Transcription
If your videos sometimes feel a little flat, like the content is good, but something just isn't popping, it's often the motion graphics or the lack of them. We've all become really used to the subtle animated elements that you see on well-produced YouTube videos, online courses, even news. The branded intro slides, the name tags, the bold text and pops up to reinforce what someone saying. They all separate a video that looks professional and well-produced from one that just looks okay.
And the really good news is that you can actually build those inside Canva really easily. Today we're going to cover just three of really commonly used motion graphic techniques: an animated top and tail, an animated lower third, and a kinetic text call out. All of it in Canva, all reusable, so that you can use it for any videos that you make going forward.
The top and tail is your animated intro slide at the start of your video, and your branded outro at the end. They frame your content, they introduce your brand, and they tell people what to do when the video finishes. They take about ten minutes to set up once, and then you can reuse them for every video to build consistency.
So let's start with that intro slide. I'm going to use a YouTube format here, but this works just as well for vertical video if that's what you use the most. Now obviously we can design from scratch, but we are not all videographers or animators. So honestly, the quickest way to get started is to make use of Canva's real power, which is its templates library. So over in the templates tab, I'm first going to filter by using the "Explore Templates" shortcut here to Landscape video. Then I'm going to just type in something like "YouTube intro," "welcome intro," "animation intro," "intro video." You can just see what comes for you. And obviously you can filter by size and style and language. There are loads of options and plenty of them already have really slick animations built in.
Now here's what I'd suggest when you're browsing these: don't just look for something that already matches your brand visual look and feel. Look for something with a layout and animations that you really like. The structure and motion are actually the hard bit to create. Making it yours is the easy bit with the brand kit. One thing to note is that some of the videos do rely on specific video backgrounds or colors that you can't change for certain graphics, so you may have to look at a couple to see what works for you and what you can and cannot change. I found this one because I like the graphic look of it, and also I like the animations.
Now let's brand it. The first thing I would do is go to my brand on the left-hand side, in my brand kit, where I've got my primary color palette. I'm just going to click shuffle and you'll see it immediately starts to apply our brand colors to this design. Of course, you can always adjust things individually, so find one that fits mostly, and then you can just click on each element, go to the colors, and actually use your primary palette there to set the colors that you want.
Next thing I would suggest is to swap in any brand images or footage or anything like that into the placeholders. I'm going to go to my brand photos and just drag in a few photos. Next, I'm going to type in the actual text that I want in this heading and subheading. And of course, don't forget to change if it has your domain or anything like that on the template. I type in the content first so that that way I can see how the number of words or letters will affect the sizing that I need to apply. When I put my own brand fonts.
Next, I'm going to click on these text elements, and I'm going to replace it with the brand fonts that I use. Then I can just adjust any kind of spacing on these to make sure that they work for my brand and of course are clear and legible. And now, because I started with a good template with animations included, all I have to do is now play through and tweak any of the timings. Of course, don't forget that you can click on the zoom page icon at the bottom right here, so that you can zoom in on the timeline, which allows you to adjust things a little more carefully, and you can click and drag them to adjust the timing so that it works for you. I would keep the intro slide to about 3 or 4 seconds. Once everything is animated, and people don't really want to wait around at the beginning of your video to get to the good stuff. So get them there quickly.
Now, the last thing I want to do here is to tidy up my timeline. So if I expand the timeline at the bottom here, you can see that there are a lot of layers or a lot of elements to this. And one of the easiest ways to keep things in control is that once you've actually set your timings, select all of those layers, then just either right-click and choose "Group" or use the Command or Control G shortcut to form a group with those elements. And that way you'll see you just have one element in there, and it doesn't adjust the timing or anything like that. That all still works for you. And if you want to expand it, you just click on this little arrow expansion sign and it will open them all up for you to work on individual layers, make any changes that you want to, and then you can just click to close that group whenever you need to. And this is especially important if you're going to add anything else into the video. You want to keep this timeline as clean as possible.
