Visual Effects

This article provides a greater understanding of how to create or incorporate special effects; specifically visual effects inside and outside of Doodly and the different methods for providing these effects.

Note: I’ve written articles on animation in Doodly, how to properly use GIF animations, proper key framing techniques but let’s talk about special effects but more specifically; visual effects.

What are Special Effects?

These refer to different techniques in film to provide the illusion of a story being told or an event unfolding and they can be separated into 2 main categories; mechanical effects and optical effects. Visual effects belong to the optical effects category and that will be our focus.

What is a Visual Effect (VFX)?

In short, it is editing images or video outside of it when filmed live.

What are some examples of VFX?

Anything that is used with Computer Generated Images (CGI) for which it would be impossible to capture on film such as a space ship flying through the sky or would be too expensive to capture on film such as wild animals like a lot of monkeys or Gorillas.
Solar flares, laser shots, sun glare are all examples of visual effects.

How can we incorporate VFX into my doodle?

Keeping in mind that Doodly is not a video editing software suite, Doodly allows us a ton of pseudo visual effects.

  • Opacity: This is great for creating an opaque effect on images for a ghostly image.
  • Layers: Using a .1s delay or duration on imported images allows for phenomenal movement effects. Watch my Scene Transitions video tutorial for a lot of examples. All animation examples in that video tutorial, except the ones at the very end, were created using only Photoshop and Doodly.

Doodly Beginner Video Tutorial: Scene Transitions

We’ve even created a training video inside that training video to teach you how to create the effects using key framing techniques within the layers section.

  • Fading and Masking: By using mask we can create fade out effects. Watch my Smooth Fading made easy. It was one of the first video tutorials I created when I was learning Doodly so it is fast but it will get you where you need to be Doodly Beginner Video Tutorial: Smooth Fading Made Easy
  • Exit Animations: These tiny animations provide us the ability to slide and provide another opportunity for animation.

Photo Editing

  • Creating our own effects using images and the key framing effect I show in that Scene Transitions video make for an excellent choice of visual effect. The best method of creating your own effects learned from my Scene Transitions video tutorial that I’ve seen to date using the methods I taught is from Tanushree Mukherjee; a very talented content creator. She created these effects with the key framing examples in the layers section using imported images.

Her videos are here. Watch the content even in just the first 15 seconds:
Covid
Public Holiday on April Fools’ Day
Sadly, last I heard, she has put up her Doodly software so we will no longer be graced with her talent and future designs.

Green Screen

Using a green screen within Doodly, the possibilities are endless because we can create videos behind the doodle or even a doodle behind our video. The results can be fantastic.
Watch our Green Screen and Masking video tutorial for just 1 example. This will require use of video editing software with the capability of removing a green screen.

Doodle Shorts

Not the shorts you wear but by incorporating very short single scene doodles with a green screen, we can create amazing effects. Just watch the bugs and frustrations video tutorial and the Father’s Day Treasure Hunt to see some of the visual effects that can be created when using Doodly as an accent software and not the main software. Doodly becomes less frustrating when exporting smaller scenes.