Behind The Scenes | New Droey's Draws Animation

You may have noticed that the intro for my Droey's Draws videos has changed, as well as the outro. Yes I have been giving some of my stuff a makeover but what's probably got you intrigued is the animated Droey Drawson in my videos. Today I'll be discussing how this came to be.

This is a screen shot of the first frame used in the opening sequence. You'll notice the software I have used to animate this footage is quite unconventional. I can't afford much in the way of software yet I occasionally can get access to Microsoft PowerPoint. I don't know if this is still the case but growing up you could find a good amount of videos of people using PowerPoint like an animation software, and since I already had it for school work, I could learn to animate without having to get any new software.

PowerPoint created the 'Animations' toolbox so that people could make their presentations more lively, so this is what we use to make our animated productions on PowerPoint. This is the same frame as the first screen shot but with the animation pane visible. While on the slide every object is visible, certain animation effects will make it so the slide is not clustered with everything at once. Appear and disappear effects were used on the different mouths, and a line effect for the movement of Droey's irises.

The hand waving was done by using a spin effect. In effect options, some of your animations can be modified to do different things, so I could stop the hand from doing a full 360 rotation, as well as get the effect to reverse when it was completed. Using the timing panel I would get this effect to repeat a few times and so Droey waves for the duration of this slide. One thing that can't be controlled with the spin effect is how the object's pivot point is it's center. So to get the hand to rotate from the wrist, I added another shape, making sure it was positioned so that the wrist would be directly in-between the hand and the shape. Grouping the hand and the square together turn it into one object and then you can add effect, don't forget to remove the outline of the spare shape and make it's transparency 100%, this will complete the illusion.

Wondering how I created a Droey on PowerPoint? Well I took the digital rendering of Droey that most people recognize and traced it using the shape tools. There are various circle tools and the curve tool that allowed me to create all of the shapes I needed to replicate the drawing. The star was made using the star tool and tweaking it's settings to make it match. You can tweak many tools by using a yellow diamond when you click on the object or by using the edit points tool. It's almost like the pen tool on Photoshop. Of course with Photoshop there's the ease of being able to just create the shapes and merge them all into one outline, then fill in the colours as you like. PowerPoint doesn't quite have that sophistication but for a software that isn't focused on for making art, it's town tools are admirable.

The outro as seen when viewed as just a PowerPoint slide

There's not much I can say about the outro version of this animation, as it is largely the same as the original. The only differences are the lack of a logo and the extended run time. You can see a few more shapes drawn onto the slide, all of which are included in the extended animation. Given that Droey was going to be waving for fifteen seconds, I thought it would be rather boring to have him doing that without changing his expression. To combat this, I added the facial animations that would allow him to lose patience as he continues to wave longer than he deems necessary. This would be less time consuming that drawing different frames for his arm to stop him waving, it would also be more entertaining to see Droey get bored and break out of his grinning presentation in hopes that the endcard comes to an end.

In an ideal world, I wouldn't have needed to create the eyelids and would have just changed the shape of the eyes. This would have matched the art style, but the problem lied within how Droey is animated. Without the eyelids being a physical shape on top of the eyes, Droey's irises would just break out of his eyes as they move, which would be a most disturbing sight. So at the slight cost of staying true to the artistic style, Droey gains some visible eyelids to his expression.

Now you're probably wondering how I was able to make a film out of a PowerPoint presentation. Well as of the 2007 version (I think that's the case), PowerPoint gained the ability to save it's presentations as Windows Media Video files, which are adaptable to just about any movie making software. This suits me perfectly as I only have Windows Movie Maker to edit my videos in. I saved the presentation file so that I can come back to edit this as I wish in future, then I saved the video files for both the intro and outro animations which could then be edited into the project files for my Droey's Draws videos.

So that's a brief explanation of creating the animated Droey Drawson that you see in my titles from now on. This does not bring promise of further animated content as this is something that will only ever be done sparingly. I used to practice animation and boy was it time consuming, I still have art to produce and post after all! I hope the animated Droey Drawson entertains you and that you enjoy watching future videos from the channel.