A Two Layered Approach for Animation Sketching

In this paper, we present an animation sketching system using a two layered approach. Animation sketching is a popular technique to create informal animations but it is often suffered by the low-quality output due to a trade-off between convenience and complexity. Our aim is to support sketching practical animation scenes easily and fast while not complicating the simple sketching interface. The key idea is to combine two conceptual stop motion layers, a whiteboard and cutout animation layer, in a seamless interface. As a background, the whiteboard animation layer handles stroke-oriented objects, while the cutout animation layer takes charge of transform-oriented objects. We found that this approach enables users to express more complicated animation fast while still maintaining a concise sketching interface. We demonstrate the usability and flexibility through resulting animations from user experiments.