Practical Strategies for Producing Animated Video on a Budget

Editor's Notes

• #2: About the Center Continuing education for health professionals and some programs for medical students and residents: medical/health provider context 90% online Custom LMS Video on HTML page
• #3: Agenda Talk about instructional and business advantages of using animated video some challenges tips for meeting those challenges on a university budget (small) a few mobile considerations Specifically GoAnimate, the cloud-based software tool we used to create animated videos that we’ll be showing have some resources at the end, time for questions
• #4: So why might you want to use animated video? What advantages does it have?
• #5: Let’s talk first about advantages for the production process
• #6: One advantage is that if you need a particular physical type, you have some latitude in casting. In our instructional situation, medical education, we often need to fill specific physical requirements for the actors playing patients - age, ethnicity, overweight/underweight. Getting an actor with a specific combination of these personal characteristics can be difficult, but using animated video gives us some leeway. We still try to cast as closely to type as possible, but it gives us some flexibility in terms of age and physical type, especially.
• #7: For example, if we have a character who’s written as a six-year-old of mixed heritage, that could be very difficult to cast for live action. For animated video, we can cast a voice actor who is a little older, and it doesn’t matter what her actual ethnicity is.
• #8: voice actor doesn’t need to be the exact age, or have physical attribute of overweight
• #9: Another advantage of animated video is we can create appropriate settings in the computer - don’t have to film on location In our case, we usually need clinical setting - patient interviews Need to be able to control noise* Would like to have variety in settings Usually shoot in conference room because noise control is paramount With animated video, we can create varied settings that are more interesting and authentic than our conference room
• #10: It’s not outside the realm of possibility to get access to a clinic exam room to shoot in, but would be impossible for us to control noise sufficiently for video shoot With GoAnimate, we can have settings such as exam room, and also settings that would be completely outside the realm of practicality such as
• #13: home health care setting
• #14: A 3rd advantage Doing animated video allows players to work with script in front of them - don’t need to have lines memorized. For professional actors, allows them to participate on shorter notice For folks who aren’t professional actors (actual health professionals), allows them to stay on script, hit all key points for the video
• #15: Here’s another advantage of animated video Creating visual interest with different camera angles in live action means multiple cameras and trained operators, or even more takes - either way, expensive
• #16: Adds time to the animation part, the post-production part of timeline, but takes it away from the filming part, which is actor + camera operator time
• #17: On the maintenance side, animated video has an advantage over live action…
• #18: When content changes (e.g., treatment recommendations), do you re-shoot? Same actors, wardrobe, setting, lighting Cuts can look strange With animated video, you can just record new lines and insert them seamlessly into existing video So you won’t have this situation...
• #19: A few instructional benefits of animated video
• #20: Easy to insert conceptual imagery, cut scenes, and text callouts to emphasize key content Let’s show examples
• #22: For example, if we have the healthcare provider asking about a patient’s caffeine intake, we can insert some imagery that illustrates the answer that the patient is giving. It visually reinforces the aural information.
