, as a free member, your only option right now will be public. Then I'll click next. Here we have the power tune watermark settings, which is, if you want the pattern logo to appear over laid in the corner of your video control over. This depends on your subscription level, Free accounts will not be able to hide branding. Then we have the quality section so you can choose the size and visual quality of the video itself. Free is limited to the standard for 80 p quality, while pro has HD 7 20 p available and a business account can go up to a full HD 10 80 p quality. Then, when export power tune or download power tune is clicked, you'll get a congratulation message. And if you choose to download the file in a specific format and your file is completely rendered, another message will pop up at the top with details on where to download that file. Another area you can export your power tune from, or even view your exports is from the my Power tune page. If you click the arrow, it will expand. There is info about your power tune, a share section for sharing to certain sites and an embed section to pick up code for the video. And then the manage export section will show additional options and history that covers exporting. Next, I'll talk about the Collaborate feature. Collaborate is a way you can share your pattern work file with a colleague that has also signed up for a pattern account. Essentially, what it does is sends a duplicate of the power tune file you are working on to their power tune account. To get started with this from the My Power Tunes Page, you can click MAWR, then click Collaborate in this window. You will be able to type in the email address of the person you want to send the duplicate Pau tuned to make sure it's the email address that they signed up to power Tune with. You can also change the title and description. Remember that this is a duplicate new file going to their account. So if you make any changes to the file on your account, they aren't going to see any live updates or changes you've made. It's a copy of your original power tune file, so each one is its own separate file from each other. This feature is still a great idea if you need to pass the rest of the work to someone else or need some extra help finishing up a video 15. Valuable Resources: power tune has a great number of stock assets to use within their program. But sometimes you may not always find what you're looking for. I want to share a few Resource is I use when creating my videos that I find to be very helpful. Number one is picks obey dot com. This one is great. It has vector images, photographic style images, illustrations and even video clips that can be downloaded and imported into power tune. It has a great variety of Creative Commons assets. Number two is open clip art dot org's. This site offers an archive of almost 70,000 unlimited commercial use Public domain images . These are mostly vector style images, but you can download them as PNG's to use within power Tune. You can even edit Clip are right on the site if you don't have access to image editing. Software. Number three is the YouTube audio library. This has songs and even sound effects that are free to download and use within your projects. Just be mindful of if the audio file you want to use requires attribution. Number four is Gimp, the free and open source image editor. If you want to further customize images to use within your videos and need access to a free program. This is a great resource. Number five is video converter software called Free Make. This software is great for converting video file types and can even convert audio two different file types as well. Another similar resource to free make ISMs are, which is an online file conversion website. It can handle video conversions up to a certain file size and do conversions for lots of other file types as well. Number six is gift creation websites out there like make a gift dot com for using photos or videos within a gift and gift paint dot com for drawing out your own GIF, you can import GIF files you create into PAL. Tune Number seven is fiber dot com. If you are looking for an illustrator for custom images or characters, a voice over artist if you need a more professional quality voice or a specific gender or accent or even script writing help for your animation, five is your best bet for outsourcing on a budget. There are a lot of resource is out there, but of course, you should always make sure that you have commercial rights to use whatever assets that you get. A hold off 16. Design Advice: design advice When making an explainer video, you really want to make it tailored to your business brand or established theme color wise . Try and use colors that match a company's branding logo or website. This will help you keep a consistent style for fonts. Sticking with one font and playing with different weights and sizes for emphasis is one option or another. Option is you can utilise to fonts that work well with each other. If you look at all of the fonts Pattern has access to, there are a lot of different modern styles to choose from. The actual name of the font is listed underneath their short description. Avoid using too many funds as that can start to look a bit messy. Try and keep a consistent style throughout the video. Remember, you can choose the style or look theme within Power Tune to have access to a library of images from the same visual style, I recommend trying to stick with one set of characters and avoid mixing too many visually different styles of characters within a video. When you introduce too many art styles, it just might not look right. Slide layout is also important as you want. Text to be readable and images to stand out but not overcrowded scene. It might be interesting to angle and image or text and mix of different animation elements to keep a viewer interested. You don't want your video to just be all text of one color and size. It's almost like reading a book that has blocks of text without any paragraphs. You will lose a viewer's attention once you have a good understanding of power Tune. I actually highly recommend voiceovers