Team member, Ellie, explains how she used Near-Life and Canva to make a fun, interactive guide to what to cook for dinner, which can be embedded on a website or shared directly.
I recently made an interactive video to help users decide what to cook for dinner depending on their skill level, price point and other factors. In this blog, I’ll explain how I made it using Near-Life and Canva.
1. Make a storyboard
First, I wrote a list of potential meals and thought about how to split them into different categories. Once I had decided where each meal would fit, I made a storyboard on Near-Life to map out the video. Below is a timelapse of the storyboarding process. It took 7 minutes 47 seconds in real-time to make. Bear in mind that a storyboard is not in stone, and you can always make changes to the layout later. I use it mostly as a guide and to help me understand what media I will need.
2. Design with Canva
Next, I went onto Canva to start designing. If you’re not an expert with the design aspect or perhaps are short on time, you can use one of Canva’s templates for your video. Type in the topic and pick the style that you like the most. You can customise it from there.
I often choose to make my interactive videos using video clips, but I decided to keep it simple this time and use still slides. However, you could download your pages as videos if you would rather. Canva has a huge number of video resources under ‘elements’, as well as animated graphics that can bring your interactive video to life.
3. Construct on Near-Life
After each scene was made, I downloaded them all from Canva and uploaded the media to Near-Life. From here, it’s easy to drag and drop each scene into the corresponding node. Naming your nodes and your media appropriately makes this easier.
With all the media in the right spot, I then went in to refine the interactions to suit the content. This involved replacing button options with hotspots – this allows the user to click on an area of the screen to give an answer/interact with the scenario.
Finally, with all the interactions in place I played through it to make sure there were no problems and shared with the team for feedback.
Want to create your own interactive videos?
Click here to learn more about how Canva and Near-Life work well together, or book a demo to speak with one of our team.