Stickman explainer videos: a rigged character, an endless paper and an edit that lands on words

A stickman video looks simple: a line man, white paper. But to hold a viewer for ten minutes, that man must never stop. Here's the system we built for our economy explainer.

A character rigged in code

We don't redraw the character for every scene. We built it once: a hat, glasses, a green dollar-print tie, two-jointed arms and legs, six expressions (smile, neutral, worried, surprised, smug, thinking), blinks and a profile view. Scenes become a list of poses: "point right here, look surprised here".

The man who never stops

The feedback we heard most on the first test: "Some parts are static." The fix was an idle layer on every pose: a 3-pixel breath, 1.6 degrees of head sway, weight shifting in the torso and blinks at random intervals. The character is alive even when it isn't speaking.

Walks happen in profile

A walk facing the camera looks like a man sliding sideways — we tried it, it went in the bin. Walks are always in profile, with a 0.16-second squash-and-stretch on the turn.

The endless paper

The camera tracks the character: he walks right, the old scene slides out on the left, the new scene enters from the right. We move along one long world. When the script says "let's go back to the beginning", he runs left and a clock rewinds. Push-ins land on emphasised lines.

An edit that lands on words

We timed the voice-over word by word. The moment "rent" is spoken, a red "RENT." stamp hits the screen; at "1948" a calendar page drops. Sound effects (steps, pops, stamps, a cash register) are generated from the same list, so they sit on the same frame as the picture.

Thumbnails

A stickman channel has no face, but it has expressions. We built three thumbnails for this video: a claim, a number and a secret. The whole set is on the YouTube thumbnails page. For faceless documentary styles: Faceless YouTube channel.