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The explain.ink mark on a video is quieter, and the tabs on a finished video open instantly.
The explain.ink mark in the corner of a video used to sit on a grey plate. The plate is gone. What is left is the wordmark on its own, drawn in chalk on a dark board and in ink on a light one, so it sits on the board rather than on top of the drawing. On a vertical video it is half the size it was.
The tabs on a finished video, added in 0.41, now open instantly. Pressing one used to rebuild the whole page before it could show you anything.
A finished video opens in four tabs, and one of them writes the post that goes with it, for the network you pick, from what your video says.
The page of a finished video is no longer one long column. Above the player: Video, with the file, the other formats and Duplicate; Share & post; Script, with the topic, the whole script and the look it was made with; and Storyboard, where any frame can be drawn again. Each tab has its own link, so you can send someone straight to one.
A video is made to be posted, and the next step was always the same: working out what to write beside it. On the Share & post tab, pick where it is going: X, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp or email. Press Write it and you get a text written from what your video actually says, in its language, opening the way the video opens.
Each one is shaped for the place it goes. A short post for X, Threads and Bluesky, with a counter for each limit. A longer post for LinkedIn and a conversational one for Facebook. A title, a description and chapters for YouTube, with the chapters placed exactly where the scenes begin. A caption and hashtags for Instagram and TikTok. A subject and a short email, without a greeting or a signature, because only you know who it is for. A quick message for WhatsApp.
Pick a tone, Plain, Lively or Formal, and hover over it to see the difference. Edit the text, ask for another, copy it, or press Open to land in X, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, WhatsApp or your mail with the text already in place.
What was written for you, and what you changed, stays with the video. Leave the tab while a post is being written, close the page, come back tomorrow: it is there. A dot on a network shows it already has one.
Writing a post does not make your video public. The link starts working only when you copy it, copy a post that carries it, or open a network with it.
Choose how your video opens and how it ends, pick the style, the narrator and the frame each in its own window, and have your own script checked before anything is made.
The first frame decides whether anyone keeps watching, and a good opening depends on what the video is for. When we write the storyboard you now pick the type: Explain it, Fix a problem, Bust a myth, Show the steps or Stop the scroll, or leave it on Auto and we read your text and choose. Each type opens differently: a problem opens on what is going wrong, a myth opens on the belief it is about to take apart.
The ending is yours to pick too. Close it lands on the payoff, Ask the viewer ends on a question about the subject, and Sum it up gathers everything the video showed into one last picture. The question mark beside each list says what every option does in one sentence.
The look step is three pictures under the preview: the style, the narrator and the frame. Press one and it opens a window of its own. Styles are grouped, you can search them, and each shows a short loop of how it draws. Every narrator can be heard before you choose. The three frames, wide, square and vertical, are drawn to their real proportions. The styles page uses the same shelf.
With Use my script, the button reads Validate until your script passes. It tells you exactly what it would otherwise have to change: a tag it does not know, a scene with no picture described, a line that would be read out loud by mistake. A script that describes a picture for every scene goes straight to the look, because there is no storyboard left for us to write.
Write your topic in one language and pick another in Translate to. The storyboard, the narration and the words on the frames come out in the language you picked.
New hand-drawn styles have joined the library, each with a loop you can watch before you choose it. The hand-drawn ones now letter the caption at a steady size and place it in the space the drawing leaves.
The first half of the new storyboard settings, released to everyone together with 0.40.
The video type, the ending, the language setting and the check for your own script were built in this release and reached everyone a day later, together with the new look step. They are described on the page for 0.40.
Internal improvements to changing a finished video and rebuilding it.
Behind the scenes, changing a frame or a scene's words in a finished video and rebuilding it became more dependable. The way you do it has not changed.
The only words on a frame are words from your video, a frame without a caption has no caption line, and a picture you describe is drawn the way you wrote it.
A frame could come back with words nobody wrote on it: a tag for a character, a name for a place in the layout, lettered neatly next to the drawing as if they belonged there. The words on a frame now come only from what your video says: its caption, its narration, or the description of the picture.
Leave a scene's caption empty and the frame is drawn without a caption band, without a heading made up to fill it. Words that belong on the objects in the picture, the label on a tile or the title of a page, are still drawn.
When you rewrite what a frame should show on the storyboard, that description is drawn as written: the grid you asked for, the colour you named, and no people where you said there are none. It is no longer restaged on the way to the drawing.
A style you upload stays in your library, your own styles come first and can be removed, and people are drawn the way your style picture draws them.
Upload a picture to draw in your own style and it becomes one of your styles, ready for the next video. It is read once, when it arrives, so the same picture draws the same way in every video you make with it. If a picture cannot be used, you hear it straight away, before anything is made. Upload the same picture again and you simply get the style you already have.
Your own styles open the style list, newest first, each shown with the picture you uploaded. A style you no longer want can be removed. Videos already made in it keep working, and uploading the same picture again brings it back.
When the picture you give as a style shows a person, the way it draws people carries into every frame that has someone in it: the proportions, the head, the face or its absence, the line. Who they are and what they wear still come from your video, and a frame with nobody in it stays empty of people.
Groundwork for your own styles in the library, which arrived in full with 0.36.
This release laid the groundwork for keeping the styles you upload in your library. Everything it made possible arrived later the same day and is described on the page for 0.36.
Internal maintenance. Nothing you will notice has changed.
This release tidies up the inside of the product so the next ones can build on it. Nothing you see or use has changed.
A solid shape in a frame is filled in as a shape instead of being drawn over stroke by stroke, and boards drawn in pure line are untouched.
When a frame holds a large block of flat colour, a wall, a sky, a filled panel, drawing it line by line never looked like drawing. The hand went back and forth over the same patch while the parts of the picture that carry the meaning waited their turn. Those blocks are now filled as blocks, and the drawing spends its time on the lines that actually make the picture. The video builds steadily from the first frame to the last, instead of arriving nearly whole part of the way through and then being drawn over.
Not every board has anything to fill. On the ones drawn entirely in line, and there are a good number of them, nothing has changed: the same strokes in the same order as the video you made last week.
Every board says how it letters and your video follows it, a picture of your own is read the same way, and an uploaded style stops showing as a broken image.
Until today one sentence decided the handwriting in every video we drew, whatever board you picked: rounded, casual, no capitals. A board built for a strict typed look could not express that, and worse, a sentence that argues with the picture it is drawn from produces a different hand in each frame. Every board now carries its own description of how it letters, written from the board itself: typed and monospaced where it is typed, condensed capitals where it is condensed capitals, a marker hand only where there really is one. Your video keeps one hand from the first frame to the last, and it is that board's hand.
Hand us a photograph of your notes, a slide or a page of your own headed paper, and the same description is taken from it before anything is drawn. Nothing is imposed on top of it any more: the lettering in your video comes from the picture you gave us, or from the board you picked, and from nowhere else.
Open a video again after uploading a picture as its style and the preview came back broken. The picture was there and the video was drawn with it correctly; only the preview could not fetch it. It loads now.
Drawing in your own style is a button under the player instead of the last tile in the row, and a storyboard that has nothing to check is not checked.
You have always been able to hand us a picture and have your video drawn the way that picture is drawn: a photo of your notes, a slide, a page of your own headed paper. It was the last tile at the end of the row of boards, where it competed with twenty pictures and lost. It is a button now, under the player, above the boards. Once your picture is in, the button offers to swap it and the line beside it says how to go back to one of our boards.
After the storyboard is written we read it back and look for a scene worth improving. When you asked for your words exactly and drew every frame description yourself, there is nothing that pass is allowed to change, so it was several seconds of waiting for an answer that had to be thrown away. It is skipped in that one case. Everywhere else it runs as before.
Minutes are sold in packs, a link to a pack survives signing in, and a new account opens where a video gets made.
There was one button, one minute at a time. There are four packs now, each one saying what it costs and what a minute works out at inside it, above the same per-minute top-up as before. Buying a pack credits the minutes that pack is worth, rather than counting how many separate minutes were in the order.
A link to a pack now takes you to that pack's checkout. If you are not signed in, the door remembers where you were going and puts you back there afterwards instead of dropping you on the home page. If we cannot find the pack, you land in the shop rather than on an error.
A brand-new account used to arrive at its own video library, which is empty by definition, so the first thing the product showed was the one screen where it looks like it does nothing. It opens where a video gets made.
Your library opens at once however much is in it, a card says what it is waiting for, and the wallet is one place instead of three.
Every video you had ever made was drawn on the page at the same time, so an account with a few hundred of them took whole seconds to answer a click. The library comes a page at a time now, and only the page in front of you loads its pictures. There are filters across the top for ready videos, drafts and ones that need another go, and a search that looks inside the script as well as the title.
A draft, a stopped render and a video still being drawn all looked the same: one grey rectangle. Each says where it got to now, and carries the one button that moves it on, whether that is opening the storyboard or trying again.
Adding minutes at the top of the page used to scroll you to a different button further down. Buying now sits inside the balance itself. Beside it is how many minutes you have used per day over the period the figures actually cover, and under it your history reads like a statement, month by month, with the balance running down the side. Minutes that come back from a video you stopped say returned, because that is what happened to them.
The surfaces, the shadows and the state labels were all falling back to the plainest version of themselves, so every panel came out flat whatever the theme said. Text also had three shades of grey that were very nearly one shade. Both are fixed, and the change is visible on every screen at once.
Writing a storyboard has a screen of its own and can be stopped, and the price sits on the screen with the button that spends it.
It shows the step it is on and a bar that moves when something actually happens rather than on a timer. Making a video and writing a storyboard look like one thing now, because they are.
A video being made could always be stopped. A storyboard being written could not, so the only way out was to sit through it. It can be stopped now, and stopping hands your text straight back, untouched, and costs nothing. Stopping a video asks first these days, because that one is work with minutes behind it, and rebuilding a finished video can be stopped too.
What a video costs and what is left of your balance were written under the storyboard, a screen before the button that spends them. They sit next to that button now.
A vertical video is cropped to a centred square in a feed, so everything has to sit in the middle of the height. The drawing is now allowed to fill half of it instead of 45%, and the frames simply use the room.
Write a brief that puts one thing under another and it is drawn that way. It used to be turned on its side, or collapsed into a single item.
It no longer closes and loses your edit if you click beside it, and it has a Copy button, so a description that works can be reused on another frame or another video.
A person or an object that appears more than once looks the same each time, a black-and-white style stays black and white, and sharing takes one step.
A person who appeared in five scenes was described afresh in each one: "in glasses and a button-up shirt" the first time, plain "the business owner" after that. The storyboard now writes the cast down once and every scene draws from that description, so a recurring character or object is recognisably the same one throughout.
A storyboard could ask for "a large bold red stop sign", and inside a black-and-white style the red won. Storyboards no longer name colours, materials or textures at all. Where the colour carried the meaning, the meaning is drawn instead: a checkmark, a warning mark, a crossed-out line.
The style was drawing in a way its name did not promise. It is chalk on a dark board now, and it suits lessons and anything you want read as taught rather than presented.
Posting a finished video cost a click to create the link and a second click to choose where it goes. Choose where it goes and the link is made for you, and the post carries a line worth posting instead of the bare title.
Copying a script, downloading a file and starting an edit are on the card in your library, and a video that is waiting or being drawn says so.
Copying the script, downloading the file and starting an edit used to sit behind a menu, one at a time. They are on the card now, in a row along the bottom.
A video waiting in line looks like it is waiting. One being drawn shows how far it has got, instead of a spinner that looks the same at scene two and scene twenty.
Under the player there is a section with the four steps it went through and the script it was built from, with a button to copy that script and make another video from it.
The button said "Edit script" and quietly copied the whole video before you had decided to change anything, so a click that meant "let me look" left a spare row in your library. It is named for what it does now.
[seconds] disappeared from a script when the script was reformatted, so a scene you had timed went back to its default length.Blueprint, comic and wild west stopped washing out to grey where the drawing had not reached yet, and redrawing a single frame uses the board you picked.
Blueprint videos showed a dirty olive wash wherever the drawing had not reached yet, and comic and wild west were losing their colour the same way. The board keeps its own colour now, so a blueprint sheet stays blueprint blue and a comic panel stays warm.
On a video that had never been made, redrawing a single frame fell back to the plain white sample: you picked blueprint, a white frame came back, and nothing said why. The redraw carries your board with it now.
Whiteboard draws in black on white the way its name always promised, the colour it used to have became a style of its own, and every style can now be looked at before you spend a video finding out.
The style everyone starts with was called Whiteboard and drew in red, blue and green. Its own recipe asked for it. So the first look anybody met, the one the site leads with, was never quite the thing it was named. It is now a black marker on a clean white board: one confident line, no fill, nothing coloured. If you liked the colour, it did not go anywhere.
Every object outlined in black and filled with a bright dry-erase colour, the way a teacher draws with a full set of pens. Colour follows what a thing is, so a sun is yellow and water is blue. It suits nature, science and how-things-work subjects, where the colour is part of the explanation rather than decoration. Three of the videos in our gallery were already drawn this way.
Until now the only place to see a look was inside Studio, after a storyboard had been generated, which meant spending part of a video to answer "what do these look like?". There is a Styles page in the app now. Every style is a row, and each row shows the same five scenes: a process, some numbers, a diagram, people, and a frame carrying only words. Every style is drawn on those same five, so you are comparing looks rather than comparing a water cycle against a rocket. Click a row and Studio opens with that look already chosen.
The page used to explain the buttons and stop there. It now shows a real script, both the plain kind where a blank line starts a new picture and the tagged kind where you say exactly what is spoken, what is written on the picture, what is drawn and how long it holds. Everything on that page is read out of the code that actually parses your script, so it says what will happen rather than what we remember.
The frames became a step you can look at before the video is made, one picture can be fixed without remaking the rest, and a scene can run as long as you tell it to.
The pictures used to be the one thing you could not look at until the video already existed, which is backwards, because the pictures are the product. There is now a step between the storyboard and the video: the frames are drawn and shown to you, as a set, the way a viewer will see them. If you would rather not stop and look, the make-video button goes straight past it.
Do not like a frame? Redraw it, or write in your own words what should be there instead. That one frame is replaced and the rest of your video is untouched.
Write [seconds] 45 in a scene and it lasts 45 seconds. The drawing spreads across the whole time, so a single board can build itself slowly while you explain it. Before this, length followed the narration, and a three-word line meant a ten-second video however complicated the drawing was.
A caption and a drawing with no narration is a scene now, and it stays as long as you tell it to. It used to be thrown away.
Five scenes in, five scenes out. Your own drawing instruction is drawn as you wrote it rather than reinterpreted.
One button reads your script back the way we understood it, before anything is made: how many scenes you will get, which ones will be silent, and how long the video will run.
Every frame is now described in full before it is drawn, down to the exact list of words allowed to appear in it, and what comes back is checked against that list. A frame with a wrong or invented word is redrawn on its own. Your video is never redrawn.
Any video can be downloaded in any shape without being cropped, the styles in the app match the ones on the site, and minutes come back when a render does not happen.
Getting a square or a vertical copy used to crop the picture, and the crop went straight through the captions: on a vertical export, whole lines came out as fragments of letters. Now the frame is placed inside the shape you asked for, with bars where it does not fill. Nothing is cut and nothing is invented, and any video can be downloaded in any of the three shapes.
For eight of the eighteen styles, the sample you picked from in the app was not the sample shown on the site. They are one set now.
Pressing Storyboard again used to rewrite it from scratch, losing edits you had already made.
Minutes reserved for a render that never happened could stay held instead of returning to your balance. They are released properly now, and anything that slips through is swept up automatically.
A PDF, a Word file, a screenshot or a photo of a whiteboard can be the source of a video, instead of typing a topic.
A PDF, a Word file, a screenshot, a photo of a whiteboard or a scanned page can be the source of a video. Pages with text are read directly; pages that are images are looked at and transcribed. If a page has no words in it at all, we say so rather than inventing them.
Before this, uploading either of them failed on the live site in every version that had shipped, and the error named the very format you had just given us.
All eighteen drawing styles are visible when you pick one, instead of six with the rest behind a button.
The picker showed six looks and a button promising twelve more, so two thirds of the styles were only found by people who thought to press it. All eighteen are on screen now.
A welcome letter that says something useful, every letter in the same shape, and an unsubscribe link that works.
A new account used to get a verification link and then silence. The first letter now explains what to do with the thing you just signed up for.
Each email had been built as its own page, so they drifted apart. They share one shell now, with the same header and footer.
The link in the footer used to point at a page that did not exist. It works, it says plainly what it turns off, and it never touches mail about your own purchases and renders.
The board texture is the scene's own board from the first stroke, and buyers stopped losing minutes to tax rounding.
On a textured style, the first frames were drawn over a flat colour and the real board appeared underneath afterwards. The scene now starts on the board it ends on.
Purchased minutes were worked out from the total including tax and rounded, so buyers in some places received fewer minutes than they paid for. And a receipt for one minute could read as five. Both are fixed.
The narrator reads the whole script in one go, so scenes stop ending on an audible breath, and formatting is never read aloud.
Each scene used to be its own request, and a narrator closes a sentence by breathing out. Eleven scenes meant eleven exhales in the middle of your video. The whole script is read once and cut into scenes afterwards.
A tag left in the script with nothing after it could be performed as a sound. It is treated as markup again.
Retrying a failed video works properly, the quoted length got closer to the truth, and you are told when a render fails.
A retry could push a job with no storyboard straight into rendering, and it also erased the reason the job had failed in the first place. Both were fixed, so a second attempt is a real second attempt.
Length is measured from the characters of your script rather than counted words, which is what made the estimate drift on short scripts.
In "use my words exactly", a short pasted script was refused.
Your own drawing style as a reference image, and a check on what goes in before anything is generated.
Upload a picture of the style you want and the video is drawn to match it, which is what people do when the look has to fit a brand that already exists.
The topic, an uploaded reference and the storyboard are each looked at before a single frame is drawn or a single minute is spent.
Buy minutes as you need them, and ask a question from inside the app.
The wallet lets you pick how many video minutes to buy and pay for them, with no subscription to keep.
Support opens from the header, the same assistant that answers on the site.
Choose the shape of the video before it is made, share a finished one with a link, and pick up a job where you left it.
Wide, vertical or square, chosen when you create it. Vertical frames are fitted rather than cropped.
Publishing is a deliberate act: you create the link, and until you do the video is yours alone.
Coming back to an unfinished job restores the text you wrote and the settings you chose.
Renders wait in a line that tells you your place, you can leave the line, and a video is put together several times faster.
Renders wait in line instead of being refused when the machine is busy. The screen says your exact position and, once there is enough history to average, how long it is likely to take. Nothing is made up before that. You can close the page; the finished video is waiting in My videos.
A queued video can be cancelled, and the minutes reserved for it come straight back.
Scenes are drawn and voiced side by side rather than one after another, and the final assembly copies rather than re-encodes when it can.