AI Character Animation: Start by Sketching the Characters and Storyboards Before Beginning Work
Sep 27, 2026 · Updated Sep 28, 2026 · 0 views
To have AI create animated characters, you need to prepare two tables before you get started.
It all started with a remark by Jason Zhu:
When using AI to create animations, the most common pitfall is that the visuals end up looking like a PowerPoint presentation: elements slide across the screen, but there’s no human touch.
He recommended an open-source toolkit called ClaudeAnimationBase. It includes a 36,000-character animation guide that teaches AI what a preparatory movement is and what exaggeration means.
Two Tables to Review Before You Begin
- Character Profile Sheet: First, sketch out the character's height, what they look like from the front and side, and seven or eight different expressions.
- Storyboard: Describe what happens in each shot, specifying “where the audience should look at 0.8 seconds.”
How was it done? Who did it?
- My prompt: “Create a story featuring interactions between the three bots—Claude, Codex, and Gemini… You’ll design the script, storyboards, content, and character designs.”
- Several AIs are working on different tasks: one is drawing character designs, one is directing a sandcastle-building video, and one is filming an ice cream video.
- After reviewing the storyboard, I said, "The storyboard is done—let's start filming right away."
- Find another brand-new AI, give it only the instruction manual, and let it complete the "Butterfly" track on its own.
I made three of them
| Video | Character | Results |
|---|---|---|
| Chasing Butterflies | 1 | The Best-Looking |
| Building Sandcastles | 3 | The screen is the messiest |
| Melting Ice Cream | 1 | For comparison: fewer characters, no wide shots, and the image is even clearer. |
From what I've seen, when there are too many characters and the camera zooms out, the scene looks chaotic. I only made one take of each, so the sample size is very small.
How does the image move?
The program asks, "What second is it now?" and then draws that frame—24 frames per second. The lines shake every two frames, just like in hand-drawn cartoons.
The canvas uses WebGL (which leverages the graphics card for rendering), but it only renders 2D; the guidelines explicitly state that 3D is not allowed. WebGL is used because the brush library (p5.brush) only runs on WebGL.
All movements should be synchronized to "120 beats per minute." The animation is silent when it’s finished, but you can add background music later without having to redraw it; this is discussed in the article "Three Approaches to Animated Soundtracks."
How Far Has AI Come?
It can be done
- Follow the 36,000-character guide to create characters with preparatory movements and facial expressions
- For the butterfly scene, the AI randomly selected 16 frames to review and went through seven rounds of revisions before submitting it.
I still need some help
- As soon as there are too many characters or the camera zooms out, the scene gets chaotic.
- The storyboard included a movement the character couldn't perform (the hand couldn't reach the mouth), so the AI animator had to make 12 changes.
- The tweet says it takes 0.11 seconds to draw one frame, but I measured 0.27 seconds on my M4 computer.
Source:Tweet by Jason Zhu,ClaudeAnimationBase(MIT)
September 27, 2026