Hello everyone, this is going to be a quick take 10 on how to use the new path animation tools in Wixie. I am not an expert in path animation, but I am an expert in going down the rabbit hole and playing with images and new features and files, and I love to do that sort of thing. So I wanted to share some of the processes for this.
Animation, I think, is so much fun. This isn't going to go because I don't have, there we go, you can try it, you can kind of see how path animation works where I'm not presenting in this because I want to build with the animation, but it's a super fun way to engage students, but we can use it for storytelling, and I think it'll be some of the fun examples I share, especially if it's storytelling connected to, say, science or social studies or even math, but it's a great way to kind of have kids play with timing, math, creativity, movement, layers. They really get to be good sort of media communicators with this.
I don't want to talk too much about why to use it because I think you're here because you want to and know that it's good, but just some fun examples. Okay, so here's the one that I just got today from one of our guys. She is doing a kind of one in her classroom where she's teaching kids, and this student sort of didn't quite follow her directions, but was obviously capable and confident in doing his own story, and it's nice and quick.
So you can see he's got a couple different path animations running on different pages to tell a very easy visual story, very short and sweet, but again, it's that visual communication, and that's a wonderful thing about cartoons and comics that having to be able to do sort of the inference there. This is a fun one that is actually from a fifth grade class, but they were really struggling to use prepositions correctly. There were a lot of language learners in this one, and so these two students put together, they read Rosie's Chicken.
I don't know if anybody ever read that, but she kind of walks by the hay in the barn, under the loft, and etc. And so they read that book, Rosie's Walk, and then created their own, and this is Bob the Blob by Brooke and Seth. Bob the Blob goes out to a cave, out of the cave, over a rock, past an anaconda, up a tree, down the tree, and back under his rock home.
So you can sort of see some of the layering. That one was work, both of these have been with original artwork. I'll show one more, and then I'll stop.
The story of, what do you call the elements going through the different stages of solid, liquid, and gas. This is Verbs Action Words. This is a third grade teacher from Texas who has her kids animate a verb.
A girl went to the car, a fancy word for one is dash. We won't watch all of the pages in this classroom, but again, a verb is a word that moves, and then also coming up with a synonym to get a little bit better with our writing. But explanations, how to point plots on a corner plane, some great Halloween greetings.
Okay, so how do we do this? I'm going to go ahead and kind of put something together quick here, and I'm going to search for a kid, and I have one in mind here because this is a fun way, this is sort of another new feature not everyone is aware of, and here's a kid right here. One of the new things that you can do in Wixie is also take a photo and remove the background. So on the options panel, when you have an image selected, you choose that, remove the background, and it sort of does a wizard like your phone does where it'll, you know, crop out the edge of an image that way.
So it'll take your photo, get rid of everything in the background, and it doesn't have to be, so no more green screening, nothing. You don't have to worry about what's in the background because the computer, that's the best part about technology advancing, is it knows how to remove and what to remove because it's got all these great AI algorithms in the back to figure out what's not a person. So within this background one, so I've got the background there, let me go ahead and just add a few stickers because she sort of looks like she is, actually let's just do skate, there we go, whoops, I can't type skate, there we go.
She looks like she's ice skating, so I'm going to grab a couple of skates and we'll put one on her foot, a little bit big there, maybe angle it a little bit more, make it a little smaller, there we go. So there's one skate, let's just copy that and rotate it around and make it fit the other foot also, there we go, and if she's skating, let's give her a scarf, except I don't know how to spell scarf, there we go, scarf, and we'll put a scarf on her, and then there we go. So she looks a little bit more like she's getting ready for some wintry weather.
I'm going to take that whole object here and I'm going to go to the edit menu and group it. Now to path animate, I really want to add maybe a background first, so let's go to page picture and search for frozen, let's see if I can find the pond, there's a good pond in here too, here we go, we'll put that lake in the background. So let's say she's going to go ice skating, well it looks like I need to change her so her ice skates a little flatter, there we go, and I go over, when I select this, now that it's a group, the only options I have for adjusting her are the animate, and I'm going to go over to animation, turn it on, by default it starts a path, I think that path is probably pretty great, and I will just send her then across the lake, and we can go ahead and see it go.
So I can choose different paths also here in the path options, actually let me do one more page just to do an example, so that one was with a photograph, but I can paint my own artwork also, so I don't know if anybody's ever read The Rainbow Fish with fancy scales, there we go, let me go ahead and I'm going to draw a rainbow fish, whoops sorry, in my solid colors, way at the bottom there's always rainbows, so let's do this direction, there we go, and let's add an eyeball quick, there we go, and black, let's just make it a little bit easier there, there we go, and let's add some gills, oh and I just said this was the rainbow fish, so let's go ahead and see if I can find, I think there's a silver heart in here, can I just use that, there it is, let me do this, and we'll just turn this a little bit and make this look like one of his fancy colored gills there, we'll do one more, there we go, so there's my rainbow fish, ah now you have to remember I drew it, and then I added objects in front of it, so now I want to make them all this image, so I am going to glue that down, and then I will take my square selector around here, and go to edit, and convert to a sticker, and because I've selected on white, I'm going to cross my fingers, it should ignore the white, so I didn't have to lasso around it to shrink it, we're going to find out in a sec whether I really needed to do that, but let's go ahead and search for a background here, there's a coral reef, we'll put, ah perfect, so you can sort of see that, let's flip it just because it's easier to do that path from this side, I'm going to turn on, again there's my animate, all my object things are still here because it's not a group, um but I can go to animate, turn that on, now I probably want to choose a different path, and so this is where the paths are a little bit different, it's a little bit more of a math, so it's, it's going to be a little bit more perfect, I can adjust, this draws obviously the length of my path, the end one, and then in this case, this one lets me adjust how much that path is moving, so if I wanted to move a little further across the page, I could go here or start on the page and move off, there we go, and let's go back here, and let's slow it down a little bit too, and I can try it, what does it try it, and you can see the fish goes along the path that way, so easy way to be able to choose start and end points with what we're going to be able to do for that, um and go through all those different pieces to make that happen, so that's sort of I think the process, um if you need to, I'm sure Tiffany has already probably put the link to the path animation help in the chat, um you can also, so you can go to your profile icon and search help, and actually if you just search animate, I think it's animate an object is what it's called, animate an object, and there's step-by-step instructions for how to do that, and a few images there to get going, and uh you'll be able to find that sort of information there, whoops let me get back into my presentation, does anybody have any questions, let's open it up to questions.