Now after the intro, we would obviously add in our video. So I'm going to click on here and go to my uploads. I'm just going to drop in this clip which is taken from my Canva OS course. So we go from this intro to the video. Now you'll see if I play through, that feels like a really jarring change from one to the other. So all I'm going to do is click between the two of them, add a transition, and I tend to prefer using just something like a dissolve. And that just means that there is a nice subtle change between first intro elements going into our video or our talking head.
The next thing we're going to do is to add in our outro or our end card. So what I'm going to do first of all is just add a blank section. And again, it's about five seconds. Going to change the background of that to black. Then what I'm going to do is to bring in one of my brand images. Now of course, if you've got footage that you want to use, all the better because it adds a little bit to that motion. But I'm just going to click and drag one of my brand images onto the page. And I click and drag so that it adds it to page, rather than replacing it in that base layer of the timeline. Now you'll see because the playhead was at the end here, it's put it where the playhead was. I'm just going to drag it back to align with the video or the background that's there.
Next, I'm going to take the transparency down so that everything else on top of it will really stand out. Then all I'm going to do is add a text box and put in "Thanks for watching." Change the color to a white so that it really pops at the top and make it quite large. I'm going to duplicate that and make it much smaller and put it at the bottom. Also centered. And that's just going to be for my URL. Then I'm going to go to my logos on the left-hand side, and I'm going to click and drag one of my logos onto the canvas as well. Now these three, I'm just going to move along so that they come in just after the image comes in, and they disappear at the end along with it.
Now I'm just going to resize it, animate these. For the logo, I'm going to add a succession animation because it has this kind of zoom and blur. The text at the top, I'm just going to add a very simple pan so that it comes across really nicely at the end. And at the bottom, I'm going to add a typewriter animation to that text, so that it just creates a little interest for the domain. So now when we exit our video, we go into something that has a "Thanks for watching" and a domain name and some branding. And of course, if you really wanted to, what you could do is go to elements and type for something like "mouse icon," and then you could again bring in a little icon, resize so that it looks like it's clicking on your domain to encourage action. And for that I would probably just use something like a pop animation, and I'm going to then adjust the timing on that so that it only appears once the text for the domain name has completed coming in. Then I'm just going to tweak the timing so that everything lines up at the end, that it's neat and tidy. And again, of course, when I'm finished with it, I can just click on all of those elements and I can group them.
And the last thing is to put the transition between your video and your end card or your outro. Again, I'm just going to use a little dissolve. That way once your video is finished, you go from your video gently into your outro. Neat and tidy, and you have some branding. Plus it prompts people to take action. And really, that's it. A polished branded opening and a closing that you can slot in front of and behind of every video that you make going forward. You know I love a good carousel and with good reason. They still get extremely good engagement. And they're also good for teaching. It is genuinely one of the highest leverage things you can do for your video presence, because it creates consistency, and it means that you can do it quickly and easily for every video.
Okay, so now we move on to the lower thirds. So if you ever watched a YouTube tutorial or a documentary or news program and you see someone's name and title appear at the bottom corner, usually the bottom left of the screen for a few seconds, that's what's called a lower third, because it appears in the lower third of the screen, and it's one of the most effective motion graphic elements that you can add to things like talking head videos.
So here I have my existing video and I want to add a lower third. The first thing I'm going to do is to just add a frame. So I'm going to go to elements. I'm going to go to frames, then add in a circular frame, resize it a little and just move it over a bit to the left. Then I'm going to drop in my headshot. Now you can of course drop in your logo if you wanted to, but I've decided I'm going to use a photo for this, so we will just click and drag that in. The next thing I'm going to do is to add a line around it. Just a very thin white line, just to give it a bit of definition because the background is a bit darker.
Now ideally we want a lower third to start about five seconds into a video. So the first thing I'm going to do is on my timeline, just drag this to about five seconds in and put my playhead there so that other elements that I put on the timeline will appear there. For the animation, for this circle, I'm going to choose that succession animation again, which gives it that soft blur and zoom, so that it just comes in nice and gently.
