Whiteboard animation: how to zoom and draw a motion?

Question

I want to make a video that will mix a whiteboard drawing animation in the style of RSA Animate videos (so speeded-up drawings) and stop-motion. I think I'm almost ready to start but I still have two questions I can't figure out an answer:

• when I want to make a drawing move in stop-motion, do I have to erase it and draw it again a little bit on the right, then erase it and draw it again and again? In some videos like this one

  , the motion is very fluid, how do I know how many drawings I have to make to get a fluid motion like this?

• What's the best way to move the field of the camera to draw in different areas of the whiteboard, like what you see here

  ? If I manually move my camera I feel like the transition will not be very smooth, but if I do it by software I could have problems in terms of resolution?

Answer 1

Erase and redraw

If you play the first video frame by frame (by pausing the video and pressing the left or right key) you see that moving objects are erased and redrawn again and again. The line properties (thickness, straightness) change a little bit between frames, hinting that the line is redrawn each time (best seen at 0:45).

Camera motion

About the 2nd video you're correct that manually moving your camera will be not so smooth. If you have a jib you could achieve much smoother motion. However, I don't think they used that in this video. The biggest output size is 720p meaning that the frame has a size of 1280x720 pixels. If you have a camera that can film 1920x1080 pixels you have quite some room left in which you can crop and move the frame.

Answer 2

You could even shoot way higher res than 1920x1080 if you put the camera in stills mode and shoot timelapse, say 5fps, which is what I'd expect this playback speed it (6 times quicker than realtime, at 30fps, although you could easily playback at 24fps too)... Things to watch out for here would be lens distortion, ie a reasonably wide lens would produce bending at the edges, so you would want to undistort the pictures before doing the post pan & tilt.

Answer 3

Well!! I am surprised no one talked about VideoScribe and PowToon. See my answer here.

To give erasing effect you need to be more smarter in VideoScriber. For this;

1. takes some blank scribelout svgs
2. add it aanother picture in your picture.
3. change hand style. pick some hand which is having eraser in hand.
4. that's all