Welcome back to BOGObiology. Today we're going to discuss some advanced tips and
tricks for using the app "Vittle". I get a lot of questions from viewers about how
I make my videos, and so I thought I would put together a quick tutorial for
you. There are five key things that this tutorial is going to cover. The first is
probably the one that I get the most questions about, which is how I do my
detailed work. The second is how I make things appear, the third is the use of
the "lock screen", the fourth is selecting specific colors on the screen, and the
fifth is the different apps that I use for something called "app-smashing". The
question that I probably get most often is how I do very detailed stuff like
this picture right here. I do do all of my own artwork (and if you look really
closely you can see some of the little mistakes that I make!). There are a few
tricks that I use in order to get really good detailed work on my screencasts
First, I always use a stylus. This is the stylus that I use when I'm making my
screencasts; its an Elago stylus, it costs about 15 bucks on Amazon. The
reason that I like it is that it's made of metal, and it's got a replaceable
screw-on rubber tip, and it has sides to it like a pencil, and it's got a little
bit of weight to it so it's very easy to hold for long periods of time. I find
that the styluses that are too light, the ones that are just made of plastic,
are a little bit too light in order to hold comfortably. I also always like to
plan out my drawings especially my diagrams well in advance so I know
approximately where everything is going to go and how it's going to fit together
on the page. Planning in advance also allows me to do stuff like color code.
All of the handouts that I use are matched up with the colors in my
screencasts and the symbols that we use are consistent across both platforms.
It's also really useful to draw things very big and then shrink them down so
that they fit on the screen the way that you want them to. When I drew this
picture of the Simpsons, I didn't draw them at the scale that you're seeing
here on the screen. Instead I either zoomed in very far, kind
of like this, or I drew it very large and then used the selector tool to shrink the
images down to the size that I wanted. When you zoom in really far like this
you can start to see a lot of the little mistakes in the drawings, but if you zoom
out or shrink the picture down to size you really can't see them anymore and so
it gives you a little bit more wiggle room.
Finally, if necessary, you can "app-smash"; you can use other programs to generate
your artwork and then import them into Vittle, or you can pull everything into
iMovie and put it together that way. There are some things that Vittle is
really good at and there are other things that it's not so good at, and one
of the things that you can't do in Vittle is draw straight lines, so I tend
to app smash stuff like this chart right here from my cell cycle screencast. I
drew this in a different kind of program and then I pulled that into Vittle. We'll
talk about app-smashing more later on in the screencast. Okay, so next up is how I
make things appear one by one on my screen, kind of like this. The first thing
I always do is make sure that everything is going to fit on the screen the way
that I want, then I take my eraser tool and I erase the last thing that I want
to appear on the screen but all in one go without lifting the pen at all.
So like this, okay, not lifting my pen and I'm done. Then I'll move on to the
second to last thing, then this one, and then the first thing that I want to
appear on the screen. It's just important that you do them in the reverse order
that you want them to appear. Then I push the record button and I can tap the "undo"
button as many times as I need to to get things to reappear on the screen.
What I find really useful about this is that sometimes it's hard to talk and write at
the same time, and so I can use this to pre-write stuff and then have it pop up
on the screen as I'm talking.
Next we're going to talk about the lock screen
feature. When you use the lock button feature, you can zoom in on the screen
without your viewer seeing it and it's also a great way to plan for screen
dimensions. Vittle has two options; widescreen and
normal screen, but the problem that I ran into when I first started making
screencasting videos is that the screen size for the iPad and the screen size
that YouTube likes you to use are not necessarily the same. So, originally I
tried using just the widescreen feature but I wound up with sort of this funny
setup where I would have some work that would appear off-center and I might see
other stuff in the margins
(and you can definitely see some of this in my earlier videos)
So, then I thought I'd solve the problem by simply using the
normal screen and then when I went on to YouTube I actually had great centered
text, but I also had these funny black bars that appeared on the side of the
screen (which you can also see in some of my earlier videos)
so I eventually came up with a workaround
where I would use the lock screen and then zoom out and
then it allowed me to anticipate the placement of objects on the screen so I
wouldn't wind up with stuff either in the margins or off center.
This is what
my screen looked like to record that last segment so you can see that I used
the lock screen and then zoomed outward so I could make sure that everything
would be pretty much in the center.
All right now we're going to move on to
selecting colors. So, if you select a drawing that has multiple colors in it
you actually now get a drop-down menu on the left hand side of your screen
and you can tap any of the colors that you want to isolate and then you can
move or delete them or shrink them or expand them however much you want. This
is actually a new feature that just arrived with the last version of Vittle.
Finally, last but not least, we have "app smashing". So, app-smashing is when you use
different apps and put them together in a way they weren't necessarily designed
to do. The two iPad apps that I find myself using the most often in
conjunction with Vittle are Notability and ArtStudio. I use Notability for
stuff like notes from class and so I might directly select some of those and
then import them straight into a screencast in order to allow for
continuity between class notes and screencasts. And then ArtStudio is
something that I use sometimes if I'm trying to get really straight lines or
make a grid or do something other than freehand drawing. It's got really great
features. Okay that pretty much wraps it up, thanks
for watching everyone, and don't forget to subscribe