Youtube Journey Part 2 - Adobe After Effects & InDesign - My Crash Course

Youtube Journey Part 2

Adobe After Effects & InDesign

My Crash Course

I was going to do this yesterday for Writerly Wednesday, but I was distracted by making birthday cupcakes for a friend. So today it is!

Now I threw together a banner and a logo for the my shiny new YouTube channel, Tales With Tasha, in Photoshop pretty sharpish as soon as I set it up, but I knew doing anything for actual vids would be harder.

When I started out I knew two things:

1. I didn't just want to film me reading things. I want part of each vid to be live action, but I remember the Disney page turning format very fondly and wanted something along those lines for the stories. Also helps with accessibility.
2. I wanted a short little logo animation to segue from live action to the story.

My first thought was Adobe After Effects.

Of course, then I hit my first problem - I had never even opened After Effects before 😂. However, never let it be said that this has ever stopped me in the past. I taught myself how to use Photoshop using turtorials, how much harder could this be?

Okay, so maybe a bit harder 😎. The thing about After Effects is its for animators and people who understand film terms and I don't, well I've picked up a little now. Never fear, however, because the lovely creators of YouTube have wonderful channels with step by step tutorials on just about everything. I love them.

Endeavour 1 - My Page Turning Book

So I knew I wanted a book with pages that turn, and I found one plugin and several tutorials, but none of them were quite right. In the end this one popped up, thank heavens:

It also isn't quite right, but it does have all the elements I needed so that after following it I could figure out how to create what I wanted. It also allowed me to understand how everything goes together.

For example, I had no idea that when you import images, if you change them on the disc, they are changed in the animation too. This is a revelation to me, and I assume it is actually a setting, like importing the mp3 files into Audition etc.

• Stage 1 - Follow Tutorial Exactly
• Stage 2 - Tutorial pages turn backwards for some reason, so figure out how to make them turn forwards.
• Stage 3 - Figure out how to create page content.

It was Stage 3 that was the hard part.

Page Content

First Idea - Photoshop:

1. Create a base template
2. Place text
3. format text
4. Rinse and repeat

Only problem - with 2K words per story, this was going to be slow!

Next Idea - InDesign

which I had also never used 😝.

2 most useful things about InDesign

1. We can import a preformatted Word Doc and it will automatically paginate for us.
2. We can export all pages as images.

This is the tutorial for I used to find out how to do #1 - Pretty Fabulous Designs has some great turtorials for doing all sorts of things.

The plan was growing! Mwuahahah!!!!

Third Thought - Plain White Pages are Boring

I found some wonderful page textures on Unsplash.com by Annie Spratt. She also has some other fabulous photos, but it was the large number of textures I was after this time.

For this I did use Photohop, creating a template for left and right pages with shadows in the margin so it looks a little 3D. Not a lot 3D, but a little 😉

These can then be used as backgrounds for the pages in InDesign.

The End Result

Anyway, I played and fiddled and now have a format I can easily customise for each video. This is a very short demo to show what I mean.

I can customise everything I need to:

• Background
• Page content
• Book style
• Page turning interval

So it should do as a template.

The Plan

1. Format the story to be animated in Word with the correct size font (I have to play with these anyway to get them ready for reading, so it's only a tiny little step more).
2. Set up an InDesign layout with the background of choice depending on story content.
3. Import Word file into InDesign.
4. Add any extra formatting.
5. Export pages to PNG
6. Import into After Effects project and set pages to have the correct content.
7. Use recording to set page turn intervals.
8. Add pretty background behind the book to please YouTube's algorithm.

Endeavour 2 - My Animated Logo

This one was actually much simpler - I went through Youtube looking at tutorials, found one I liked and went with it.

This was the tutorial I chose in the end:

And here is what my animated logo looks like:

Now I just have to teach myself how to use After Effects in Premier Pro 😎.

Oh and actually film the bits and format all the stories I have planned etc, etc, etc ...

So, y'know, just a bit of stuff. 😂

How is everyone else doing? Any interesting projects going on? Do you have a YouTube channel?