for explainer videos. Since having the voice and visuals at the same time can beam or engaging especially for longer videos. Sometimes less is more. Making a simple and clean video is better than one that is overrun by images and text. If you find yourself stuck on what type of visuals to use, do a Google image search to try and get some ideas and references. This doesn't mean to use the images you Google, however, most likely they are owned by someone else, and you don't have permission to use them. Always make sure you are using public domain or creative Commons materials or files that you have the rights to and permission to use within your animations. PNG files are important when importing images like If you want to bring in some of your own characters, make sure to import it as a PNG file with a transparent background so it will blend into your slide seamlessly. If you bring it in as a J peg, there will be a background with the image that will block your actual pattern background. 17. Square & Vertical Video: square and vertical videos. Square videos are getting popular on social media platforms specifically like Facebook and Instagram, so Pattern has introduced the ability to create square sized videos. If you click, create a square video pattern will load up settings for a square formatted video. You will see that the main focus is on the White Square in the middle, which is the active area in which your video exists. If any elements are outside of the white square in the middle in the Dasht area, they will not appear in the exported video. Another thing you can do is design with vertical format in mind, which is an optimal format for mobile viewing. You can click the top drop down to change the format to vertical or even back to traditional horizontal if you like, and this will change the videos format to vertical. Changing between these settings will not alter your video content and will only change the size of the exported video 18. Aligning Multiple Elements: aligning multiple elements. Pau tune has advanced. They're aligned settings when it comes to selecting multiple elements. When you have two or more elements selected, you can click the align icon. Once clicked, you will have a variety of options. Towards the top. You have a line left, a line center and a line right under that. You have a line top, align middle and align bottom, and next you have a line to stage options. The 1st 1 is center vertically on stage, and the 2nd 1 is to center horizontally on stage. Both of these will align your elements according to what is considered the actual center of the video. And at the bottom, we have distribute, which is usable when three or more elements are selected. This is best used when you are running into issues, distributing an even amount of space in between elements. In this example, we have some wide and narrow spacing between letters, and let's say I want an even amount of spacing In between each line, I'd select all of the text, click a line, then click distribute vertically, and it will automatically distribute an even amount of spacing in between each line of text 19. Customizing Characters: Pow tune has introduced a character builder into the program. You can customize a character's facial features and outfit with the ability to even add your logo or branding to a character's close. However, this feature is available to agency plans Subscribers Only. The character sets. You can currently edit our Bohemian, Rhapsody and Kosmo. Or you can create a character from scratch with the basic designs and art assets coming from those character sets I already mentioned. The other character sets do not have the ability to be edited at this time. Let's get started with making a character from scratch. If you've ever used the character creator and a video game, you'll catch on fast. The characters icon on the right. Then click the Create your character button. First, you'll select which gender to make the character. Then click Next. Then you'll have an option to select body type. And you can see as I'm recording this, they only have the basic body type available and more are coming soon. Click next after you make your selection. Then we get to the preset character screen where you can select a default based character to work with and change as you see fit. Once you make a selection for the base character design, you can change the skin tone as well by clicking the color swatch below skin tone and selecting a new color. Once you are done with that, click, customize face and select the face shape you want to use. If at anytime you want to go back and tweak something, you can click basics, face or outfit on the left. And the top texts will show you the details you can edit within that section. So back in the face section, you can see we can edit hair, eyes, nose, and mouth. You can change hair color, eye color, and mouth color. Once you've settled on your choices, you can click Pick outfit or outfit on the left. For the top, you can choose three clothing layers. If you want to remove a layer, click the no symbol. For each clothing piece, you can change the color and the color and branding section. Some pieces have more color selections than others. If you want your logo or icon to appear on a shirt, click the first icon below color and branding to upload that image. Keep in mind in most cases this is going to show up very tiny on the shirt or a jacket, depending on which clothing option you pick. Icons work best. Since more detailed or complex logos would be a bit harder to see. Click upload image. It's best to use a PNG file with a transparent background. Select your image. Then you will have the opportunity to adjust what shows up. You'll want to make sure your image shows up within the circle. You can click the actual image and drag it around if you need to position it. And to make it smaller, you can use the slider below. Once you have it positioned correctly, click Save logo. The clothes that will show your uploaded image are the ones that have the three blue dots in the upper right-hand corner. Make sure your logo or icon is visible on the clothing by