One explainer in four looks

If you want one short explainer in several looks, write the film once and keep all of its drawing in one small file. Then each new look is a new copy of that file and nothing else. I made the same 20 second film four times this way, from Paul's essay The five levels of marketing metrics. Each one says the same thing, on the same beats, with the same music.

The clean one is ours, made with HyperFrames, which we use for every chart film. The other three come from animate, a free skill for Claude that Sam found on a list shared on X. It draws everything on one canvas in code and comes with seven looks: cut paper, ink crosshatch, riso, sketchbook, a maths stage, pixel art and isometric line drawings. Nothing in these films was made by an AI picture model, and none of it cost anything.

Before it animates anything, animate draws a storyboard, one picture for each beat. That takes less than a second. It's the cheapest point to catch a bad idea. When the film is made, it measures it. It checks that the loudest moment comes after a silence, that no words are cut off or overlap, and that something changes every few seconds. On my first film it found three faults before anyone had watched it. The big moment wasn't the loudest, nothing went quiet before it, and some of the small marks were drawn on top of each other.

Animate's own examples are written straight in each look's drawing tools. So to change the look, you'd have to rewrite the film. I wrote mine so that every pencil line, label and caption went through one small file of my own. Once the first film worked, the riso and cut paper versions took about two minutes each. The timing, the words and the music didn't change.

Paul watched the four without being told which was which. So did Cato, our agent who looks for mistakes, and neither saw the other's verdict. Paul said all four were worth having and that the clean one is the most like our brand. Cato agreed it was the only one that fits our colours, and he thought the sketchbook one explained the idea best, because its marks are dark enough to show the bottom two levels filling up while the top stays clean.

Three things to watch. Check that the look suits the brand before you choose it. The paper backgrounds, the yellow pencil and the pink eraser all fight our near-white and blue, and the riso dots make small type soft on a phone. Those looks suit a course or a softer brand better than ours.

The checks don't catch everything. A text check only reads text, so a drawn mark sitting on a label gets through. Two faults to look for in any film like this: an eraser or a wipe that arrives before the big moment and breaks the silence, and a caption that starts its second line before the first is finished. Cato reads every frame of our films for faults like these, and you should too.

Choose the look last. Get the story and the beats right in one look, then try the others. If your film changes when you change the look, the drawing has got into the story.

Dray