My Shiny New Youtube Channel #WriterlyWednesdays

Now as I mentioned in last week's writerly Wednesday post, I have decided I need a Youtube channel. So I have been thinking about it all week and trying to plan, which involved a lot of watching Youtube vids on how to set up a Youtube channel etc. 😁

First of all I had to decide what I wanted to put on it and this is what I have come up with so far:

• Story narration
• Novel excerpt narration
• Book trailers and other Wittegen Press news vids

Other suggestions of things you might like to see, gratefully accepted.

Then I made a list of all the content I already have to choose from, well actually I made a Google Sheet (so useful). Turns out I have over 100 sources to choose from. And that doesn't include the naughtier stories, which I can't put up because Youtube does not like adult content.

In all honesty I don't have a strategy completely worked out yet, but I am plotting.

One thing I did decide is that my focus is going to be on the narration, with other things as additions, because I think that is what might bring in an audience. So I brainstormed for a Youtube channel name and came up with...

Tales with Tasha

So far I have a channel art, an icon and 2 subscribers, both of whom are other accounts I own, but we all have to start somewhere, down't we 😎.

Next I need to come up with:

• The about section
• A plan of attack so I can get the content prepared.

Apparently I need 100 subscribers and have had the channel for 30 days before I can get my proper URL. 💖So if you feel like subscribing to a completely empty channel, that would be awesome - thank you.💖 I promise there will be content.

Do any of you have a YouTube channel? What content do you put on it? Any tips? Drop me a link so I can check it out.

New Release Day

Yesterday was new release day over at VirginiaWaytes.com (my alter ego) with:

Sexy Stories 12 - The Manor s01e11 - Searching for a Mate

Josh is gone, but there is still hope to find him, even with the pack bond occluded to be useless. His connection to Pippa may be the answer and she and Lucy must work together to launch a dangerous rescue mission.

The Joys of Cover Design Now We Have Sites Like Unsplash

The Joys of Cover Design Now We Have Sites Like Unsplash

Making eBook covers used to be a lot harder than it is these days. Why I hear you ask?

Because there were a lot less resources available.

There have always been places like Getty images and some royalty free images sites, but the images on them cost not insignificant amounts of money, especially when combining several images to create new ones.

These days we have fantastic sites like:

• Unsplash.com, 
• Pexels.com 
• and Pixabay.com 

where the most wonderful artists upload their work to be used totally for free. Technically we don't even have to give credit, but I think that's incredibly rude! For example, the image I am using in the background of my banner today is by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash.

Many of the photographers have donation options - a great way to pay back their hard work.

Now these images aren't always the highest quality and could be problematic for high def print work, but for web images like eBook covers, they are amazing.

Over the weekend I have been working on the covers for The Manor, the new series by Virginia Waytes, coming early next year to Wittegen Eros and the Sexy Stories podcast.

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Firstly, can I just say how sexist the photo industry tags seem to be! I typed in the word "sexy" and "erotic" on all 3 of the sites I mentioned above and all I got back were pictures of women. Now while I appreciate this because I needed some of those as well, I was looking for some sexy men too! To get suitable pictures of men the most productive search terms were "young man" "abs" and "muscles" and most of the images returned weren't close to what I was looking for.

Anyway, I did manage to eventually find all the images I was after.

You can check out the cover reveal for Episode 1 - Lamb in Wolf's Clothing over at Virginia's wordpress blog: Virginia Waytes - The Parlour - Sexy Stories. And yes, it's very different from the one that was on the Free Fiction Friday version of the book.  

BTW - for those wondering, yes, Virginia is my alter ego - a new pen name to focus specifically on the podcast and paranormal erotic romance eBooks and get away with being a little bit naughty 😘. Virginia has a shiny new newsletter for everything to do with the podcast and accompanying books, and we will be running a giveaway when we launch for all members.

Join now to be in with a chance of winning a $20 (or equiv) Amazon voucher and all 12 novelettes of The Manor as they come out.

Come join me as Virginia on: Twitter | Wordpress | Blogger | Podbean | Facebook

All the new covers!