Now I'm going to add a rectangle and I'm going to resize it so it's long and thin. And I'm also going to round the corners to give it this kind of pill shape. And then I am going to duplicate that and make the second one smaller and at the bottom. For the big one, I'm going to make that a bit lighter because I wanted to stand out even more. And this one I'm going to leave in this gold color. I'm going to make sure that the gold one, the little one, is slightly overlapping the other one, just so that we have this nice kind of effect of depth. And then what I'm going to do is just move them over so that they also overlap the circle. And this is essentially the basic building blocks of our lower third.
Now I'm going to add a text box and put in my name. And I'm going to place it over the larger box and resize it to fit. Then just duplicate that. And I'm going to put in my title. I'm going to resize that text box to fit into that lower placeholder that we've got. And I'm going to adjust the letter spacing on that and change the color to white because the background is a little darker in that particular box.
Now for the rectangles, I'm going to click on those and I'm going to go to animate. And I'm just going to choose a pan animation. But the second rectangle, the one at the bottom, I'm actually going to change the direction of the pan so that it goes in the opposite direction to the big one. For the main text, with my name and my pronouns, I'm also going to use pan on that one so that it comes in with the background shape behind. For the text in the lower shape, I'm actually going to use a different animation. And I'm going to just use typewriter just to bring a little bit of interest into that.
Now I just want to adjust the timings by clicking and dragging the handles on the left and right of these. So first of all, I want the circle to appear. And just as it's appearing fully, the first rectangle comes into play. The other rectangle with the title is going to come a little later. So I'll move those for now. And then I want the name to pan just after that shape comes in, just so that we've got a slightly staggered animation, which will add a little bit of interest to it. And there you'll see you can see the text coming in before the shape now. So we're just going to move the text down a little later in the timeline so that as the shape becomes fully visible, the text starts to animate.
If you wanted to, you could add some kind of animated element as well to draw attention to it. So for example, if I go back and I just, for example, search for "circle," go to graphics, and then I filter by those that are animated, I may find something that I think works really well just to go around that circle. So if I use the first one, I can actually recolor it, which is great. Then I can resize it to sit just below or just within that circle image that we put there. And then I want to make sure that in terms of position, it goes behind the naming. So there you go, again, it just gives a little bit of depth. So now in the timeline, I'm just going to drag that along to make sure that it also appears just when that circle does. And I will also use succession and slow so that they come in almost together.
Now the last thing that we need to do really, is to just make sure that they all exit at the same time. So you can drag them along, leave them on for a few seconds, then just click and drag the right handles so that they all connect at around the same time. One thing I do like to do is on animations that allow me to reverse the exit animation. I choose to do that, and basically it just adds a nice little bit of polish because they come in in one direction and they exit in the other, which I think gives it a really nice feel. So now let's play back and we can just check if we're happy with those timings.
Now as before, I'm going to select all of these layers. I am then going to group them. So it's just nice and neat in the timeline. And we can see as it comes in, the animations are still there and it looks really good. Then I'm going to resize it because we tend to want to have these quite subtle in the bottom left corner. Then the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to audio. I'm going to search for "transition." And then I'm going to listen through to find a really subtle transition sound, like a whoosh sound. And I'm going to drag that in so that it makes that sound just as the circle starts appearing. And I'm going to take down the volume so that it's only just audible. Then we have a really nice effect for our lower thirds as it comes on. It makes a noise. And then you can see the name and title with an image or logo in there.
You know I love a good carousel and with good reason. They still get extremely good engagement. And they're also good for teaching and also storytelling. Plus, they give you multiple chances to show up in someone's feed with a single post, at least on Instagram. And so, from a small business point of view, in terms of time and effort, that's a really good return for one piece of content. And once you have a process in place, carousels become surprisingly quick to create and they are so effective for things like Reels. And it can really elevate a video from just having captions to using text as a feature, and to help to reinforce what you're trying to communicate.
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Okay, so back to our motion graphics. These graphics are actually my favorites, and it's a technique that I see pretty much on every high-performing video in 2026. And they're kind of kinetic text call-outs or overlays. And here's what I mean: while you are talking, at key moments in your video, a short, punchy text element animates onto the screen to reinforce what you're saying. So here I have a video also from the Canva course. And along this video, in certain places, I want to use this kinetic text to draw attention to certain ideas or concepts.
All we're going to do really is to add in a few text boxes. Ideally 3 to 5 words maximum because we want them to make a real impact. It's not to provide lots and lots of info. We're going to play with size and placement as we go. First, of course, we're going to listen through. We're just going to find those places where we want to highlight some of these words. Once we get to that space, just either pause your video or drag your playhead to where that is, then just hit T on your keyboard to add in a text box. You may need to play around with this a little bit, so that the text box happens exactly as you say those words. Of course, you can use the zoom in on the thumbnails to just zoom in close enough that you can refine this with more granular control to make sure that it comes in exactly where you want.
Now, as with anything else, we're going to format the text. So the phrase that I want to highlight in this video is where I say "teaching" and also "storytelling." And so I'm going to make this into three boxes. I'm going to split that text across the three. And now I'm going to format this text. So I'm just going to highlight this and make it a bit larger first of all. And let's make it an orange-yellow color that is very popular at the moment on videos. Now I'm just going to play around with sizing and placement essentially. So we could have them coming in and staggered a little. You could have some of them much larger. You could play around with these in any way that you want. You could even add different formats if that works for you. So for example, if I just italicize, you'll see that it gives us a very different feel.
The next thing that you're going to do is just listen through and adjust each of these boxes so that they come in when you say those specific words. So I say "teaching," also says "storytelling," I want to add that text box. Now this takes a little bit of playing around so that you create the biggest impact with it. Now you could just leave it without any transition or animation on it. But of course, if you want to add even more impact, you could also add some kind of animations. Generally for animations, I would keep it fairly simple. Things like merge work really well. Typewriter can be a little slow, but experiment with what works for you, because if you have something that's very high energy and you want a lot of excitement, you could even use something like a stomp effect, which really makes it impact and really kind of takes its place on the screen. Personally, I use really simple things like blur. I just think that they work really well for the way that I present and my kind of content.
Now, the truth is, sometimes the playing around with the timing is a little fiddly, but it's just one of those things you have to just get used to. Listening through over and over so that you can see if it works for you and how it works. The other thing is to make sure that all of these disappear at the same time, so that really the interest is when it starts, they just quietly disappear once they have actually made their point.
You know I love a good carousel and with good reason. They still get extremely good engagement. And they're also good for teaching and also storytelling. Plus, they give you multiple chances to show up in someone's feed with a single post, at least on Instagram. And so, from a small business point of view, in terms of time and effort, that's a really good return for one piece of content. And once you have a process in place, carousels become surprisingly quick to create. And they are so effective for things like Reels, and it can really elevate a video from just having captions to using text as a feature, and to help to reinforce what you're trying to communicate. And honestly, that's as simple as it is.
Three motion graphic techniques that will make your videos look significantly more professional without needing any specialist software or any big production budget. You've got your animated top and tail to frame every video with your brand. Your lower third to introduce yourself and add visual interest to your talking head content. And your kinetic text call-out to keep people engaged and to drive your key messages home. The beauty of all of this is that once they're built, they're easy to recreate or to duplicate and use essentially as a template, and then just replace the video in the middle. You've got a reusable production pack for every video that you create.
If you found this helpful, please do subscribe. Apparently, half the people who watch my videos aren't subscribers yet, and I would genuinely love your support so that I can grow this channel and keep making content like this for you. That's it for today folks. Have a fabulous week and I will see you soon, you lovely people. The.