Hand-Painted GIFs: Launching my class & behind-the-scenes!
What goes into making a Skillshare class.
Today I have some news that I’m thrilled to finally be able to share: my Skillshare class is LIVE!
For about 6 months now I’ve been gradually putting together a class on making hand-painted GIF stickers like the ones I make for Instagram stories! It has been a huge learning curve (I knew absolutely nothing about filming, editing or talking in front of a camera before this), but I’m very proud of it and hope that you’ll enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed making it!
You can go through this special link to get a free month of Skillshare to watch my class plus the many other great classes on there!
I thought you might like to see a bit of the behind-the-scenes process of making the class, especially the perhaps surprising parts.
I filmed myself talking about nothing most days for several weeks.
I’m a bit shy and the idea of getting in front of the camera was TERRIFYING to me. I thought this would be my biggest hurdle, so before even beginning to learn the technical side of things, I started filming myself on my laptop, just talking about my day. It was like a video journal only to be seen by me and it helped a lot.
I actually hadn’t looked at them since, until just now when I went to take these screenshots. I watched back the one from when I was just about to film the first piece of footage for the class. I was really nervous. For 8 minutes I mumbled about how I didn’t know what I was doing, and then I said, “I’m just gonna do it”. So glad I did it!
Planning the class
I was lucky enough to be taken on by Skillshare’s ‘Teach Lab’ program, which meant I was assigned a mentor and they guided me throughout the process. One of the first things to do was to plan the class - both the script and the shot list.
It felt weird trying to visualise the shots with such precision before even knowing how to shoot them, but a solid plan did make things much easier once I got into filming, and it was something to come back to when I had a mess of unedited footage to wrestle into shape!
Filming Day
I filmed all of the talking head shots in one day. It was a big day! I filmed everything on my phone and kept having to re-record bits because it ran out of space and/or I forgot to plug my mic in! But despite this, it was actually a lot of fun playing director and presenter. Lots of coffee was drunk and lots of “umm”s were uttered, which brings us to the final stage…
Editing!
I thought the steepest learning curve would be the filming, but nope, it was definitely the editing.
This is what took me by far the most time - I was learning a new software (I used DaVinci Resolve, thoroughly recommend, it’s free as well!) and it took time to get used to. Compiling all that footage into something that makes sense is a tricky skill to master, and on top of that I did the voiceover kind of as I went along (would not recommend). But now that I’m on the other side, I’m just dreaming of making more videos! And GIFs, for that matter.
I hope that was interesting and maybe helpful if you’re thinking of making videos or classes yourself at some point!
Here’s that link again if you’d like to check out my class and get a free month of Skillshare. I really hope you’ll enjoy it!
Aside from my own class, I can also recommend Angela Mckay’s class on painting for pattern design and Marie-Noëlle Wurm’s class on colour mixing, both of which I learned a lot from. And if you want to get into making videos, Nathaniel Drew’s class on speaking on camera helped me get started!
I’ll be sending my next letter in 2022 so in the meantime, I wish you a very happy Christmas!