Make Documentary Style Timelines in Canva

Today we're going to build a comprehensive timeline animation inspired by Johnny Harris style documentaries. I'll walk you through it step by step, from the initial design all the way to the final animation and transition sequence, all inside Canva. And if you want the finished timeline as a fully templatized Canva template, you can download it from my Patreon. Let's get straight into it. Open Canva and create a new design. I'm using the 16 by 9 video crop, but you can try and follow along in any crop that suits your project. Let's first get to building the timeline path. Set the background color of the page to dark gray and then press L on your keyboard to create a line shape. Under the line type drop-down, change the line type to elbowed. This allows us to create an elbowed path with our existing line. When you're drawing your path, just make sure that after you draw one angle, you grab this handle and pull it in one direction. This will help create the elbow so it can continue in the next direction. Keep doing this until you've created something like that, which resembles a Pac-Man track. Change the stroke style to dashed. Press C on your keyboard to create a circle shape. Change it to a color of your choice and place the first one over the very start point of the timeline path. Now press Alt on your keyboard to create a duplicate and drag the next dot to the next elbow angle. It's important to make sure that all of these circle markers are in line with each other, either vertically or horizontally. This ensures that everything lines up nicely as we go through the animations later. Now we're ready to start adding movement to our timeline path. Open a new page and first of all, use the guidelines to find the exact center point on the canvas by dragging them roughly to the center until they snap into position. You'll see the color change on the line when this happens. Place a copy of the timeline path on the page. Enlarge it so we only see the first marker and the line on the canvas. Now reposition the marker so the center of it is perfectly aligned with the center of the canvas, like this. Duplicate the page. Hold Shift to ensure that the path stays in perfect vertical alignment. Drag the path up until we can center the next marker in the same position. Now you can see why it was so important to ensure that all of the dots are in vertical and horizontal alignment as we move along the path. Now duplicate the page again and drag the timeline horizontally until we reach the next point on the path. Continue this process until we get to the final point on the timeline path. Set each page to 10 seconds in length. Then place a match and move transition between each scene with a 1 second duration. Let's have a quick preview of how it's looking so far. Nice. Now we can start designing the elements on each page. Go back to page 1. Press T on your keyboard and type out the first year time marker for this section. In this case, it's 2003. Set this font to something chunky, like Impact. Give it a color of your choice. I am going to match it with the marker circle color. Then open the effects panel and give it a neon effect at the lowest intensity. Now we can create the subheading and type it out as before. For this one, you can change the font to a serif font for a good match to Impact. Something like Times New Roman. Change the color to white and you can also give this a neon effect at 50% intensity. You might find this slightly overpowering, so what I have done is reduce the transparency to around 80% just to take away that overbearing glare. Press L on your keyboard to create a line shape. Resize it like so and send it to the back of the composition. Make a duplicate. Rotate it by 90 degrees and place it here. Now let's add a little bit of a title animation in the top right to fill this negative space. Open the Apps section and search for the Motion Text app. Here you simply type in your content into the box and change the parameters to your liking, or you can choose a preset. I have chosen a preset and updated the settings here. The font I have chosen is Nanum Brush. Set the animation loop to Bounce, Speed 2, and set the animation fill to Gradient Sweep. Then change the colors in the Color Palette section to suit your theme. Next, let's create our icon section. Press C on your keyboard to create a circle shape and set the background color to the same as the canvas. Give it a 7-pixel dashed border and change the stroke color to one that suits your theme. Let's add a subtle glow behind this badge. Open the Elements tab and search for Circle Glow. Find one similar to this and place it behind the badge, then update the color to suit your theme. Find some icons to suit your project. You can either select some from the Canva Elements library or ask ChatGPT to generate ones more suited to your needs, which is what I have done. Place the icon in the center of the badge like so. And now we are ready to start adding a little bit of animation. Before we move on to transitioning to the next scene, select the first handle line and give it a wipe animation from right to left. Then select the preceding line and give it a wipe animation in the opposite direction. Give the year title an ascend animation, making sure both are selected, the writing style is set to Word, and the direction is set to Up. You can do the same for the subheading, give it a baseline animation, making sure both are selected, and the direction is set to Up. Give the icon and baselines an animation in the opposite direction. Select the icon badge and give it a baseline animation. You can also move down to the Add-on Effects section and set it to Rotate. This will give it a constant rotation as it moves through the transitions and animations. Give the circle glow a fade animation. You can also add a subtle flicker effect to give the scene a bit more life. And finally, select the timeline path group and give it a baseline animation, making sure On Enter is selected. You can slow the speed slightly. This is the only time we will give this element an animation, as the rest will be handled by the match and move transition. OK, now it's time to start adjusting the timings of each element. Right-click on this line and select Show Timing. Set the line to start animating just after the timeline animation has completed. Now select the next line and set that one to line up with the animation of the previous line. Continue through each element and do the same, making sure that all of the animation timings are in sequence with each other and that there are no significant gaps. If there are large gaps in the timeline or in the animation sequence, the scene will feel slow. Let's have a quick preview of what the opening scene looks like. Looking good. What we need to do now is adjust the end animations to ensure they don't spill into the transition. This makes the transition cleaner as we only want to focus on the movement of the timeline path. Much better. Now select all of the elements, right-click, copy, move to the next page, and paste them. They should all line up in the same sequence as before. You will need to reposition them on each page based on the angle of the elbow in the timeline path. Once you've done that, you can simply change the content and move on to the next page. Continue this process for each page until we reach the end. You can add more design or content to pages that suit your timeline, just make sure not to make things too cluttered. Your narration should do most of the heavy lifting. Now let's add a very Johnny Harris-style backing track to the composition. Open the audio section and look for a track called Sunshine Rain by Brendan Mueller. This arpeggiated synthesizer track feels very reminiscent of a Johnny Harris-style video. The subtle progression works really well to support the pacing of a well-told story. If you'd like a fully sound-designed, templatized version of this composition, you can download it from my Patreon. If you'd like to try the sound design yourself, you can watch this video where I dive deep into how I use the Canva audio library to get the best possible sound design for my videos. Until next time!