• #23: Another way to enhance the instructional efficacy of the video is to add B-roll. For example, if the physician is making physical activity recommendations, it’s easy to insert B-roll of physical activity, like so:
• #25: Likewise, it’s simple to add text callouts to video to callout key learning points, such as this patient-centered interview example:
• #27: Another possible instructional benefit: Animated video gives a layer of abstraction that can make the video more relatable
• #28: Shooting live action is inherently specific - these particular people in this particular place - the way they dress, style their hair, If it’s outdoor setting, you can tell if it’s urban/suburban, east coast/midwest, etc. All those specific details can make the video less relatable to your audience Even if content doesn’t need to change, video starts to show its age
• #29: Animated video has fewer specific details - it’s more generic, which can be a good thing. Viewers less likely to be distracted by unimportant details - won’t be thinking, I can tell they didn’t film this in our area If you need to tailor same video for different audiences, for example, easy to swap in character with different uniform Animated video is a bit more timeless - sometime down the road, the animation style will probably start to look dated, but it’s a bit more evergreen
• #30: So those are the advantages of animated video, now i’ll introduce some challenges
• #31: Be aware: Post-production timeline with animated video is much longer than with live action It’s not that animated video is necessarily more time-consuming than live action, but the time spent shifts more to post-production
• #32: Live action timelines are about setup - set up the location, the lighting, wardrobe, sound - And filming - however many takes you need to cover camera angles and get it right With animated video, setup is fairly minimal - we’ll talk about setting up for audio capture in a little bit There are usually fewer takes for audio recording than video takes The bulk of the time you spend for animated video is in finessing the audio and creating the animation
• #33: Another challenge of animated video The characters don’t do anything that you don’t make them do You have to give them facial expressions, gestures (live actors have their own) In GoAnimate, there’s a limited number of expressions, gestures, poses, so it can be challenging to maintain visual interest or get the right expression for the scenario Have to vary framing, camera angles, insert new scenes for variety
• #34: When it comes to minimizing post-production time, it’s all about getting clean audio recordings
• #35: GoAnimate has a feature to automatically lip sync the animated characters to the voice recording attached to the character
• #36: If the audio level is too low, the characters’ lips don’t move, even if it sounds fine to you. That can look something like this
• #37: If you have to boost the audio volume in post-production, you boost the noise on the recording also. You can end up with something like this interview, which we recorded before we learned these lessons:
• #38: Obviously, there’s pretty significant echo in this audio, which is the result of having to boost it so that the patient character’s lips would move. Objective: try to capture audio at the right volume, and as cleanly as possible, to minimize post-prod work and artifacts
• #41: I’ve done Video for our Center before, however this is the first time I’d ever done animation for a work related cause in recent years, and I was grateful to be asked to participate.
• #42: There was a lot of excitement to get the go ahead and develop patient cases through animation. However there were a lot of unknowns as well. What would it take to create what we wanted to do? What obstacles would we run into? How long would it take us do what we needed to get done? It turns out, we would find out what our obstacles were in short order.
• #43: First, let’s go over where to record, equipment and recording tips.
• #44: How many of you have access to a recording studio? Technically as part of the University, we have access to a studio, but we have to pay to use it. Our offices are also not located close to campus, so there are added logistics involved if we wanted to use it. We often default to using our conference room. It may be hard to tell in the picture here, but this room is fairly small, has a pretty bad paint job, and the walls are dirty. However, this luxury is offset by it’s convenience.
• #45: It may be hard to imagine, but this is the same conference room. I have to admit, this part of the recording setup was not standard issue University of Arizona, but these partitions covered with blankets acted as perfect sound absorbers to create a usable recording room.
• #46: Here’s why we have this setup. Recording in the conference room was fine for video audio. In fact, the first audio recording session we ran, I backed up with video – I was confident that the audio would be good from the camera pickups and also I wanted to have the visual reference handy to see how audio matched. The recordings seemed good upon initial review, however when we matched the audio tracks to the animated characters, the level was too low to be picked up with the moving lip synchronization feature. <Could have slide of motionless characters staring at each other> So we boosted the sound levels, and got the lips to start moving. However this produced some terrible artifacts in the sound quality, much of which was due to room echo. To reduce this, we created our own sound absorbing panels, as seen above. This vastly improved the audio quality!
• #47: What we have here is an iPad mini, an adaptor allowing multiple inputs with a headphone jack, and two lavalieres. We used a free app on the iPad to record, which then automatically uploaded the completed audio clips to a shared server. We were fortunate to have the iPad mini from a previous project, but you can use any device to record from successfully. Laptops, tablets, and smart phones can all be options. I liked the small size of the iPad because it allowed participants to place water and notes nearby while doing the recording.
• #48: What we have here is an iPad mini, an adaptor allowing multiple inputs with a headphone jack, and two lavalieres. We used a free app on the iPad to record, which then automatically uploaded the completed audio clips to a shared server. We were fortunate to have the iPad mini from a previous project, but you can use any device to record from successfully. Laptops, tablets, and smart phones can all be options. I liked the small size of the iPad because it allowed participants to place water and notes nearby while doing the recording.
• #50: In addition to the room setup (to reduce echoes), there are some important steps you can take to improve the quality of your recordings. When placing mics on actors – these always go on the side they will be facing, it’s important that they talk over the mic, and are consistent in their position. No accessories that affect sounds – jewelry like necklaces and earrings are especially intrusive as they can jingle or hit the mic. Loose clothing is difficult to work with as the mic may droop or shift. Make sure to ask everyone present to turn off devices - Turn off cell phones, wrist watches, etc. Be aware of environmental noises that may occur and be proactive to eliminate them. For our office, we ask people don’t use a nearby breakroom sink and the copier. Common issues can be caused by: Cars neighbors plumbing Birds/animals crickets Wind, rain, hail other weather Make sure readers are familiar with script. They need to know it well enough to talk through it as naturally as possible.
• #51: Remind your participants not to touch the lavaliers if they gesture while speaking. If you’re listening with headphones, a hearty chest thump can ruin your day. We let our participants use scripts – so they had papers strewn in front of them and would flip through them as they progressed. We made sure everyone had matching scripts and would pause and flip pages together so that paper rustling didn’t get into the audio track. Give yourself space to edit. Direct your participants to leave 2 or 3 seconds between restarts. And at least a second between the end of the line and the beginning of someone else’s line. Having 2 voices talking over each other will make your audio track unusable unless you’re recording with a dual line, and even then, it’s likely to cross over.   Be prepared to do multiple takes. Average was 3 takes.   For each take, we found it useful to create a chart that shows each paragraph / line compared to each take – mark all the successful lines delivered in take 1, take 2, take 3 – this is so that when you get to post production, you’ll know which audio clips to pull from. Listening to them all and then choosing is very time consuming.  
• #52: <Amy if you talk about this, I can remove from here> Doing patient cases – one of the early decisions in the project was to find talent that matched up with each of the case requirements as closely as possible. So we wanted actors and actresses to accurately reflect the correct age and ethnicity for all patients. We had actual health practitioners coming in to do the intakes. For video, this was a problem for several reasons. First, actual health practitioners are not actors and not used to memorizing and delivering lines. They are used to doing their own intakes, but this wasn’t how the scripts were designed. So on video, this usually means a long day of takes. We take it in chunks. Get a piece right. Do the next piece, sometimes there are many takes for each chunk. They can be long days. For audio only, we had the huge advantage of letting them read. Second, we could hire actors who didn’t match the age and background we were looking for.
• #53: Actors can be hired at very affordable rates, especially just for audio. The difference between those having voice experience and those of a more amateur nature can be pretty vast. My feeling is it is well worth it to invest a little up front and save yourself time on production, and avoid having to re-record. It’s probably worth looking into your local talent depending on your project. Even if you do hire voice talent, it does not always mean things will go perfectly. While this may seem obvious, I recommend never letting other family members/ non-essential people in the recording area. Here is the scenario: We needed a younger actor for a pediatric case, including an actress to portray the mother. The actor was 11, and his mother said she had voice experience and could portray the mother in the script. Great! A real mother-son team could work well. When they came to the shoot, the father also came with them and asked to be allowed to watch. By the second take, I’m hearing some strange background noise, and I look over and the father was snoring in his chair!
• #54: A brief summary from a cost perspective: You don’t need to pay for good quality. Production time is cost as well, so make sure to take steps to plan and reduce production time by utilizing some of the previously mentioned tips.
• #55: Hello my all, my name is Cesar Bustamante. I am the ranking third wheel on this presentation, and I’m going to cover a few tips for post production audio and animating with GoAnimate.
• #56: I won’t take up too much of your time, there’s 10 tips in all, 5 for audio and 5 for GoAnimate.
• #57: So lets begin with Audio
• #58: After the audio capture we’re left with a few recordings. This normally meant maybe 3 files, each about seven to fifteen minutes long with multiple voices on them. In order to use these voices with GoAnimate we need to cut them down to size, isolate individual people, and make sure everything sounds clear.
• #59: Some of the equipment you’ll need: 1. Headphones, unless you have your own office with really nice speakers. You’ll be making edits, listening to the same lines of dialogue repeatedly, and removing all manner of noises. 2. Programs. For programs we had access to both Audacity and Adobe Soundbooth CC. Audacity is open source, with plugin support, and lots of documentation out there to read Adobe Audition CC is a paid subscription program, feature packed right out of the box, and it made editing and exporting easier on me. So I used and preferred this audio editor 3. The Script. Keep a printed version nearby. You’ll need it to take notes and it’ll guide you along the recordings as you listen, edit, and export.
• #60: First tip… Get Organized.
• #61: I like to start off with three folders for audio in your project root: 1 to separate out the original recordings, 1 to keep your edited recordings, and the last to keep your exported lines of dialogue.
• #62: Now the first two folders I recommend because I found audio editing to be a destructive process. Most changes made to the file cannot be undone. Save the originals as unedited recordings and work on copies of them in a separate folder.
• #63: The last folder is there because separating out lines of dialogue from different characters results in a lot of small audio files. In one case an interview I split apart ended up in 85 wav files. Because I was using Adobe Audition, each of those 85 wav files is accompanied by a PKF file. These are made automatically and have data that corresponds to the WAV file. These smaller audio files you’ll need later on in the GoAnimate process. And however you have them saved you’ll want them to make sense to you.
• #64: Tip 2 is just listen first. You’ll want to figure out which is the best recording.
• #65: The best recording is the one that requires the least amount of edits. Less edits mean less work for you and less time in post audio.
• #66: Following along the (printed) script, take notes and watch out for the odd noises. These can be: Plosives, or people popping their P’s or B’s, coughing, sneezing, snoring, ANYTHING that doesn’t sound good to your ears make a note of it on the script. Which line and which file.
• #67: Also if it’s not on the script make a note of it. Sometimes a voice actor will mess up a line and do a repeat in the recording. Other times they might improvise the line. Either way make a note of it. Which line, which file. Keeping track of repeat lines will help you avoid making mistakes during the exporting process. When you’re done following along, tally up your notes and see which file is going to give you the least amount of grief. Make a copy of that file. You’re going to work on that one.
• #68: Because we are doing this on a budget, we’re not using top of the line recording microphones or studio sets, our audio is going have noise. The lights, the computers, the A/C, noise. Thankfully Audacity and Adobe Audition have a few effects ready to take on your noise removal tasks.
• #69: Because I used Audition I’ll let you know what’s there. For humms, there’s a DeHummer! For clicks, we have the DeClicker! Generic white noise or static, there’s the noise removal tool.
• #70: Echoes unfortunately are very difficult to remove. If you’re not crunched for time you can try your hand at tweaking the Reverb settings or searching for plugins that might help. In my experience combined with desperate google searching you can minimize or at best lower the volume of the echo but it’s always there. Best advice is to have a high quality recording, use the blankets to prevent the actors’ voices from bouncing off the wall and hitting the microphone again.
• #71: The 4th Tip is Make audio great. Once you’ve made some minor edits we want to see if there’s anything else we can do to make the recording sound better. We have the tools so why not?
• #72: I started looking into what podcasters do to make themselves sound better. Luckily there was no shortage of help One of the best resources I got to was Mike Russell, Creative Director at Music Radio Creative, and luckily for us a Youtuber.
• #73: Experiment! Knowing that online tutorials and plugins are not going to be the end all solution to your problems you’re going to have to experiment. Thankfully we have the effects rack in Adobe Audition.
• #74: The effects rack allows you to add up to 16 effects to your audio track, and allowing you to preview the many changes or effects before applying them to your waveform. If you use the effects rack heavily that is apply a lot of filters, your PC performance might stutter a bit. But it is a great tool to use. Also once you’ve brought together a group of effects that you really like, you can save them as a single preset. Then anytime you want to redo those effects on a different file you can just go to your preset and bingo.
• #75: Tip number 5 Exporting dialogue - all the while staying organized.
• #76: You’ll be happy you did this later on, because it makes uploading and replacing audio in GoAnimate much easier. Speaking of GoAnimate…
• #77: Let’s run through a few tips there. So GoAnimate allows you to work with this very easy drag and drop interface. You select your backgrounds, characters, props and drop them onto your stage and go. Overall I think it’s a pretty forgiving program that doesn’t have a steep learning curve. That being said I wanna give you some tips that’ll hopefully save you some time as you create your animations.
• #78: Step 1 plan ahead.
• #79: Planning ahead, using storyboards, whatever the method it’s just good sense and it really does save you some time. I learned the hard way that GoAnimate does not allow edits to be done globally. Every individual scene needs to be opened and changed manually if you want an edit to be done to the entire animation.
• #80: For example: Lets say I have an animation in GoAnimate made up of one scene with a couple characters. If I should have to change of one of the characters I simply select the character in the scene and swap them out. Easy and fast.
• #81: On the other hand: Lets say I have an animation in GoAnimate made up of 57 scenes with a couple main characters. If I should have to change of one of the characters I select the character in the scene and swap them out. And then I select the next scene they’re in and swap them out. And the next scene and so on. Slow and tedious. So if you can avoid this situation go for it. Have all the stakeholders agree on the content and move on.
• #82: Tip 2 The bespoke prop GoAnimate has a wide array of props available to use. But if you use the program long enough the props might start to feel repetitive. You’ve used them one too many times. Or perhaps you simply want a small change, like color for example. With this tip you can work off the props already in GoAnimate. All it takes is a green screen, a screenshot, any image editor, and that’s it. You can have your custom backdrop or prop.
• #83: First we’ve got to export the item you want to customize. In this example we’re gonna take this lovely basic couch and destroy it.
• #84: In GoAnimate you’ll choose the most basic scene which is a blank background and change the color to this ooze green. Place the prop in the middle of the green screen and take a screenshot. Command Shift 4 on a Mac, and the Windows key plus print screen.
• #85: Once you’ve got your screenshot open it up in your preferred image editor and go nuts. With some silly edits we took this couch from IKEA to Craigslist in no time. And once we’ve done that…
• #86: We use GoAnimate’s handy upload feature. There is your couch. Aside from props you can do this with backgrounds and it really is a great way to get the most out of GoAnimate. Moving on…
• #87: To tip 3 Two voices, one scene. This will make sense in a minute.
• #88: By default GoAnimate makes it seem like only one voice can be in a scene. Now it doesn't make sense to have to create a new scene every time a new character speaks so we’ve figured out the work around.
• #89: Normally the process is pretty straight forward. You select your character, choose dialogue from the panel on the left and upload his/her dialogue. There you can see the little waveform that just got added for that character. Select the second character and choose dialogue from the same control panel and GoAnimate will try to encourage you to create a new scene. It took us a while to realize there’s a skip option in the warning message. Select skip, upload your second character’s voice, and now you’ve got a second voice in the same scene. This process can be repeated for more than two characters in a single scene. The last thing you’ll see on this video is me rearranging the waveforms so that the two characters are not speaking over each other. Moving on…
• #90: Tip 4 Audio Editing in GoAnimate GoAnimate offers some limited audio editing that can save you the trouble of having to opening up your audio editor again. And by limited I mean extremely limited. Volume, fade, and split controls.
• #91: I occasionally found myself having to split up a character’s dialogue. Either a scene was too long, or a break was needed to show something else. For whatever reason, GoAnimate gives you some tools to help manage your audio audio. So for small edits it’s amazing because you don’t have to go back into Audacity, or Audition to cut up some dialogue. And the best thing about splitting dialogue in GoAnimate is that it’s already assigned to a character. You can chop a file to bits and every piece is still assigned to the parent character. And one last thing about the audio…
• #92: The sound of nothing is better than nothing at all. So what I mean here is that in areas where no one is saying anything it’s better to have an audio file with no dialogue than no audio file at all. You will notice (at least with headphones) that the audio cuts in and out when you don’t have an audio file in place. Keep some quiet or silent seconds of audio to use in areas where no character or music is playing. And the final tip I have to offer..
• #93: Save compulsively. It’s generic advice, but it applies to all the applications I talked about using, and it may save you some grief. Save as often as you can. Why…
• #94: Because for some reason or another these programs may (I mean will) lock up and crash. Some of them are more forgiving than others. GoAnimate has an awesome autosave feature that has come in real handy. Others you’ll have to start over and it’s no fun to have to redo changes you’ve already made. That’s my time and thank you. On to Kevin
• #96: If you know you will be developing animation for mobile: Keep in mind your screen size. You won’t be able to have a lot of complexity – simplify and focus. Scenes with multiple characters will not work as well as those focusing on one speaker, or object. When you drop in text – multiple lines will get lost or not seen. So keep them focused and efficient. Short animations work better than longer. Mobile users are not going to watch a 10 minute animation – you will lose the majority of your audience. Aim to keep this under 2 minutes or less.
• #99: lots of other animation tools, not nearly as robust or sophisticated as GoAnimate, but if you need to create presentation-style animations (explainer videos, infographics) these are possibilities