How to Make a Vyond Video in Canva

I think Vyond is a great tool, however, after starting to train in After Effects, I’ve realized that if you follow some basics in animation design, it’s possible to animate in Canva if you’re handy with video editing, but it will take immense patience at first. First take a look at a video where I used animation made in Canva then read on to learn about my approach and hopefully you’ll get some ideas of how you can use Canva too. I’ll also tell you about how I learned from Ingrid Bergman and Ernest Hemingway to sync the voice and animation!

Canva Animation Sample

Summary of 2 different approaches

In the first problem, I moved the character’s lips and also moved the hand of one of the characters and the torso of the other character.

In the second problem, I chose “breathe” effect for the animation for both characters and didn’t have any of their body parts move. To show that a character was speaking, I just cropped the scene and cut to them.

How I animated 1st problem

I started with the background. Canva has many different backgrounds. Here are a few I liked. You just need to search under elements and graphics for: Cafe background/office background/living room background/etc. Here are a few that remind me of Vyond’s style. I especially like the look of photographs (photo 1 of Barcelona’s Gótico) and more artful pictures (picture 2) as I get bored with the general aesthetic I see in Vyond’s backgrounds. I also like the characters I chose (picture 2) better than Vyond’s typical character look (the vyond-type characters are available in Canva. What do you think of them in the café scene?)

The next thing I had to do was change the characters and scene a bit to work. Using the drawing tool and coloring over the arms on the torso, I changed the torso of the character in picture 1 as arms were originally crossed to arms outstretched in picture 3. I added arms to the elbows to make this happen. I also superimposed a bigger desk and laptop over the original office scene. I also added legs.

Before and After

For the characters, I had to add a lower lip that I could animate. For this specific one, I added a half moon of white to the top to give her teeth. I then added a lower lip that could move (another half moon drawn with drawing tool). Then I took off her original arm below elbow and added the same one back that I could animate.

To animate, I used the custom animation tool in Canva.

Lessons learned about syncing speech with animation from Hemingway and Bergman

This is something that takes a lot of patience! For this video, I found that the speech pattern was pretty similar. The sales- manager character spoke in long soliloquies. I just had to animate the lower lip to move constantly. Then when the character stopped at the end of a phrase, I used freeze frame to have them hold their mouth closed. I still need to work on this! This was my first attempt though and I’d love to use it for a personal project to improve even more. If I were to spend a little more time on it, I think it could rival Vyond, as I don’t think it looks that realistic in Vyond anyway. I actually got this idea as I was reading A.E. Hotchner’s book, “Papa Hemingway.” Ernest Hemingway was visiting Ingrid Bergman in Milan and she was recounting how she had turned down a movie role because it was going to be dubbed in a foreign language. She didn’t want to stand there in different scenes just opening and closing her mouth like a ‘goldfish’. Then I realized that was exactly what Vyond was doing; making their characters open and close their mouths like little goldfish!

Really, that is the best part of their technology, because syncing it on your own is a little frustrating, but you can easily predict it by looking at the sound wave.

Takeaways

With some knowledge of how animation works, I think Vyond could easily be replaced for most corporate videos as it’s mostly just scenes between 2 characters anyway. I’ll keep working with it and see if I can come up with a system to better sync the voice and animation even more. I find that when making Vyond videos, because it’s web based, I sometimes have issues with bugginess anyway so that doesn’t make it that much faster than doing it through Canva.

The drawback would be in the range of movement through Canva. There’s no way to move an object besides up and down. The restraint of movement works fine with lips when speaking, but how do you make a character’s hand wave or have an arm signal/motion to something? These are things you can tackle in After Effects though. As many of you are aware, Vyond really needs to step it up with subtitles and a way to have AI populate scenes and objects based on the words of a script. The technology exists for this and if Vyond doesn’t want to be lose its market, it really needs to offer more value, especially when lower cost tools like Canva exist.