Animate in the studio

1The animation studio, and what it is not

Reset one expectation before anything else: this is the Animation asset kind, a standalone, online-only asset with its own timeline, and it is pure frame-by-frame cel work. You animate by drawing every frame yourself, one at a time. Nothing is tweened, there are no keyframes, no easing, nothing gets interpolated between your drawings. The motion is an illusion your hand builds, exactly like a flipbook. Learn the hierarchy and you will never feel lost: a Sequence groups Scenes, a Scene holds Tracks (art or audio), an art Track holds Frames (your cels), and each cel is a stack of drawing Layers. This is not the page canvas's onion-skin Animation Assist, and it is not the visual-novel Stage. It lives and plays in the browser only: no page grid, no print, no source download.

2Create one, and pick your shape

Spin up an Animation from the create wizard: a frame-by-frame piece you build on a timeline of scenes, layered art rows with onion skinning and riffle play, plus audio. It is a canvas in your browser, online only, that you draw on rather than a file you render.

The wizard stops you at Aspect ratio with two cards. Cinematic UHD is 16:9, 3840 x 2160, landscape, the default and the pick for players and wide video. Short UHD is 9:16, 2160 x 3840, portrait, for Shorts, Reels, and TikTok. Whichever you choose is your 4K master shape at 24 frames per second. On create you land in Scene 1, already seeded with art rows and a few starter frames, so you can draw immediately.

3The studio at a glance

The animation studio is one screen, no sub-tabs to hunt through, laid out in three columns that mirror how you actually work. On the left, a Scenes sidebar: pick the scene you want to animate. In the middle, the stage (your preview canvas) with the transport controls and the timeline beneath it: this is where you draw and arrange each frame. On the right, a Cover panel and a Frame panel for tuning the selected frame or the cover art. Up top, a film icon and Animation, a caption reading {w} x {h} · {ratio} · {DPI} DPI, an FPS field (1 to 60), and Full screen. Everything saves to the server the instant you make it. No save button, no spinner to babysit.

4Scenes and sequences

A Scene is one shot: a self-contained stretch of frames. It is also the studio's unit of loading, only one scene's frames are held in memory at a time (lazy loading), so an hour-long film stays responsive while you draw. In the Scenes sidebar, + adds a scene and each row shows its name (or Scene N) with a frame-count badge like 10f. Drag one scene onto another to reorder (Drag to reorder); that order is exactly how they play and publish. Need to tidy a long film? Seq makes a sequence, a labelled folder (placeholder Sequence) with its own +. Loose scenes sit under Ungrouped. Select any scene to edit its name, delete, Sequence pills (None plus one per sequence), and frame rate.

5The timeline and your cels

The Timeline is where you build your animation. Each Art track is a lane of cels reading left to right, and every cel is one drawing you made by hand. Click the ruler (numbered every 5) to scrub; the red line is your playhead. Click a cel to select it, then double-click, hit the pencil, or press Draw to open it in the editor. The trailing dashed + adds a frame. Each cel's ... menu gives you Add left, Add right, Duplicate, Show/Hide, and Delete; drag a cel onto another to reorder. Work like the pros: rough your key drawings first, then fill the frames between them, one drawing per cel.

6Timing: holds, ones and twos

A cel's Hold is how many frames it stays on screen, counted in the scene's frames per second (24 by default). Set it two ways: drag a cel's right edge on the timeline (a badge like x3 marks anything longer than one), or type into the Hold field in the right-hand Frame panel, which tells you on ones, on twos, or held {n}. On ones means a fresh drawing every frame: smoothest, most work. On twos holds each drawing for two frames, the classic hand-drawn look at half the drawings, and a professional choice, not a corner cut. Stretch a hold longer for a pause or a settled pose. Timing is the animation. The same drawings read completely differently depending on how long you leave each one on screen.

7Drawing a frame

A cel is just a drawing, and you make it in the same Creator Canvas editor you use for comic pages: the same pens, layers, blend modes, and guides. Open it four ways: the stage's Draw button, Draw this frame in the Frame panel, the per-cel pencil, or a double-click on the cel itself. A fresh cel opens fully transparent, so you draw over nothing (or over ghosts and neighbour rows). While you work, the frame's other art rows composite around your drawing, above and below, so you paint against the true picture, with a small dock of the row's frames along the bottom. A cel is one held pose in a stack of transparent sheets. Everything about the pens and tools is covered in the drawing tutorial.

