Today’s Plan:
- Text Animation in Adobe Premiere
- Homework
Text Animation in Adobe Premiere
Last class I mentioned that we are going to edit a promotional video for the English Department’s 4+1 Accelerated MA Program.
One thing that can make videos look much more sophisticated is a polished intro sequence. These sequences often involve animating text using Premiere’s effects panel. I spent about an hour today reviewing various tutorials and sites and settled on this “Premiere Pro Text Animation Tutorial” from Motion Array Tutorials. While the tutorial moves a bit fast, it highlights how to make a flexible template that can be easily incorporated into other projects, and demonstrates a lot of new advanced features in Premiere 2020.
Our title copy:
4+1 Accelerated MA
UNC Department of English
Bonus: Bear logo.
I wanted to spend time working on this in class today for two reasons. First, one common response on the survey I distributed early in the semester was to spend more class time learning in Premiere. Second, I think understand how the effects panel works is what separates amateur video editors from professionals.
BUT, you don’t have to know how to create these kinds of animations from scratch to incorporate them into your videos. There’s a lot of services out there that provide free templates (or even more sophisticated templates for a small charge). You can download these assets and import them into your premiere project.
Homework
Remember that your homework is to spend an hour researching and writing your Kalman script. Also, locate images (or visit a location and take some pictures) that you can use in Monday’s storyboard activity. The longer description from Monday’s class is copy/pasted below.
In next Monday’s class, I am going to ask you to storyboard your Kalman project. This requires you do two things between now and then.
First, you need to draft a script of your Kalman project. The script can/should include original material (stuff you write) and what I like to call borrowed material (think about the Kalman I shared in class that repurposed Rosevelt’s speech on conservation). Spend about an hour researching your topic this week. Cut and paste. Brainstorm. Do whatever things you do when you are inventing ideas and writing. (Note: if you are doing an interview, develop questions in advance!)
Then think about the order of that material. Perhaps order it like a 3 or 5 act play. Start imagining what shots/scenes you’d like to pair with particular sentences.
Finally, gather some still photographs to go with your script. Visit one of your two shooting locations and simply take some still photos. (I recognize that it might be inconvenient/impossible for some of you to do this–in the past many people film the entirety of this project in a single weekend or over the Thanksgiving break). So, if you can’t go to a location, then collect some google images of the location or shots similar to the ones you want to pull off.
In next Monday’s class, I’ll ask you to assemble this material into a Google Slides presentation. My plan is to come around and talk with everyone individually, to check in on your progress.
