I'm Tomasz Kaye I make animated pro-liberty propaganda shorts. I recently published my latest one, How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis. In this post I've tried to collate some information for people aspiring to make similar things, but perhaps not sure where to start. You'll find some useful search terms, some tips, and you'll get a 'high altitude' impression of alternative approaches you could take to making propaganda videos.

The almighty script

No matter how your final product looks, in my view the advice for writing a good script is the same. Get the script right and the rest is (relatively) easy. And conversely if you don't have a strong script, the rest is a waste of time. Be ready to spend longer than you thought you needed on the script. It's not sexy, making revisions is a grind but it's worth it, this is the foundation of your project.

Propaganda with a great script and lousy visuals can succeed. Propaganda with a lousy script and great visuals will fail.

Keep your script short. Read it through calmly and time yourself. If it's less than 2 minutes long, great! 5 minutes? Make it shorter if you can.

Use Google docs to write the script. Then when you have a first draft share it publicly allowing anyone to comment. Post on Steemit.com, asking for help. On reddit. On Facebook, on Twitter.

Don't be precious, be open to all feedback. Kill your darlings. Your target audience is (should be) non-anarchists. So wherever possible have non-anarchists review your script and give feedback.

• What were their questions?
• What were they confused about?
• What intrigued them?
• Did they have objections? (Could they be preempted?)
• How did it make them feel: Attacked? (bad) Confided in? Invited? (good).

Once your script is strong, Here are a non-exhaustive bunch of formats you could consider for your presentation, arranged from quick and easy to torturously time-consuming and difficult. One of these will be right for you.

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Your big old talking head

Perhaps the simplest option. Turn on your webcam press record and talk. Very easy to do. This approach is likely to work especially well for handsome, charismatic people with great voices. That's not me. It's statistically unlikely to be you either.

If you read from a script try to disguise that - memorise small chunks of the script and record those one after another. Redo takes, and edit together the (best) parts at the end, you can use some free editing software (iMovie or Blender both work fine). Edit out the stop-gaps and flubs. Be respectful of your viewers time. Keeping your script conversational if you can.

For all the options that follow, it makes sense to first have a good, edited version of your recorded script before moving on to the following stages - by that i mean a sound file that you can base the rest of the timing and visuals on.

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Slideshow with narration

The next simplest format to use, and very common on YouTube. We hear the narrators voice while watching a sequence of still images. Pictures are typically sourced from google. If you choose this route use google's advanced picture search options to find HD sized images.

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Use a story telling template system

The video Government Explained was created using a storytelling system now called Nawmal. Despite being released more recently, it has roughly twice the number of views as George Ought to Help. Well played Man Against The State!

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Animatics

An animatic is traditionally a kind of slideshow of storyboard images, used in the creation of an animation. The animatic is made after the storyboard is complete, but before work on animation proper begins. It's a way of testing timing and rhythm and correcting problems in those areas early. But you can use the animatic approach to delivering your message to great effect. An animatic can work with relatively few images, you certainly aren't aiming to create the illusion of movement (as you are in full animation). Try to use just enough images to be able to read the 'story' clearly. Sequence the images together in something like iMovie or Blender. There are many ways you could create an 'animatic' video quiet economically, here are a few alternatives:

Use Miniature Figures

Take photos of toys or miniature figures. Lego, Duplo, Star wars (the originals of course!). Arrange these figures to do the things necessary to illustrate your script. Get hold of a mini tripod for your camera or smartphone. Some household lamps might be handy too, to get consistent lighting. See The Brick Bible for an example of how this could look.

Use Sketches on Paper

Piece your animatic together from sketches you made on pieces of paper or digitally. Keep the drawing style simple. Use just two colours. If you're not great at drawing (or even if you are) using a deliberately naive drawing style can help. You don't want to be butting up against the limits of your technical ability if you can help it, so choose a style that will allow you to depict lots of situations comfortably and consistently.

Photograph Actors Enacting Key Moments in the Story

Enlist the help of friends to actually act out the scenes you'd like to depict. Photograph them.

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Make your mistakes early with a storyboard

If you do choose the animatic route, or either of the following two options, you'd be smart to create a storyboard first to avoid wasted effort when you have to scrap/redo scenes later. Look at boords.com or theplot.io (in development) for online storyboarding tools you could use.

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Motion design

Motion Design is a bit of a vague term, but motion design videos are characterised by little-or-no character animation (internal movement in an image of a person), lots of clever/fancy transitions (the way one image/scene gives way to the next, the way visual elements appear). They tend to feature typography and iconography usually as vector art (often created in Adobe Illustrator or similar). Motion design lends itself to clean lines, colour fields and graphically striking work, often with abstract spaces and hard geometry. A solid grasp of composition and the principle of movement easing is important to pulling off a strong motion design project. Here's a good introduction with lots of examples (French language with subtitles):

Adobe After Effects is the program to get to grips with if you're interested in doing motion design work. And is generally a very versatile and useful program to know. I use it one way or another in all my projects.

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Limited animation

Limited animation is the kind of animation you see in many made-for-TV shows: e.g. He-Man, Dexter's Laboratory, The Flintstones. In this approach, you try to create the illusion of movement with as little effort as you can! In practice that means re-using drawings as much as possible, and when using digital systems, using rigs, automatic tweening, and cutout animation. Most of the animation I do falls into this category, with elements of motion design in there too. Here's a decent primer.

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Full animation

Full animation (AKA cel animation, frame-by-frame animation) is what studios like Disney and Ghibli do. 24 different drawings for each second of screen time and an army of animators and assistants. An enormous cost in terms of time and effort to produce. Lone animators do use full animation sometimes, and may capitalise on the constraints that their lack of resources imposes on them. Disney's lines are very smooth silky and flowing, not at all jumpy. But a lone animator doing full animation may deliberately choose to emphasise 'line boil' - that's the jumpy wobbly quality of lines created when lines on subsequent drawings aren't as consistent as they could be. The result lends itself well to animations that suit a visual style with a kind of nervous kinetic energy.

Some software that can be used for either limited, or full animation:

• Toon Boom Harmony
• Anime Studio
• TVPaint (better for full animation than for limited animation)
• OpenToonz (free)
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Animate (previously Flash).

Here's a beautiful short from one of my favourite animators, Charles Huettner:

I was surprised to learn that he uses Photoshop to make his stuff. So does Alex Grigg. Here's a video explaining his workflow.

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How I can help you

If you're interested in making these kinds of production yourself, great! We need more people doing this. If you have a script you're working on and want extra eyes on it let me know. If you have a storyboard you want critical feedback on, let me know about that too. And all questions are welcome in the comments.

Some possible subjects for follow up posts

• Crowdfunding your propaganda
• Recording your narration
• Using sound effects and music
• Publishing your propaganda

Other stuff I posted that you might like
Hello! I'm Tomasz, the guy who made George Ought to Help
Less stressful, More respectful - RIE caregiving

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I'm Tomasz Kaye. I made George Ought To Help and other pro-liberty propaganda films. You can support my work on Patreon.com.