8Onion skinning

Frame-by-frame animation depends on consistency: does the head stay the same size, does the spacing between drawings feel even? Onion skinning is your answer. It shows faint ghosts of the nearby cels in the same row, tinted red and fading with distance, so you draw each new frame in honest relation to the last. It is the single most useful assist in cel animation, and the reason your volumes stay solid across a walk. In the timeline, find the red Onion range bar. Its eye toggles the ghosts (Onion on / Onion off). To reach further back, drag the start handle of the range backward. More previous frames appear as ghosts, up to 24 cels deep.

9Riffle: flip-test your motion

Riffle is the digital version of thumbing a stack of paper: it flips fast through a run of your drawings so you can feel whether a motion reads. Because you draw every frame by hand here, spacing is everything, and the only way to judge spacing is to watch it move. In the timeline, grab the sky-blue Riffle range bar and drag its start handle back to cover the frames you want (up to 48). Hit Riffle play this range to loop them right in the drawing view, fully composited, then Stop riffle when you have seen enough. The workflow that saves you: rough two or three drawings, riffle them raw, fix the spacing that feels wrong, then commit to inking the rest.

10Rows, layering and backdrops

A scene stacks its art in rows, and they composite: the row at the top of the timeline draws nearest the viewer, the bottom row is the backdrop behind everything. Your seeded scene hands you a Foreground row sitting over a Background row, which is exactly the classic split you want. Put your moving character on one row and a setting that barely changes on another. Now you draw the character fresh every frame while the background just holds, one long cel doing all the work, so you never redraw scenery you already nailed. Each row carries its own backdrop: click Turn on a solid background fill and set the Background colour. The fill paints behind the art from the lowest row that has it on.

11Adding sound

Sound is the one thing you can bring in from outside, so use it well. Drop an empty audio lane onto the timeline with Audio, then click the dashed import button sitting at the end of that lane (Import an audio file into this row) and pick a file. Imports always launch from a row, so the clip lands in the lane you started from. You will see Importing audio… (and Importing… on the toolbar) while it lands. The clip becomes a bar with a live waveform. Drag its body to slide it, drag an edge to trim (it snaps to whole frames). Select it for the inspector: a Volume slider from 0 to 100%, Splice at playhead, Delete, and Close. To sync a hit, drag the clip until the waveform peak sits under the frame where the impact reads.

12Playing it back

The transport under the stage runs your whole scene at its frames per second. Left to right: jump to the first frame, step back one, the big green Play / Stop button, step forward one, jump to the last frame, a Frame {n} / {total} counter, and a Loop toggle that reads Looping is on once armed. Watch it at speed constantly. A pose that looks great frozen can fall apart in motion, so play, feel the timing, nudge a frame, play again. Where riffle previewed just a range, this plays the entire scene. One habit: any scrub or step stops playback, so let it run before you reach for the timeline. Trust what your eye reads here, because this is the piece.

13Your cover

Find the Cover panel in the right column. This is the poster image, the thumbnail wherever your animation shows up, so treat it like a movie still, not a random frame. By default it is automatic: Auto: the start scene's first frame. Set your own below. To take control, hit Upload poster for your own image, or Use current scene to grab a drawn frame from the scene you are in. Once you set one, it reads Custom cover. It stays put as you keep drawing. and Reset to auto appears if you want the default back. Pick a frame with a strong pose and a clear silhouette, because on a shelf crowded with thumbnails, that single frame is doing all the selling.

14Publishing, and what the reader gets

You ship an animation exactly like any other asset: set access and pricing, add a cover, then hit Publish. There is no render step to wait on and no export, because nothing gets baked into a file. What the reader receives is a live canvas player. It plays your scenes in order at their own frame rates, streaming one scene at a time and prefetching the next so the motion stays smooth. There is a centre Play/Pause and a Loop toggle; portrait pieces sit in a tall, centred frame. The platform labels the action Watch and lists the asset like a video, but under the hood your reader is watching real frames play, not a movie. Give it a strong cover and a confident first scene, since that opening scene is the first thing a browsing reader sees.

15What is not here yet

This is a young, focused, hand-drawn studio: it does traditional cel animation and skips the motion-graphics tricks, so plan around a few honest gaps. There is no export of any kind, no mp4, no GIF, no download. Your animation lives and plays only on the canvas, so to get an off-platform clip you screen-record playback. There is no tweening, easing, or motion path; you draw every drawing. The frame roles like key, breakdown, extreme, and tween are labels for your own organisation, not interpolation. No camera means you draw pans and pushes into the art, or shift cels across the stage. You cannot import an image onto a cel (only audio imports), and there are no stage text or shape tools: letter and draw everything in the drawing editor. Scenes cut directly, so draw a fade or wipe as frames if you want one.

Animator questions