How whiteboard animation works

Before any of the software existed, an artist would stand at an actual whiteboard and draw while a camera filmed from above. Then somebody sped the footage up and laid a voiceover on top, which is how a full day of drawing turned into a few minutes of video.

April 2010 is when it really took off. The RSA in London put out an animated version of Dan Pink's talk on motivation, "Drive", with Andrew Park of Cognitive Media doing the drawing, and millions of people watched it. After that, if you had an idea to explain, the hand-drawn explainer was more or less the look everyone reached for.

Then came the software. With tools like VideoScribe and Doodly you drop images on a canvas and a virtual hand draws them along a path, so the camera and the drawing skill weren't needed anymore. You still had to build each scene yourself though, and record your own voice. That leftover grunt work is the part we built GenPixy AI to eat. You type a topic, or paste the script you already wrote. A few minutes later there's a video sitting in your library. Drawn, voiced, captioned, timed. Done.

There's one stat that gets passed around on basically every whiteboard site. It comes from a 2012 experiment by psychologist Richard Wiseman, run with Sparkol (yep, the VideoScribe people), in which viewers remembered about 15% more from a whiteboard video than from a talking-head take on the same material. Keep in mind who ran it with him, though. A 2025 study comparing animated and talking-head videos for science communication came out with the two formats roughly tied.

Not magic, then. Where we see it shine is when the sketch carries the actual explaining, say water pushing through a pipe or one domino tipping the next, and it's a lot less special when the sketch is just there to look cute. When the sketch is only there to look nice, you might as well film a face.