changing clothing color as needed. Once you are done with the top part of the outfit, click bottom, select the pants you want to use and change the colors. If you don't see the exact color you want to use from the swatches. Click Advanced. And you will be able to make a more specific selection. Or you can type or paste a hex code n for an exact color. Once you are done, click shoes, choose your shoe style and colors. Then when you're done with your character, click Finish. Now you can name your character and click Save. Your character will appear on the slide. And if you want to view all of the characters you've made, they will show up in the my characters section. Just like with all the other characters and Pao tune, you can change the pose by clicking the pose icon and selecting a new one. If you want to edit your character or edit an existing one from one of the templates. You can hover over the character in the library, hover over the three dots and click the edit button. Any changes you make while editing a character will not update that character wherever you've used it in your video. Instead, it will create another new character. Lastly, you can delete a custom character by hovering over the three dots icon over the character and clicking the trashcan icon. It won't remove the character from your slides. It will just remove it from your custom character section. 20. Powtoon Video Capture (& The New Workspace Layout): Updated in 2020 is Pow Tunes new Workspace Layout. First and foremost, you might be wondering where all your previous pow2 in work files are. On the right-hand side is the Toolbox area where you can see the most recent Pow Tunes. Clicking on Expand will show you all of them and allow you to search for a specific file name if needed. If you want to get even more organized, you can even make a folder in this section and save pow2 in work files to the folder, or even move older pow2 in files to that folder as well. For example, if you are teaching a class and you have different Pow Tunes for each lesson, you might want to make a folder with the classes name. There's also the Learning Center and the absent integration section. If you want to explore pow2 in plug-in functionality with PowerPoint and Photoshop. When you close the toolbox, you'll be back in the workspace area. You can customize your workspace based on your preferences or profession. And of course, for creating your next pow2 in video, you can choose from a template, import a file, or clicking Create will let you start your pow2 in from scratch. Now let's move on to pow2 and capture, which is actually a Chrome extension that allows you to record your screen and webcam as an overlay, which is only available in one browser at the moment, which is of course Google Chrome. This feature is perfect for sending video messages or notes to co-workers or clients, or even recording a class. Just click the capture your screening cameras section and click the get Chrome extension button. It will take you to a new page where you can click Add to Chrome, then click add extension. Click the puzzle icon above, and choose to pin pouch and capture to the bar to quickly access it. When you click the platoon capture icon. First, you need to allow permissions for screen and webcam recording. Click Allow. Then click the camera icon on the top right of the web address bar, and choose always allow Chrome extension to access your camera and microphone. You can make sure your microphone and camera settings are correct here as well. And then click Done. Once you do, you're all set up. You can toggle microphone audio on or off, Change video frame shape in the design section. And the video section allows you to change your camera source and recording resolution. And there's also a flip camera toggle, the Audio section that lets you change your microphone source. And at the top, you can choose to capture both screen and camera. Your computer screen only, or just your webcam only. Once you have everything set up properly and hit record, you'll get to choose which monitor to record from. If you have multiple monitors. Or you can choose to record a specific application or Chrome tab. Once you make your selection, a countdown before recording starts. Recordings are currently limited to 70 minutes. You can change the size of your webcam overlay and can pause and resume your recording. Once you are done recording, hit the Stop button on the Overlay and a new tab will open with your recorded video, which is also now available in your pow2 in workspace, as well as a direct copy of the URL to the recording copied to your clipboard. So the next time you hit Control V, it will conveniently paste a direct link to the video. You just record it. And if needed, you can even download an MP4 video from the workspace area. Right now you can't edit the screen capture, but apparently editing capabilities are coming soon. 21. Sound Effects: You can now add a sound effect from a small selection of sounds within the enter effects section on an element on a slide. This can be done by right-clicking and element, then clicking enter slash, exit effects. Then click add sound. And choosing from one of the selections here. Hovering over the sound will play it so you can hear a sample of it. Before selecting it. You can click the Exit tab to choose a sound effect for the Exit animation on the element as well. If you want to add that. The choices are limited here though. And the next thing I'll be discussing is a way for you to have more variety and control over sound effects and audio on your slides. There is now the ability to add sound effects to the slide as an element that you can move around, sync up the timing, trim, and even fade out. First, click the sound tab on the right. As of now, there isn't an easy way to browse the sound effects offered within pow tune. So you'll have to manually search by typing something within the search bar. Something like pop or click or whatever you're looking for. And don't worry if you hear a story blocks audio voice-over when the effect is previewed in this section, that is just a watermark sound that is