What this book covers

Chapter 1, Structure of a PowToon Studio Project, looks at why animations work, when to use them, the art of storytelling, the elements that make up a PowToon Studio project, and some ways to combine the elements.

Chapter 2, Getting the Best from Color in PowToon, looks at a few basic principles of color, how to choose colors for your project, ways to combine color, and why it matters.

Chapter 3, The Dashboard, covers navigation and file management (naming, deleting, renaming, exporting, and so on).

Chapter 4, Getting Started, helps you with building your own PowToon Studio project and selecting a template, and describes the main parts of the "stage" and how they interact.

Chapter 5, Storyboarding and Scripting, covers planning—an essential step to power up your PowToon Studio project. Planning helps reduce rework, which is time consuming. It also covers a few suggestions on how to write a script and demonstrates how the same idea can be said in multiple ways depending on the audience.

Chapter 6, Backgrounds, Characters, and Props, introduces the main objects that you will work with while creating a project. It covers creating and possibly customizing a background using perspective and magnification, characters to accentuate your message, and manipulating props and characters, and very briefly introduces some methods that you can use to think about layout and composition.

Chapter 7, Animation, Animating, and Transitions, is all about adding movement into your project using objects that move by design, by adding movement to objects when they move on and off the stage, and by adding animations between slides (known as transitions). It not only covers the features and functionality and how to use them, but also looks at some of the ways to think about animation that can enhance your content.

Chapter 8, Text, looks at some typography basics and the mechanics of inserting text and manipulating it within a project. Text may seem self-explanatory, but to get the most out of text in PowToon Studio (which is primarily an image-based tool), you need to think about words as images. This chapter also covers some ways to make your text more original and creative, accentuating the concept of using text as a visual element, not as "words".

Chapter 9, Voiceover and Music, discusses the elements of voiceover and music and looks at how they can add to your project, although opinion does vary on this. It covers the mechanics of inserting audio (including voiceover, sound effects, and music) and looks at some of the considerations that you should take into account before adding a voiceover. The chapter concludes with some basic tips to improve the sound quality of your voiceover recordings.

Chapter 10, Sharing and Enhancing Your Project, covers what you should do when you are finished publishing and sharing your project with the world! It also briefly introduces the concept of enhancing the project.

Appendix, The Latest Features, covers the latest feature added to PowToon Studio, which is action buttons. New features seem to be added all the time, but this one is exciting and displays just how "dynamic" the product is!