The Christmas break is one of those few times you get to step away from urgent things. Why not take a little of that time to finally learn something new? We’ve assembled a list of seven great ways to add new filmmaking skills to your wheelhouse. And in customary moviola.com style, most of the courses will get you ramped up in under 30 minutes.

So spend your post-turkey coma moments learning something new!

1 Learn Photoshop in 30 minutes

Photoshop is the swiss army knife of image editing. Many of us have learned enough to do a couple of things in there, but have no idea how to go deeper. In 30 minutes we’ll cover off the essential elements of image processing in Photoshop. Heck, you could fit in Photoshop training and your cosy nap this afternoon.

2 Write it right: screenwriting structure and formatting

We’re extremely proud of our screenwriting course, which distills the essentials of Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat” and Robert McKee’s “Story” into a series of short seven-ish minute videos. They’ll help you craft your ideas into a story someone might actually sit through. Then use our 15-minute survival guide on Fade In to learn professional screenwriting. (Fade In is a free-to-use dedicated screenwriting app (the trial is not time limited, is fully functional, and export-ready.)

3 Learn 3D Animation

3D animation is one of those things that everyone wants to get around to learning, but the task seems so monumental that a lot of us get overwhelmed before we start. Never fear: between moviola.com’s 3D fundamentals series and our survival guides to Blender 3D, Maya, and Houdini, you’ll be up and rendering beautiful animations in a day or two. (Note: unless you want to invest serious cash in software rentals, go with the open-source Blender 3D survival guide as your launching point.)

4 Replace creep Uncle Gary with Brad Pitt using our Face Replacement tutorial.

Not every holiday reunion is a welcome one. Erase those bad memories and increase your status by substituting your favorite person into your holiday footage.

5 Stop shooting video and start framing cinema

Pointing a camera and pressing record is documentation, not filmmaking. Learn how the framing of an image informs meaning and subtext (and just plain makes things look prettier) with our camera framing series.

6 Autorotoscope your way to carpal tunnel-free hands

Rotoscoping is tedious, time-consuming, and necessary. But for a lot of tasks rough, guide roto is all that’s required. Stop spending unnecessary hours on temp roto when robots can do it for you, using our handy ML-based autorotoscoping tool. You’ll also learn a little Python on the way.

7 Become a colorist

Make 2020 the year you add “Colorist” to your résumé with our color theory course and our 20 minute crash course in color correction using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve.

As with all the content at moviola.com, these courses are completely free and designed to suck up as little of your vacation time as possible. So when you run out of Hallmark Christmas movies to watch, why not binge watch something that’ll actually make a difference to your life?