First of all the Eros covers:

And now the other covers I have updated for Wittegen Press:

With some of them I've just rearranged a few things and changed fonts, and with others I have completely redesigned them. It was mostly fun, but a couple of them really gave me the run-around!

Wittegen Press' New Look

Wittegen Press' New Look

I've finally done it - I gave the Wittegen Press website a new look. Now technically this should have just involved picking a new theme for WordPress, but things are never that simple, are they? 😝

Do you like the new header? I think it speaks about the site much more than the old one which was just the logo.

New Wittegen Press Home Page

It loads much faster now too! I think the newer themes are much better than the 2014 theme we were using.

One thing that did surprise me, however, is how many of the currently offered themes are not responsive. I had to search carefully to make sure the one I picked was.

If you're unfamiliar with the term, responsive means that the site can be viewed equally well on PC, tablet and phone and it uses CSS div layouts to do it. There is also fluid layout which uses percentages to do it, but, as you can imagine, on a phone percentages are not going to work too well.

Had to sort out all the menus as well because, while the new theme tried to sort them out, if only has once widget area (the old one had 3) so it duplicated a whole load of the menus.

There were some other formatting issues that I had to sort out, but it was actually easier than I expected, which was nice for once 😂

Other things I did while I was at it:

• Added a page for Wittegen Eros
• Updated all the books so they are now tagged Wittegen Press or Wittegen Eros so they can be found by publisher.
• Updated all books with their new covers.
• Implemented the featured stories scroller for the blog page.

New Wittegen Press Blog page

There is only one thing I can't fix and it's driving me batty. Our books used to have a G+ link on them, which is part of one of the plugins we use, and it's no longer formatting correctly, but it won't go away! I've turned off the social media setting for the plugin and turned it back on again, but it is still not working. Most frustrating.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look for Wittegen Press.

New Imprint, New Podcast and Free Fiction Friday

New Imprint, New Podcast and Free Fiction Friday

Firstly, apologies - this should have been out yesterday, but our power flipped out several times and meant I was racing to get the eBook for Free Fiction Friday formatted properly because I kept losing work. Everything else had to go on a back burner. Rob is going to connect my PC to the UPS we have for the server, in case it happens again.

So, on to the exciting news!

Soph and I are setting up a new imprint of Wittegen Press called Wittegen Eros:

For a while we've been looking at our titles and thinking that some just don't fit with the others and we want to make it easier for our readers. We also decided that we have enough titles to do it now. So Wittegen Eros was born - an imprint for all our exclusively adult titles.

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This will not affect any of our existing readers - eBooks will be getting a makeover for the new branding, but if you have updates enabled, you'll get the new version automatically.

However, new and exciting things are also coming.

We're launching a podcast - Sexy Stories with Virginia Waytes - who will be narrating the naughty bits from a new paranormal series called The Manor. The Manor being a supernatural hot-bed and  adult-only, exclusive members club in the middle of the English countryside.

The Manor will be episodic, with the first season being 12 episodes long and each episode consisting of:

•  the podcast with introductions and narration of the naughty scenes by Virginia
• an eBook to enrich the story and universe as well as including the sexy parts from the podcast.

More details on this will be coming soon!

However, if you would like a taster of the world of The Manor this month's Free Fiction Friday is the first chapter of episode 1. No naughty bits in this one, you'll have to wait for those 😎, but we get to meet Lucy, the proprietress of The Manor and several of her friends and colleagues.

Lamb in Wolf's Clothing - Free Fiction Friday version

The Manor is a sanctuary for many supernaturals and a new face means new mysteries to solve and new danger to come.
This story has adult concepts, but no explicit content.

To acquire your copy of Lamb in Wolf's Clothing, subscribe to The Wittegen Press Newsletter. News, updates and a free short story every month. Links for this month's free short story are in the final welcome email when you sign up for those who miss the Newsletter mail shot.

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You can follow Virginia for updates at any of these places:

Blogger | Wordpress | Facebook | Twitter

Header Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash