MOMA Video: How to Make Hand-Drawn Animation

From the Museum of Modern Art, here's a lovely guide to creating hand-drawn animation presented by Kohana Wilson. Their explanation of how persistence-of-vision works is easy to understand and foundational to perceiving animation. Here's the description from the YouTube page:

Learn how to make hand-drawn animation from start to finish. In this tutorial, animator Kohana Wilson (they/them) walks through the tools, techniques, and principles behind classic paper animation, from your very first drawn frame to a finished animated sequence in After Effects. Whether you're animating an abstract dot, a dragonfly, or a cartwheeling character, this video breaks down the full traditional animation workflow — from rough sketches to a polished, moving sequence.

You'll learn:

• The science behind animation — persistence of vision, explained with a zoetrope, praxinoscope, and flip book
• Essential tools: light boxes, peg bars, and paper choices for hand-drawn animation
• Straight-ahead animation — drawing frame by frame in sequence
• Keyframe animation and in-betweening — planning key poses first, then filling in the motion
• Core animation principles: squash and stretch, easing in and out, follow-through, overlapping action, and smear frames
• How to clean up rough animation and scan your frames for digital editing
• Bringing your sequence to life in Adobe After Effects

Artwork references included: Lotte Reiniger, John Canemaker, Winsor McCay, David Ehrlich, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Mary Beams, Maria Lassnig, and William Kentridge.