Whenever you are part of marketing, media, advertising, entertainment, gaming or any other industry that requires expressing a message, animated content has become essential in grabbing people’s attention. Giving you an answer on how to create an animation in 3 minutes is my purpose for this post.

Did you know that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and images are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text? Did you know that viewers are 85% more likely to make a purchase after watching an animation?

This is why I strongly believe that animation should be easy to learn and accessible to anyone. Everything around us is animated. We, as humans, express our  feelings and engage with others through motions. Motions connect people and create emotions and determine us to take decisions.

In this post I will explain you 3 essential tools that will allow you to easily create an animation in 3 minutes! You will see that it’s easier than you’ve ever thought and no animation skills or special talent is required for doing that.

All steps will be made with Marionette Studio animation editor. If you don’t have an account yet, make sure you create one here.

In the video below you will see how a picture is dragged from your computer into Marionette Studio editor. The image I used is taken from pixabay website where you can find tons of images free for personal and commercial use. If you want to use it, you can download it here.

Once te image is added into your animation scene you can scale, rotate and move it around the scene depending on your needs. Make sure you watch the video with this first step.

Next, we need to make a small setup to our image in order to deform it. The easiest way of doing that is to transform your picture into a mesh and make a rig for it. Of course,  the mesh can be customized according to your wish as shown in the 1-minute video below. Basically you’ll create some bones and you’ll make a skeleton for your object. As a personal advice just try to follow the natural shape of your object, as I am doing for this mushroom.

Once we have the skeleton in place we need to attach it to the mesh in order to finalize the setup. And it’s ready to be animated.

The last essential tool we need to understand is the animation timeline. This defines our animation. In the video below you will see how I chose my mushroom key poses in order to create the animation.

The animation timeline contains all important key frames of the animation. I’ve set only 3 in my example, but you can have as many as you want. One tip that I would like to share with you is to have the Autokey button enabled as Marionette Studio will record every movement in the animation timeline. So that would save a lot of time when defining your main animation poses. Of course, you can copy, paste, delete and edit your keyframes for a quicker refinement.