- Hey guys, my name's Tom.
I wanted to share with you today a really quick thing
I discovered this week that solved a problem
I've been having for a long time.
For quite a while, I've been wanting to find a way to make
hand-drawn animated titles for videos and stuff.
Just so that my titles and graphics
could be a little more unique to me
and not just look like what everybody else has.
But, when you're dealing with anything to do with animation,
quick is usually never part of the picture,
because animation takes so long to do anything.
So just this week, I stumbled across a method
for creating very quick titles, even other graphics.
It's a super simple method and the only special equipment
you need is an iPad with Procreate on it.
I've been using an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil,
because I really like the way it feels to draw
with the Apple Pencil, but you could use
a traditional stylus, you could use your finger to draw,
it doesn't really matter.
If you've never used Procreate before,
it's only a couple of dollars on the app store,
it's totally worth it.
It's a very full-featured app,
and it lets you create different documents,
it almost works like Photoshop does in a way.
Has layers and things like that, it's not quite as advanced
as like Photoshop on a desktop would be,
but it's really really good and it lets you just draw
and create all kinds of artwork with unlimited layers
and brushes and things like that.
Really cool feature though,
and this is why I recommend using Procreate specifically,
is that when you draw something,
Procreate tracks every single brushstroke
and every single line that you make,
even if you work on it over
the course of many days or weeks.
When you're finished, you can actually
play back a video of your artwork being created.
I realized this almost by accident,
I was drawing some lettering one day
and then I hit the Export Video, and it did it real quick
and it looked like the letters drew themselves
and filled themselves in and I thought,
"Oh, this is really cool. I could use this for titles."
So I'll walk you through the whole method really quick,
but you're essentially creating a green screen video
that you're gonna use in your video project.
And this should work on any editing software
that lets you key out a color, like a green screen.
I'm using Final Cut Pro, but you could do the same thing
in Premiere, you could probably even pull it off in iMovie
or any number of other programs.
With Procreate, you can create your own size,
or you can select from pre-built sizes.
I like it because there's already a 4K resolution,
which makes things very, very easy.
Once you've created your new piece,
the background's gonna be white.
You can fill it with whatever color you want to key out.
Green is the most typical.
Whatever color you choose for the background,
make sure it's a bright, crisp color
that's not going to be anywhere in your artwork.
From there, you can just start drawing your titles.
It doesn't really matter how you position them
within the canvas, because you can resize them
and reposition them once you get them
into Final Cut, or whatever editor you use.
All you need to concentrate on is
drawing whatever you want to draw.
When it comes to lettering, I outline the shape
of the letters, and then I go back and fill them in.
It's entirely up to you how neat you want to be with this.
I like to try to be very neat with the outside lines,
but then when I go back and fill them in,
I'm usually a little bit messier because I like
that hand-drawn look and it helps me
to get things done more quickly,
but you can obviously take as much time as you want
and be as detailed and clean
and polished and perfect as you want it to be.
Once you're finished with things in Procreate,
then all you have to do is click on the little wrench
and you can Export the video.
It's going to give you some options
on how you want to share it.
Usually I just air drop it to my MacBook,
but you can send it to yourself in an e-mail,
you can even send it as a text message,
these movie files are very very small,
even at the 4K resolution.
And then you're ready to put it into your editing software.
Once you have your Procreate graphic in Final Cut Pro,
or whatever editing software you use,
the next steps are pretty simple,
you just need to key out the green,
just like you would anything else.
If you film somebody in front of a green screen,
all you need to do is keep your image with the green on it,
on top of whatever you want it to appear over.
In this case, I'm just using
a random clip from yesterday of my dog,
but you can do any image, you could do,
if you did it over nothing, it would just be over black.
If you've never done keying before,
it's very easy in Final Cut, you just go over to
the Effects Menu, select Keying and all you have to do is
add a Keyer layer on top of your green.
Final Cut's already pre-determined
as our most Keyers to take away green,
if you want to use green in your lettering,
and you needed to use a different color for the background,
you could just click Sample Color and select the
actual background color that you were gonna use.
But that's about it, and this looks pretty clean already.
Right now they're just over a black background.
What you'll notice though,
is with Procreate, the finished version,
it starts with the completed title,
and then it wipes it out, and then it shows
the title being created, and when it gets completed again,
it ends right away, so it's only like
one frame of the completed title.
So this means you need to do a couple of things,
first is put your playhead directly over the last frame,
where your title is totally complete.
And then just click the Retime tool and add in a hold,
which is basically like adding in a freeze-frame.
In older versions of Final Cut,
you used to just insert a freeze-frame,
similar for like, Premiere and other programs.
And then you can adjust how long
you want it to hold at the end.
So once your titles are done, once it's finished,
you can adjust how long you want it to stop.
The other thing you want to adjust
is how long it takes to draw out the title.
Obviously you're gonna wanna cut out this whole thing
that Procreate adds in where it like, wipes away the title,
and you're probably gonna wanna start
right when the title starts, so you can just clip that out.
But especially if you have longer titles,
this might take a little too long.
That's almost distractingly long,
so you can just shorten that down however you want.
Personally, I like to have it very fast.
There ya go.
And that's a good title right there,
and then you can decide if you want that over black,
and then you can reposition it, you know, wherever you want.
The next step here, especially in Final Cut Pro,
is to then resize and reposition your title.
So that just involves going down to the Crop tool,
selecting Transform, and then it's up to you
if you want your title to be,
if you're doing something smaller
that's just gonna be off in the side,
maybe like a branding thing or a lower-third graphic,
you could put it there.
If you wanna make it giant, and cover the whole screen,
you could do that.
And that's it, and then it will
play through and cover it up.
If you wanted to get really advanced,
and you feel fairly comfortable with Final Cut Pro,
you could then add in key frames and have the title itself
move in or out or reposition or scale-up or scale-down,
I'm just keeping things very simple because
when I tend to use this trick,
for the most part, it's very, very quick.
At least lately.
You could be as detailed
and as in-depth as you want with it.
And that's essentially it,
that's how you make your titles right there.
Couple cool things,
I personally prefer white titles for the most part,
so that's what I like to use if I'm just making a title.
But, if you created your titles in Procreate
and they're one color, and when you get them
into your project, you decide that you don't want that color
anymore or you wanna change it, you totally can.
In Final Cut, the way you would do that is
just add a color layer on top of your titles,
and then you can go in over to the Color Board
and you can adjust the color and the saturation,
so you'd probably really wanna saturate these guys up.
And play with the color, 'til it gets.
I really like blues, they look kind of like that.
So then you can have in
different colors.
So you really do have a lot of freedom.
Procreate just provides you the basic animation,
but you still have a lot of time after you created it
where you can go through and adjust it.
So you're not married to whatever you have in Procreate.
You don't have to go back
and recreate things if it didn't work right.
You could obviously also use this for things
other than just titles, you could do all kinds of different
graphics and animations,
and that's pretty much all there is to it.
When I said that this was quick and simple,
it really is quick and easy, which is why
I felt so compelled to share it, because for me,
I've been wanting to incorporate this
kind of style into my work for a long time,
but I didn't want to deal with the work that comes
with animating it, especially if you're doing a project
that needs lots of titles,
or lower-third graphics or something like that.
It doesn't really add too much to your workflow,
and all you need is an iPad with Procreate on it.
Hopefully that gives you enough information to get started,
if there's anything I left out
or any other questions you have,
please feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer them.
So, thanks so much, good luck!