Fifteen years ago, creating an animated video meant hiring an animator. It could take months for the animator to create your characters and scenes from scratch and edit the project. Once complete, you’d have a gorgeous video—but only after paying expensive fees and waiting for months.
While an animated video can be engaging and help demonstrate things better than text, it doesn’t scale well if you need to hire an animator every time.
Today, all you need is an easy-to-use animation software that does the heavy lifting for you. You can learn how to animate yourself into a character that looks like you in a few simple steps. Then, put your animated self in different scenarios to help get your point across.
Define your use case for animating yourself
Animation offers dynamic visuals that you don’t get with PowerPoints or PDFs—or even live video. Animated videos are often cheaper than live videos and easier to edit if something changes. Because you can put yourself and other characters in a variety of scenes, you can easily demonstrate your point without the cost of filming on location. Plus, videos are often the most engaging form of media. The average engagement rate for video posts by Facebook Pages is 38% higher than for images and 323% higher than text-based status posts.
Before you learn how to animate yourself, define your use case. Whether you want to humanize a presentation or create a personal training video, there are several reasons you might want to animate yourself.
By including your animated self in training and eLearning videos, your character can act as a narrator guiding the course, similar to a teacher. You’ll foster the student or trainee relationship by familiarizing them with your voice and animated look-alike.
Including yourself in Internal communications and HR videos can familiarize new hires with you and feel more personal to coworkers. They’ll recognize your character and voice, so the video feels a bit more personal—almost like they’re having a conversation.
And if a policy you mention in the video changes, such as for onboarding videos, you can edit the video without re-shooting the entire thing.
If your identity is tied to your brand, you can use your animated self in marketing videos, such as product explainers or social media ads. Including yourself will let your audience connect to you and associate you with the brand.
Sales teams can humanize the sales experience and build better relationships with prospects. Adding that personal touch to pitches and product demos familiarizes prospects with your brand and helps build trust with you as a potential future partner.
By animating yourself in a sales video, you’ll humanize the sales experience and build a relationship with your prospects.
Whatever use case you choose for animating yourself, knowing what it is before you start will help you select software that’s aligned with your purpose and streamline your character design process.
Secure animation software with character customization features
To create an animated video of yourself, you need software that offers enough customization options so that you can create a character that you feel represents you. That means facial features, hair, skin tone, and even clothing. You don’t want software that constricts you with “average” features that really only represent a few people.
[insert image of a variety of characters that are possible in Vyond, including gender, body type, skin tones, religious headwear, and apparatuses like wheelchairs or canes]
Vyond offers 700+ character creation options for features, clothing, and accessories, allowing nearly limitless combinations. Choose your skin tone, eye color, different body shapes, and even eye and mouth shapes. You can add a hijab, a turban, or that beanie you’re known to wear around the office. There are even options for freckles, beauty marks, and a bindi.
The platform also offers a number of ability-focused actions for characters. If you use a wheelchair or a guide dog, for example, your character in Vyond can, too.
Storyboard your scenes
Once you have your idea and software, the next step is to create a storyboard — a graphic representation of how your video will unfold, shot by shot. You’ll save yourself a ton of time and energy if you do this before creating your character and video.
A storyboard is a graphic representation of how your video will unfold, shot by shot.
Your storyboard will help you conceptualize the video for others, which is helpful if you’re collaborating with a team or need to get approval from stakeholders. By getting feedback in advance, you’ll streamline production by working out the details ahead of time. That way, you won’t find yourself having to make major changes after you’ve already created your video.
Take advantage of your visual medium to help you tell your story. For every scene, consider:
- The setting
- Whether you or other characters will be present
- Activity happening in the shot
- The script, or words you’ll be speaking
- Any graphs or charts that will help to illustrate your topic
You can create a storyboard on a blank piece of paper or download and print our handy storyboard template (US Letter or A4).
Create your character
Once you have your scenes set, you’re ready to create your character. Vyond Studio makes it easy to create custom characters for any setting or job role. Many animation tools are limited to a handful of customization options—it can be hard to see yourself in these generic-looking characters. Hundreds of customization options in Vyond mean you can create an animated character that really feels like you. Bring them to life with realistic actions and automatic lip-sync.
The way you create your character will depend on your software, but here’s what’s possible with Vyond:
- Choose a gender. No matter your gender, there are plenty of gender-neutral features if you want to appear neither feminine nor masculine. If you don’t identify with a gender binary option, click on each gender to view the different facial features and clothing options to find what resonates.
- Choose a body type. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all media representation. Choose from four body shapes to find one that feels most representative of you.
- Personalize your features. With Vyond, you can choose from more than 250 face and hair features and customize your hair color. Here you can also add a kippah, hijab, or other headdresses.
- Put on an outfit. Choose from hundreds of outfits great for a multitude of different scenarios. Put yourself in business casual, workout gear, religious attire, formalwear, or even a Halloween costume.
- Add accessories. Here you can add beauty marks, freckles, occupational headwear like a chef’s hat, and fun costume accessories like a Batman mask. If you use an apparatus like a wheelchair, cane, or prosthetic leg, you can find those in the actions section while you’re creating scenes later.
And there you have it: In five easy steps and just a few minutes, you’ve created a character that looks like you.
Make your video
Now that you’ve created your storyboard and character, it’s time to make your video.
You can make a video in Vyond without any technical know-how—seriously, no prior video experience is needed. With our easy-to-use platform, everyone at your company—from marketing to HR to C-levels—can make an animated video of themselves.
Use one of Vyond’s 100+ video templates and customize it to your needs in just a few steps. You can find templates for many use cases—like a seasonal sale template for your marketing team or a training video template the HR team can use to teach employees about preferred pronouns.
You can also build a video freeform. Combine Vyond’s 1,800 pre-built scenes to build your own video arc—or build scenes from scratch with 10,000+ props at your fingertips.
Start your free trial today to create a video with a personal touch.
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