Make you own animations with Google Drawings and Photos

This is basically a tech updated version of the flipbooks I used to make when I was in school

The other day while working with some teachers we explored and started playing with using Google Drawings and photos so that students could create their own animations. Sure there are plenty of ways for students to create their own animated gifs but we thought it would be cool to try and do it Googley and it might be a bit easier than trying to use Scratch or something else.

We used Google Drawings to create our starting frame

Then we download the drawing as a jpeg

Then we went back to our Google Drawing and made a slight change to create our next frame.
Downloaded frame number 2

Made a change to the drawing
Downloaded frame number 3
Change
Download
Change
Download

this continued until we had created all our frames for our animation.

We tried to make changes uniform by using the checkbox guidelines that are in the background of a drawing

We added speech bubbles by using the shapes tool

We changed the colour of images by using the image option / recolour

To make the text boxes uniform, we first created one and set it up how we wanted, then we cut it, made a few changes / download jpeg / change etc and then pasted the text box back and changed the text. This was quicker than trying to remember the formatting and setting up up every time.

With a bit of creativity, you can make some really cool effects, even something as simple as moving objects to the back can make a huge difference.

Once all our frames were downloaded, they were conveniently saved and renumbered in our downloads folder.

To create our Gif, we dragged them into Google Photos on a Chrome browser to upload.

Once images are uploaded you get the option to create a new album, which we did.

We then selected all the images in order and used the + button to create a new animation

A new animation / Gif is created.

Once you have done it a few times, it is pretty easy and you can get really fast at it.

The animation in this video took less than 10 minutes from start to finish.

Have a go, or even better let your students have a go and get them creating.

It was lots of fun and the kids got the idea that all movies / animations are just a series of still images running together.