Create animated YouTube videos.

Create vector animations.

Turn any sketch or ink drawing into an animated cartoon. Once you have your drawing, take a photo of it and turn it into a vector shape with your mobile device and Adobe Capture. (Vector shapes stay sharp at any size, so you can blow up your drawing for large screens.) Once you’ve turned it into a vector shape, refine it, add color, and animate the drawing in Adobe Animate.

Make a whiteboard video.

If you want to explain a complex issue or process and you find narration less than riveting, try a whiteboard video. Motion can keep your viewers tuned in and help them follow you, even without words or sound.

All you need is a dry-erase board or white paper, a well-placed camera, and lighting that avoids making shadows on the board as you draw. Then just use a marker to turn everything from a math problem to a complicated infographic into a compelling whiteboard video.

You can also create your entire whiteboard animation digitally. With Adobe Animate, start with your completed text or drawing and work backward. Paint over your lines with a white brush, adding keyframes as you go. Then select Modify › Timeline › Reverse Frames. When you play the animation, your lines will appear as if you’re drawing them live. 

Create and animate original characters.

A good character goes a long way toward keeping viewers engaged. You might find your marketing video much improved if a cow or chicken does the selling instead of your most dramatic marketer.

With Adobe Character Animator, create a character, or puppet, and control it with your own movements using your video camera. Then lip sync with that puppet in Animate, or upload prerecorded audio and sync it with your puppet. Then add movement.

Animate with keyframes.

Keyframes are the key to modern animation. These are markers that define the beginning and end points for changes in onscreen elements that give the impression of movement. Adobe After Effects, Animate, and Character Animator all use keyframes to identify different elements of a graphic and determine how those elements move or change over time.

If you want to do something straightforward, like show a car driving from one point in the frame to another, make it happen with keyframes. Set the first keyframe on your animation timeline where you want the car to start and a new keyframe further along the timeline where you’d like it to end.

Location is only one parameter you can change. Add a keyframe to make the car grow or shrink in the frame, rotate, or gradually disappear and turn into a ghost car. And the ghost car doesn’t have to move at a set rate or in a straight line. In After Effects, use the Graph Editor to adjust the rate of movement. To send the car down a winding road, just create a path for it.

If you’re short on time — or you’re not an artist — you don’t have to draw the car, or any other object, from scratch. Search Adobe Stock for vector images for most things you might want to animate. Explore different backgrounds, including stock footage, to make your video content even more dynamic.

Add a third dimension.

You can tell a great story or make a compelling argument with 2D animation. But if you want to add some additional wow factor to your video, learn how to animate in 3D. In After Effects, enable the Cinema 4D Renderer to create compositions with layers that have true 3D geometry and depth.

Create depth by rotating 2D Illustrator layers in 3D space, turning Text and Shape layers into 3D objects. Add lights to create shadows, and fly through a scene with a camera. Watch a few tutorials to learn more.