How to make a stickman animation

Start to finish in about ten minutes, without installing anything. This is the route that gets you a finished clip first and teaches you the editor second — which is the right way round, because a finished clip is what makes you want to learn the editor.

1. Describe the scene before you touch anything

   Open the studio and type what you want to see into the description box, in ordinary sentences. Name the actions and say how long they last — a stickman walks in, waves, then sits down for 3 seconds. Press Generate from description and a timeline appears with one segment per beat. You now have something to edit, which is far easier than having something to invent.

2. Fix the timing before the poses

   Play it back once and change nothing except durations. Almost every first draft is too fast: an action that reads clearly in your head needs longer on screen than you think, because the viewer is also working out where to look. Stretch anything that felt rushed and cut anything that felt like waiting. Timing fixes more bad animation than posing does.

3. Pick the art style and background

   The style and background dropdowns are on the left and the preview updates immediately, so this is a decision you make by looking rather than by guessing. Seven styles ship with the tool — Bold Cartoon reads most clearly at small sizes, Neon Glow suits action, Hand-Drawn Sketch and Doodle Ghost suit something more personal.

4. Pose the moments that carry the scene

   Open the Pose Designer for the two or three frames that actually matter — the reaction, the impact, the moment someone notices something. Drag the joint handles, or use the sliders when you want an exact angle. Do not pose everything; a scene where two poses are excellent and the rest are adequate reads much better than one where everything is equally average.

5. Save the poses you will use again

   Any pose you build can be saved, and saved poses join your own action list. It is worth doing this the first time you make a move you like, because the second and third time you need it the work is already done. Over a few projects this quietly becomes a personal library.

6. Add dialogue only where silence is worse

   Each segment can carry dialogue, which renders as a speech bubble. Use it sparingly. Stick figures are read as movement, and a bubble stops the viewer to read instead — which is exactly what you want at a punchline and exactly what you do not want during an action.

7. Export the video

   Press Export Video and the animation downloads as a .webm file with no watermark on it. That format uploads directly to YouTube, Shorts, TikTok and Instagram without conversion. There is more on the export step if you need a different format or you are putting it into an edit.

Three things that go wrong the first time

Everything happens at once. A beat needs room. If two things happen in the same second the viewer sees neither, so give an action its own segment even when it feels slow while you are building it.

The figure never stops moving. Stillness is a tool. A held pose immediately before a fast action makes the fast action look twice as fast, and it costs you nothing but a short segment.

The camera is doing nothing while you do everything. A stick figure walking across an empty background is a hard scene to make interesting. Change the background at a beat, or start the character already mid-action, rather than animating the boring approach to the interesting part.

When to leave the rig behind

The jointed figure covers most of what you need, but not everything. Anything that is not a body — an object breaking, a change of expression, a visual joke — is often faster to draw than to rig around.

Flipbook mode is in the same tool for exactly this. It gives you frame-by-frame drawing with onion-skin guides showing the previous drawing underneath, so you can line motion up by eye. A few hand-drawn frames dropped into an otherwise posed animation is a completely normal way to work.

Questions

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