Create a Digital Narrative with Adobe Express

Adobe Express is an online and mobile design app for creating graphics, videos, and web pages. The app follows a “freemium” model where you can access certain basic features for no cost, although logging in with your Smith credentials will provide you the premium, upgraded version.

Although you can use Adobe Express for a variety of content creation needs, it serves as a convenient tool for creating short videos and digital narratives. The process for creating one of these videos with Adobe Express is very similar to building a narrated slideshow, where functionally you can create slides with any kind of media content (photos, videos, text, etc.) and then record your voice onto each slide.

When you export the final product as a video, Adobe Express will stitch together those narrated slides into a complete MP4 video file, which can then be submitted or embedded wherever needed.

Step 1. Go To Adobe Express

Visit express.adobe.com and log in with your Smith email (including the @smith.edu). When prompted, complete your login with your Smith username and password.

Step 2. Start a new blank video project

Most digital narratives or short videos should be a 16:9 ratio at 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high. You can start a canvas at these dimensions multiple different ways from the home screen of Adobe Express, but I recommend the following:

Select the Create new “+” button from the upper lefthand side of the home screen, and then choose Video from the menu (this will be the “landscape” 1920px by 1080px option that we want).

Step 3. Start creating your slides

Rename your project something different than the default title in the upper lefthand corner of the screen. Note that Adobe Express will save your project automatically as you work.

Choose the “Start from scratch” option on the bottom of the screen, if prompted.

Then you should see a timeline appear as below:

To add more slides (what Adobe Express refers to as “scenes“), you can choose the “+” button after the first slide/scene, and select “Add blank scene“.

These slides/scenes will have a default duration of 5 seconds, which is how long they will stay on screen. You can extend a slide or make it shorter by clicking and dragging in/out the edges of the slide on the timeline.

Step 4. Work from a detailed and well-organized script

At this stage of the project, it is very useful to work from a script where you have clearly outlined your narration and separated which lines will be recorded on each slide of your video. This is especially helpful if you have to translate your narration and place both versions of each line on the screen as subtitles.

As an example, I have created an example two-column script to clearly plan out my lines and identify what visual content I want to provide on each slide, including the translated subtitle text.

If you would like to use a two-column script to plan your own video, you can find the link to our template here. When it opens in Google Docs, go to File → Make a copy and save it to your own Drive.

Step 5. Add text/image/video content to each slide

Look to the toolbar on the left-side of the page to add different types of content, including Text and Media.

Text

The Text tool will allow you to browse templated text options, or choose Add your text to create a text box on the page for you to start adding text from scratch.

Once you have a text box on the page, you can select that text box to edit it and change its properties. With the text box actively selected, the left-side menu will now offer you related text-editing options.

You may need to change the formatting of subtitle text to ensure that it is readable over the background. Out of the text menu, you can select Effects to change text color, add a drop shadow, or add a shape behind the text.

Once you have settled on a style for your text, whether titles or subtitles, I recommend you copy and paste the text boxes from slide to new slide, editing each one for content only, to avoid having to re-create the style choices every time.

Media

The Media tool can be found under the “+ Add Content” option in the toolbar. There, you can choose between the Photos, Videos, and Audio tabs, which will present libraries of Adobe stock material, as well as an Upload from device option to import your own saved files.

Once you upload a media file or select an item from the stock library, it will populate on the slide.

You can then edit/adjust the properties of each file if you first select the item on the slide. Notice that the left-side menu will update with the related options for that item, while it is actively selected, just like a Text item:

As you add content to your slide, the layers panel to the right side will become useful if you have to re-order or change the stack of the items on your slide. To change the order, click and drag a layer in the panel to the top or bottom of another layer in the panel.

Step 6. Record narration on each slide

Under the Media tool’s Audio tab, there is an option to Record voiceover, which is the easiest way to add narration to your video.

Importantly, when you first select Record voiceover, most browsers will ask for permission to access the microphone on your computer. Choose Allow to grant access and continue.

On each slide, record your section of lines for that slide, starting and stopping the recording each time, resulting in something that looks like the following project with an audio recording attached to each slide:

These audio recordings can be moved around on the timeline and trimmed, much like the slides themselves.

Step 7. Additional editing tips and tricks

Editing on the Timeline

As you add slides and content to the timeline, you will be able to select those components on the timeline to adjust both their duration and order.

Most items can be selected, dragged, and dropped to reposition their order on the timeline, including the scenes themselves.

Timeline Controls

Use the playhead to scrub back and forth through the scenes on your timeline.

Zoom in or out of the timeline as needed with the magnifying slider in the lower righthand corner of the screen.

Use the play button to preview your assembled video as you work.

Layer Timing

If you toggle on Show layer timing at the bottom of the timeline, you can select an item on that slide and adjust its timing on screen during the duration of that particular slide.

For example, the text object “I’m Meridith“, as below, appears by default for the entire duration of the first scene. With layer timing on, I can adjust both how long and when exactly it appears in that scene to instead have it pop-up halfway through.

The change would look something like this:

As long as you have layer timing toggled on, and a text/image/video item actively selected on a particular scene, you will be able to trim and re-position that item on the timeline.

Animation

Customize the flow of your video by adding animations to the elements on each scene. To add an animation, select a text, image, or video item within a scene, and use the contextual menu to navigate to the Animation options.

You can set an animation for any object in three different ways: first, as it enters the scene (In), then as it appears through the duration of the scene (Loop), and finally, how it exits the scene (Out).

You can choose to add an animation in just one of these ways (In, Loop, and Out), or two of them, or all three, based on the overall impact you want. In addition, you can adjust the properties of each animation by opening the Settings on a selected animation from the menu.

Step 8. Export your finished video

When you are ready to export your project, choose the Download option in the upper righthand corner and select MP4 as the the File format.