Around this time of year, we often get asked for Remembrance Day content for schools to add to their digital signage. While we could make something and pop it in the Content Catalogue (which we have done here), it’s also an excellent idea for you to try and make something more appropriate for your local setting.
Making your own content means you can include information more personal to your school, such as your commemoration assembly, a note from a grandparent with memories or images and artwork students have produced.
Making your own Remembrance Day signage content
Here’s a guide to how we made our short content item using Canva and an image from the Unsplash photo library.
The poppy is the iconic image for Remembrance Day, so heading to Unsplash, we typed in Poppy to see what images were available. Unsplash has over 6 million high-resolution images and all available free to use as long as you attribute the creator. Here at TrilbyTV, we make use of Unsplash in some of our Smart Content, allowing you to search and add images to Polls and Countdowns.
We found an image with a nice focus point on a single poppy. The image represents the strength in the individual, but also captures the background of red to signify the loss. This framing will give us some space to add text so it makes a good background.
We can now save this image and also make a note of the attribution text “Photo by Tschernjawski Sergej on Unsplash”
Using Canva to add text
Canva (free for education) has some great text animation effects and the ability to save as Video which is perfect for using on digital signage screens.
We start by making a new Slideshow in 16:9 format, then uploading the poppy image.
The Poppy image is placed on the page and then zoom it up to fill the screen, while also moving it to the left to leave room for the text.
Then add some text in this case “Lest we forget” and also our attribution to the Unsplash creator.
With the ‘Lest we forget’ text selected, we click Animation and choose an appropriate effect.
As this is a presentation we can click Present to view what we have made, then make adjustments to the animation if needed.
Save from Canva as video
Before we save the video we made sure the content was long enough. Click on Duration and drag the slide out to around 12 seconds.
Then we can click Share and Download choosing MP4 Video as the file type before clicking Download. Finally, we upload our video to TrilbyTV to share as with any other content. We hope this brief guide has been useful and we look forward to seeing some of your Remembrance Day content on screens. If you have a piece of content you are really proud of, let us know and we will be happy to share it on our social media.