K-Sketch for novice animators

I recently read “K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” sketch Pad for Novice Animators”, a paper by Richard C. Davis, Brien Colwell, and James A. Landay. The paper describes an animation program, which uses a pen as an input tool. They wanted to design a program that could easily be used by novice animators. They interviewed 8 experienced animators and 11 inexperienced animators to see how and why they wanted to create animations.

Prototyping 35%
Entertain 21%
Doodle 21%
Explaining 21%
Thinking 2%


It seems that only professional animators are willing to invest significant time to learning a complex animation system. Therefore, it was decided that one of the major goals would be to reduce learning time. They decided on 18 animation operations that would be the most useful. In an effort to maximize usability while minimizing complexity, a subset of the original 18 operations was selected: Translate, Scale, Rotate, Set Timing, Move Relative, Appear, Disappear, Trace, Copy Motion, Orient to Path, Repeat Playback, and Copy Object.

Sixteen novices tested K-Sketch and PowerPoint. Users were able to complete their animations in K-Sketch about three times faster than they were able to when using PowerPoint. It was also noted that the users felt much more comfortable making and presenting K-Sketch animations in front of other people. Eleven testers felt that K-Sketch needed more tools, while seven testers felt that PowerPoint was complicated.

Image from “K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” sketch Pad for Novice Animators” page 6