only on the preview and will not be heard in the actual pound tune. Or when the file is rendered. The shorter length sounds or ones listed at 0 seconds are usually sound effects, while longer ones are actual music tracks. Click, Use on the sound effect you want to add. Then when the pop-up appears, choose this slide only. Typically you want to select entire pow2 in here for background music and voice-over. If you have one, choosing, this slide only will add the sound as an element within the timeline. You might get another pop up if your track is too long for your slide, and you will have the option to increase the length of the slide or trim the sound effect. Once the effect is added, you will see it down in the timeline. You can move it around to manually sync it up to an animation, trim the track, and even have it fade out. If the library within pow2 doesn't have what you're looking for, you can of course, upload your own effects or find some royalty free sound effects from other websites.com actually has a sound effects and music section for free commercial use. You can check that out at pixabay.com slash sound dash effects and pixabay.com slash music. To upload a sound you created or downloaded, click the sound section and click either add music or add voiceover. Upload your file by clicking upload or dragging it to the blue box, then click this slide only and it will add the sound to your timeline. 22. Lip Syncing: For power to end users with a business or enterprise plan, you can now add lip sinking to your characters. This feature is limited to the editable characters within pow tune, like the ones you see in the Kosmo or beau ** sections. You can't add lip sinking two characters from the non editable character sets, like from the Omni set, e.g. this means you can create a character to look like yourself or someone from your office and upload or record voice-over lines for pow tune to automatically animate a lip sinking animation sync to the voice-over recording. To do this, first, add your character to the scene. Lip sinking for your character can be added to any pose. Next, once the character is selected, click the microphone icon and you'll see a few options here. Text to speech is exclusive to the enterprise plan and allows you to turn typed out texts into artificial voice. Upload allows you to add a pre-recorded MP3 voiceover from your computer to the character. And my voice-over will let you add a previously uploaded voice-over file to the character. Clicking record will open up a new window and clicking Start Record will record your voice with a microphone you have set up for recording on your computer within the browser you are using. When trying to record. If you receive a message in your browser about pow2, wanting to use your microphone, click allowed to give power to an access. Otherwise, it will block access to recording your microphone. Clicking Stop record will stop the recording. And you'll then have an option for playing it back, deleting it, or saving it. Clicking Save, we'll let you name the recording. And clicking Save again, we'll add the voice-over to your character. And we'll also add the file to your library in the my voice-overs section. Make sure to preview the video to see how it ends up looking. Something to keep in mind when creating videos that you intend to have lip sinking in is that there is a limit of one voice-over file per character element. In other words, you are unable to change character poses with just one audio file. If you want to have multiple poses for your character throughout the video with lip sinking added, the best thing to do would be to have your voice-over file spliced into multiple files or plan to record your voice and batches. This way you can change what pose your character will be in for each voiceover section. Here's an example. This pose and slide has one recorded audio file attached to it. This one has a second separate audio file attached to it. To edit a voice-over edit to a character. When you have the character selected, click the microphone icon again. You will be able to do things like swap the voice-over, delete it, lower the volume, and you can toggle, reduce soundtrack volume on or off. When toggled on, this will automatically lower the volume of music you have added. Whenever a character is speaking. I prefer to have this toggled off. This way, I can have music in the background be at a consistent volume throughout the video. 23. Assignment - Introduce Yourself with PowToon: after you've completed my course, try creating an explainer video where the topic is introducing yourself. Kind of like a lighthearted resume. This project can be a great way to practice your skills and implement new animation techniques and design styles you've learned along the way. All you need to get started is a picture or sketch of yourself. J. Peg or PNG file. It should take you about 1/2 an hour to complete your video. 1st 4 Slide one. Upload the picture or sketch of yourself into power tune, Place it onto the slide and change the animation settings on it if you like, write your name or nickname above or below it, and at an animation effect to the text to go ahead and add some other design elements around your picture. Toe livened things up. And don't forget to add a background. Be as creative as you want. Next, you'll add two or three more slides. Write a sentence about yourself per slide, for example, your likes, dislikes, education, career talk about a pet you own, etcetera and include images on each slide. To go along with that text, arrange the text and images. However, you like for each slide and, of course, add the animation effects. Finally, add music of your choice. Once you finish the video, preview it. Make sure the video flows well. That text is readable, and the timing on the text and image animations are all happening at a good pace that is not too fast and not too slow. Export your video by creating your personal pal Tune player page and get the link from that page in the share the awesomeness section and feel free to share it to this class or with your friends. 24. 8 Steps to Creating a Video: