Animating My Lettering in Procreate

We’re in the thick of it now.

I feel like I say that or something similar every week now. But, this is about the time during the school year where Teacher Tiredness kicks in for me…

It really doesn’t take long!

The commute to work is long, the commute home is long…The day becomes a string of back-to-back classes that leaves me forgetting which day of the week it even is….There’s the lesson planning for the week and the annual professional developments to be done…At the moment, my first newsletter is due soon and I have been given some unexpected responsibilities this past week. Given what I already have at work and at home…I can tell this year is going to be a whole trip!

But, as part of my self-care regimen as a creative, I’ve always found ways to insert my interest into my work day somehow. Yep…That’s how I overcome obstacles-and this year will be no different.

Case in point, we have a virtual event coming up soon at school and the arts specialists have been tapped to suggest ideas as well as work at the weekend event. Since we have been talking about creating a few slideshows and videos to play during the event, I thought I would try to draft one up this weekend.

For me, it’s one thing to talk about our ideas…But to actually create an engaging story with our photos and imagery takes time to craft and tie together…and time is an extremely rare commodity as a teacher.

So, often, I try to kill a few birds with one stone.

Along with the newsletter and this event, one of the few birds in this particular flock is animating my lettering. It’s something I’ve wanted to tackle since I saw the trailer for the Domestika class, “Animated Lettering for Advertising Using Procreate” by Eduardo Mejía this past summer. Now, I didn’t know that I had much to advertise or ever would…But, this skill was just so attractive! I thought maybe it could come in handy for something. When this event came up, and we started talking about creating media for it, I just thought I’d whip it out and give it a try.

So, while our overall theme this year is “Overcoming Obstacles” and the underlying theme of the first newsletter is positivity-in which we will feature the sunflowers our students planted last year in our hybrid model (see below)-I threw all of it into the pot this past weekend with some animated lettering to see what came out.

Let me just say that animating lettering can take some time! The process itself is not difficult, if a bit tedious. You are basically drawing and re-drawing every single frame, each with another piece of the lettering…now and arm…now a piece of a crossbar… now a section of a stem….rinse and repeat a bajillion times until you’re finished. Every once in a while, you have to stop and start over as you only get a certain number of frames to work with depending on how you set up for your video. I set mine up just like the the class suggested for this first time, so I had 55 frames to work with for each section of this video.

All in all, in between eating, feeding the kid and getting her hair washed, this took a whole weekend to create! Contrast that with my typical piece of lettering which usually takes about an hour or so. As I sit here Sunday evening, writing this post, I still have to style the kid’s hair for tomorrow….still have laundry to do…still have Sunday night communion with my family online…and still have a lesson plan to write up for this week. 😲

Y’all pray for me, k?

To make this, I used the piece of lettering I created in Procreate (shown above), some photos I took on my phone of our sunflowers in front of the building, and some photos I took around the building of students with teachers and paras, etc. I can’t show the photos of the kids here because I don’t have photo permission to do that on my personal accounts. But, I can show the part where I’m just animating the title…and, of course, their beautiful sunflowers. 😊

After creating the animation, I took it, the static lettering piece, and the photos into a few different video editors to assemble and see what all I could do. Ordinarily, I use Splice for quick videos and LumaFusion for videos with more pieces to it-both on my iPad or my iPhone. But, this time, I gave Adobe Premiere Pro a shot on the laptop. Since I want to add a few different tracks of audio and visuals to the longer version (and my phone is about to smack me if I try to save one more photo on it), I felt it would be a good idea to get familiar with that program too.

Take a look at where this little mini-project ended up below.

Not a bad use of a weekend (I reiterate, a whole weekend), if I do say so myself!

I’m hoping to be able to use this technique for something else later where I can get more time to spend on the actual lettering itself and be a little more creative with how the lettering reveals itself…which will probably mean I’ll have to reserve that for summer break. Still, this was a nice weekend project that will hopefully give us some direction with the rest of the media we create for the event…Or, at the very least, the intro segment.

Y’all be easy this week…and go learn something new!