5 Quick Ways to Make Animated Stories Without Video Apps

Nikhil Arora
8 min readApr 23, 2021

More and more social platforms are counting on the utilization of ‘stories’ as a fast way of consuming content on the go. the thought was most made popular on apps like Instagram and Snapchat, and what made ‘stories’ unique (at least at the time) was the very fact that the stories themselves would disappear after they’d been seen then expire after a while, learn Graphic designing from the top institution who has provided the best graphic designing course in Delhi

Short-form videos, photo galleries, or animations would show up during a user’s feed for a limited time. This format is right for account owners to interact or share a fast update with their followers without committing to a post that may last forever.

People appeared to engage well with stories and therefore the different content types that it encouraged, so unsurprisingly, many other apps and websites have introduced an identical feature somewhere in their feeds since then. for instance, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook all have something resembling ‘stories’ baked into their platforms now, so it’s safe to mention that the thought of consuming and creating content via ‘Stories’ is here to remain.

Like any other piece of content online, many of us wish to get creative with stories. rather than posting raw photos or videos, there’s a trend of individuals editing and composing engaging videos or animations for his or her stories before time by making use of video editing software.

Thankfully you don’t always get to have access to video software when you’re trying to realize engaging animated content for your stories. There are many free or affordable methods that you simply can use to quickly make animated stories without using video apps — here are 5 fantastic ways of doing just that.

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is such a well-known design tool that it needs no introduction. Even those outside of the planning world is conversant in what ‘Photoshopping’ is. Undoubtedly, many of us desire they know the key features of Photoshop and the way effective it is often for photo editing and graphic design. Still, even today, people sometimes forget that Photoshop actually has several video editing tools built into it, which are accessible via the timeline option.

Now, this is often by no means a replacement for a totally featured video editing suite. Still, Photoshop has only enough animation features built-in to form it efficient thanks to quickly animate individual text or graphic elements once you’ve finished composing your design.

Here are the essential steps involved in animating your story designs in Photoshop.

1. Open your completed design.
2. attend Window > Timeline.
3. Click “Create Video Timeline” from the new panel that ought to appear.
4. Expand the layer you would like to animate from inside the Timeline panel.
5. Click the “Enable Keyframes” Icon (the one that appears sort of a stopwatch) on the attribute you would like to animate. for instance, moving your text around would require you to enable keyframes for “Transform.”
6. you ought to see a yellow diamond appear on the timeline of the layer you’re on. This signals that the parameters you set at this frame are recorded. So for transform, for instance, it means the position at this frame has been defined.
7. Move the playhead or scrubber forward in time, then make your adjustments to the layer as needed. for instance, you’ll move your text to a replacement position.
8. together with your adjustments made to the layer, click on the diamond on the left-hand side of the timeline window to feature a replacement keyframe.
9. Photoshop will now ‘animate’ i.e., fill within the frames between your first keyframe and you're last with the acceptable motion.
10. Once you’ve made adjustments to all or any layers you would like to animate, hit File > Export > Render Video… to start saving your video file.

Animated Stories Templates for Photoshop

If you’re not comfortable designing stories from scratch and you would like to form use of some pre-made templates inbuilt Photoshop, there are an enormous number of high-quality Animated Story Templates for Photoshop available on Creative Market. Each specific template may have its own process for editing the animations, but the essential steps from above will usually apply. Here’s a variety of animated story templates that we love…

Keynote

One surprisingly quick way of making stories for Instagram is by using an app that a lot of Apple computer users have access to for free of charge already, Keynote. For those that don’t know, Keynote is actually a presentation design app, almost like Powerpoint. wont to be”> I used to be surprised to seek out out that it can actually be used to create beautifully simple animations using any quiet images, illustrations, fonts, or graphics you’d like.

1. Create a replacement file.
2. Remove any existing content.
3. Select ‘Document’ settings within the top right of your Keynote screen.
4. Set the document size (usually 1080 x 1920 pixels for stories).
5. Compose your layout, message, or graphics as you would like.
6. Once you’ve designed your look, click on any element that you simply would really like to animate and make use of the ‘Animate’ tab within the top right of Keynote.
7. Click ‘Add Effect’ and experiment with the varied animation settings.
8. Once you’re proud of your animations, select File > Export Movie.
9. Set “Go to line Slide” and “Go to line Build” both to 0.
10. Set the video quality to 1080p.
11. Save your movie, and that’s it, able to use!

Canva

Canva may be a platform that permits you to edit various print or graphic templates online and for free of charge. Canva has grown in popularity and established itself as a really approachable design tool that anyone of any skill level can use, with the power to start editing designs directly within the browser.

Canva makes use of pre-designed templates that you simply can open and edit to kick off your project. you’ll find these templates on Canva itself, otherwise, you can find premium Canva Instagram Story Templates here on Creative Market, for instance.

All templates are often customized however you would like, and if you favor, you’ll design your own templates from scratch instead — except for the sake of speed, I’d recommend finding a template you wish and easily swap out the text and graphics to fit your message.

To use animations in Canva, you’ve got a few options: you’ll simply look for animated stickers in their elements library then drop those into your composition. otherwise, you can animate all of the weather on a whole page directly by applying some lovely pre-made page animations within the animation library.

To use the pre-made page animations, you merely got to do the following:

1. Open Canva and your Instagram Story Template of choice.
2. Finish editing or designing the content of your story to fit your needs.
3. confirm you don’t have any text or graphics currently selected.
4. An ‘Animate’ button should appear at the highest of your workspace. Click this.
5. Choose and preview one among the free or premium animations.
6. Download your story as an MP4 video file.

Stories Templates for Canva

Browse through my handpicked selection of Stories templates for Canva available on Creative Market immediately and find the right starting template to start animating and experimenting with.

Procreate

Procreate may be a powerful drawing tool made for the iPad. Create Market shop owner Holly McCaig of Holly Pixels has this useful tutorial over on YouTube, which explains the method of making delightful animated story templates inside procreate. the method itself features a few steps involved.

the essential idea is that you simply want to make a layer to act as your background, then using the ‘Animation Assist’ feature, you’ll found out different layers to behave as new frames in your animation.

The result’s a playful stop motion style animation that you simply can then loop and export to be used on Instagram or elsewhere; please watch the complete video to raised understand the complete process.

Procreate Brushes

If you’re looking to expand your library of Procreate brushes to assist together with your animations, you’ll be glad to understand there are over 4,000 Procreate-related items available on Creative Market when scripting this.

Instagram

One of the only ways to feature some animation into your stories is by using the Instagram app itself. Once you’ve got a story template designed and prepared topos, or maybe just a photograph or video you would like to share, you’ll inject some fun animation just by using the favored Instagram stickers feature. Instagram stickers are pre-made static and animated graphics that you simply can just overlay on top of your post.

Combining custom graphics or story templates with commonly used stickers is one effortless thanks to giving your stories a more unique but familiar feel amongst your followers without having to touch, edit or create any actual animations yourself.

Share Your Suggestions

Let our skills get creative together with your stories, and we’d like to hear if there are any apps or websites out there that we’d have missed that you simply would recommend for quickly animating content for Instagram stories.

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