Hi guys it's great to be back! Apologies for not creating any tutorials recently but I've been
really busy on some very exciting projects. But today I'm back and
I want to show you how to create your own unique countdown timer for free using Canva.
And once you've done that I'm going to show you exactly how to upload your countdown timer
into a video for sharing online. If there are any teachers listening right now
let me know in the comments box because this tutorial is definitely going to be for you.
If you're still sharing recorded lessons online countdown timers are a great way and a fun way
to just quieten things down a little bit get your students to put their phones away and let
them know that the lesson is about to start. If you're a fitness instructor and you regularly
record workouts for sharing on Pinterest or YouTube you can also let me know in the comments
box because this is going to be really useful for you. These countdown timers are a fabulous
way to motivate your students and to get them to complete those final really difficult reps.
So if you're ready let's make a start by hopping over to my Canva desktop...
So from your Canva desktop open up a blank template. Choose the size that suits your
project so I'll be choosing a presentation template because it's perfect for YouTube
Step 1: we're going to start by adding the numbers. It's important that you choose a
font that is bold and easy to read. I'm going to use my own brand font.
If you don't have a font in mind you might want to click on the font drop-down menu
place your cursor in the search bar and have a look at 'Headings'
and choose from a selection under the 'Headings' tab. Or if you don't like those scroll through
until you find something like 'Bold' and have a look at all of these lovely fonts here.
So I'm going to carry on using my brand font. Next you want to decide what you'll
be counting down from, so maybe from 1 minute, 30 seconds or even 5 seconds.
Now go ahead and add the first few digits. I'm going to create a 30-sec timer, so to begin with
I'll add two zeros to represent the minutes. Next I'll add a colon to separate the minutes
from the seconds. I'm just going to increase the size slightly so you can see what I'm doing
I'm going to make sure that the font is right aligned
Now let me duplicate those numbers so that I don't have to go through that all over again. And now
I'm going to add the numbers for seconds. So since I'm going to be counting down from 30 seconds the
first figure I need to put in is 3. I'm going to make sure that it's left aligned this time,
just make that slightly smaller and I'll just duplicate the number and then
type in zero. Great so that's 30 seconds. Let me just make that a little bit bigger again.
Okay now the reason why I added these seconds as separate digits will become clear very very soon.
If you want to you can select your font and change the colour to a brand colour,
but for now I'm going to stick with black because it really does stand out the most.
And I'm also going to make the font bold just so that it stands out even more.
Now for step 2: adding some animation. We're going to make our timer come alive now by animating
the digits but we're only going to animate the digits that change. So in my case the
minutes aren't going to change and I just need to animate the seconds. To save yourself a whole load
of time just duplicate this page by heading on up to the top right hand edge of your template
and clicking on this little icon here. And that has made an exact copy of the previous page.
Great! So now I'm going to go ahead and change the numbers,
so from 30 I need to count down to 29 so I'm going to change the 3 to a 2, and a zero
to a 9. To start adding animations I need to select the 2 by clicking on it once,
go up to the 'Animate' tool and click on it once. Now go to the left hand side menu
and select one of these fabulous text animations. Free Canva users now have 13 wonderful animations
to choose from and Canva Pro users have a further 7. If you'd like to upgrade to Canva Pro for FREE
for an exclusive 45 days just click on my Canva Certified Creative affiliate
link which I'll leave in the description box below. If you don't know what the animations
look like just hover your mouse over one of the animations and see how it changes on your page
I think I'm going to select the roll animation, and I'm going to do exactly the same for the 9.
So select the 9, head over to the text animation toolbar and select 'roll'.
Now let me add another page by clicking on the little duplicate
icon. And this page is going to be 28 but this time I only need to animate the
8 because the 2 has already changed. So I'm going to select the 2, go up to the Animate
button and then I'm going to change the animation to 'None'. Next I'm going to change the 9 to an 8
but I'm going to keep this figure animated.
Now since you duplicated this page you don't have to re-animate the number and that's another
huge bonus of duplicating pages. Now I'm going to repeat these steps until I get down to 20.
Perfect! So if I pop down and click on grid view
you can see I've got the first 10 digits of my countdown timer.
I'm sure you've got the idea now so I'm going to complete my timer right down to zero
That's it, let me just check it in grid view to see that we've got all our numbers included.
It's so easy when you're doing something like this to miss a number out.
Yeah I think that's good so let me close that down. Step 3: do you remember as a
kid having one of those little cartoon flip books with a stick man in the corner and as
you quickly flicked through the pages the stick stickman looked as if he was running or walking.
Well we need to achieve exactly the same kind of effect in Canva for our countdown timer.
Let me go back up, right up to the top. We need to set up each page so that it automatically changes
every second. To do this you'll first need to select the page by clicking your cursor
on the template. In the top LH corner of the toolbar you'll find a little stopwatch
and a figure after it, and the figure represents seconds. So here I have 5
seconds. This means that this page will last for 5 seconds before it changes to the next page.
So I need to change the 5 seconds by clicking on it once and then typing 1 and then enter. So
now my page will only last for 1 second until it changes to the next page. So I need to go through
this process for all my pages. So I'm going to select my template, click on the 5 seconds, type
in 1, hit return and that's changed to 1 second. I'm just going to do this now for all the pages
It's worth just double-checking the pages because sometimes this little timer
button can be a bit temperamental. You can choose if you prefer you can choose to alter
the page timing at the same time as you change the digits on your template but for the sake of
this tutorial I thought I'd make this a separate step just to make sure that it's really clear.
Ordinarily you'd be able to preview your template before downloading it but unfortunately in
this presentation view you can't preview your template. To preview a template all
you need to do is click on this play button here and you'll see how the timer works
Now since I'm going to be uploading my completed countdown timer to a video
I'm going to add a green screen. So I'm going to click on the first template,
click on the background colour tab and select the green screen colour. And I'm going to change all
instances of white to my green colour. And that changes the background colour in all of the pages
Now all I need to do is go up to the toolbar and download my countdown timer as an MP4 video.
So click on the downward arrow, select file type as MP4 video.
Make sure that all your pages are selected, click 'Done' and then download.
And you're Going to download this to a local folder in your device such as your
laptop. I don't recommend that you do this on your smartphone because I think it'd be quite fiddly.
For step 5 I've opened up my video editing tool, I use Filmora. I've uploaded a little video
snippet which I created before and I've added it to my timeline. Now I'm going to upload my
Canva countdown video. Once that's done you need to drag it on top of your little video snippet
It does need to sit on top because it acts like an overlay.
If your countdown timer sits underneath your video you will not see it. And now you'll
see why I added a green screen because what I'm going to do is I'm going to double click
on the countdown timer to select it and I'm going to scroll down until I find the chroma key
button. In Filmora all I need to do is put a little tick in this box, click on the pipette
and click the green colour. And that removes all the green colour and leaves my numbers behind.
And now I'm going to grab on these corner buttons to resize my timer
and then I'm going to drag it into the top
left hand corner of my screen. And now if I press play you'll see how this looks in this video.
And that is all there is to creating your own unique countdown timer in Canva. Coming
up next take a look at how to use that little timer feature in your Canva designs
via my recent tutorial. Or take a look at all my Canva tips and tricks via my Canva playlist.l
Thank you so much for watching and for all your support as always and I will see you next time