What is whiteboard animation? Meaning, history and uses

Picture a white surface, a hand holding a marker and a voice explaining something. As the narrator says "a farmer carries his harvest to a market twenty miles away", the hand draws the farmer, then the cart, then the road. The next sentence adds a price tag or an arrow. By the end of the scene the board holds a small diagram of the whole argument, and then it clears for the next idea.

Three things define the format. The drawing happens on screen, so the viewer watches each picture being made instead of seeing it pop in. The drawing is timed to the narration, element by element. And the pictures are simple: line art, a few hand-lettered labels, an occasional touch of colour. The voice carries the argument; the drawing makes it visible.

The names vary with who is talking. "Whiteboard animation" and "whiteboard video" are the most common. "Video scribing" and "scribe video" borrow the word from live scribing, where an illustrator draws a talk as it is being given. "Doodle video" usually means the same thing with a looser, more sketchy line. A chalkboard version, white chalk on black, or a blueprint version follows the same rules on a different surface.

Explaining with a marker in hand is as old as the whiteboard itself, but two projects turned the filmed version into a genre people recognise. In January 2007 UPS launched a TV campaign called "Whiteboard", created by its agency, The Martin Agency. In each spot a man sketched UPS's services on a whiteboard as he talked about them. He was Andy Azula, the agency's creative director, and by October 2009 the campaign had run to 52 ads.

In 2010 the RSA (the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, in London) started RSA Animate: edited recordings of its public talks, illustrated on a whiteboard by Andrew Park of the studio Cognitive Media, drawing along with the speaker. Dan Pink's talk on motivation, "Drive" (April 2010), and Sir Ken Robinson's "Changing Education Paradigms" (October 2010) have about 20 million and 18 million views on the RSA's YouTube channel as of September 2026.

From there the look spread to marketing, e-learning and YouTube. Software made it possible without drawing skill, first with editors that animate a hand over library images and more recently with tools that generate the drawings from a script. The core idea hasn't changed since those UPS spots: a voice explains, and a hand shows.

The usual explanation is anticipation. When a hand starts a drawing, the viewer tries to guess what it will become and waits for the answer. The picture also arrives at the moment its word is spoken, so eyes and ears receive the same idea at the same time instead of competing. And line drawings strip out every detail that doesn't serve the point.

Research backs part of this, with caveats. In a 2016 study in Computers & Education, Selen Türkay (Harvard University) showed physics lessons to 621 online participants as a whiteboard animation, a narrated slideshow, audio only or text only. The whiteboard group enjoyed the lessons more and reported more engagement than the slideshow group, and remembered more than the audio and text groups. On retention, though, whiteboard and slideshow were not significantly different, and the author did not rule out a novelty effect.

A 2023 study in Heliyon by Sascha Schneider, Felix Krieglstein, Maik Beege and Günter Daniel Rey isolated the drawing itself. In two experiments with 133 secondary school students in Germany, pictures that were drawn progressively led to higher retention and transfer scores than the same pictures shown finished, and the students who saw static pictures reported a higher mental load. The lesson for creators is practical: the drawing-as-you-speak part is what earns attention, and it only works when every sentence gives the hand something to draw.

Every method starts the same way: a script written for the ear, with one drawable idea per sentence, and a narration that sets the clock. What changes is who draws and who does the timing. Our step-by-step guide on how to make a whiteboard animation (linked at the end of this page) walks through the process; here is how the three routes differ.

AnimatedBoard belongs to the third route. You paste a script, or have our AI draft one from a topic or write one from a PDF or Word document. Our AI proposes where to cut the scenes and what to draw in each, and a hand draws every element when the voice names it. Your script is narrated word for word, in one of six languages, and you can redraw a scene or change only part of a drawing before downloading the MP4. The video at the top of this page was made that way.

It depends mostly on who draws and who times the drawings. Studios and freelancers quote per finished minute, and the range is wide because custom illustration and revision rounds are paid in hours. Editing software is a subscription plus your own hours. Generated from a script, the cost is the minutes of video: with AnimatedBoard the first minute is free, and plans start at $29 a month for 30 minutes. Our whiteboard animation cost guide, linked below, compares agency, freelance and software prices in detail.