Animating a Clown

 With the pandemic, we've done a few prerecorded virtual shows. For the latest one that I am editing, I thought it would be cool to end it with an animated version of the Husband's logo. I thought it would make a more interesting finale that just a still photo. Theoretically, I knew that it would have to be created like it was a flip book, but in a digital fashion. I had made a bouncing circle flip book early on in the pandemic, so I figured I could learn how to do it digitally without too much difficulty.

Where does this pandemic teacher go when she needs to learn a new digital skill? YouTube.

I found numerous examples of how to go about creating an animation with an iPad, laptop, or both. The best one I found demonstrates how to create an animation using the apps that Apple already includes on iPads and Macs. Since I just wanted it to be a final clip at the end of the virtual clown show, it was a bonus to learn how to turn it into an overlay. With this tutorial, I learned how to use the green screen effect in iMovie. This thrilled me because it means I won't have to pay for an extra app whenever I finally figure out how to light a green background evenly. I could also record a video of the Husband, adding a cartoon on top of it later on. All I'd have to change would be giving the animation a green background. There are a lot of possibilities!

For this project though, all I needed was a short clip to put at the end of the show. It took me a few tries to get the animation to export from Keynote the way I wanted it to. First, I exported it as a gif. The quality of the picture wasn't very good after I transferred the file to my laptop. Next, I exported it as a movie. This time it was better, but not quite what I wanted because the file was so large. Finally, I realized that I could choose the size of the gif file when I export it. The first time, I had just gone with the size that was automatically chosen. So I exported the file as a gif again, but this time I chose a much larger file size.

Here's what I ended up with:

Pretty fun, right? When I added the gif as a clip to the end of the movie, I adjusted the speed of the gif so that it runs almost twice as fast. With that extra speed, the ball falls into his hand much more gracefully than it does as shown above.

What other types of animation ideas do you guys have for clowning? I want to make another one, but I can't settle on an idea.

Cheers!