How to make stickman videos with AI or by hand.

The short answer

To make a stickman video, write a short script, split it into scenes, create a stickman image for each scene, add a voiceover, animate the figures, then add captions and export in 9:16 for Shorts or 16:9 for YouTube.

You can do every step yourself in a free animation app, which takes hours per minute of video, or let an AI stickman video maker like Clippie write the script, draw and animate every scene and narrate it in a few minutes. Most faceless stickman story and explainer channels now use AI for the scenes and spend their time on the script.

Method 1: make a stickman video with AI

This is the fastest way to make narrated stickman videos: survival series, “what if” stories, history and psychology explainers. In Clippie it works like this:

1. Open a stickman template: Bare stickman in 16:9 for YouTube or 9:16 for Shorts, Doodle explainer for explainers, or Caveman stickman for ancient-human videos. The look and the frame are set for you.
2. Write or generate the script: Paste your own, or type a topic and the AI script writer drafts one in the tone and length you pick, up to 10 minutes. Edit it like any text.
3. Generate the scenes: Clippie splits the script into scenes and draws a stickman scene for every line, keeping the same look across the whole video. Redraw any scene you do not like.
4. Pick a voice: Choose from 125 AI voices, a calm narrator for explainers or a tense one for survival stories, and regenerate any line until it sounds right.
5. Animate the scenes: Animate one scene, or animate every scene at once from one prompt, so the stickmen walk, run and react instead of sitting still.
6. Add captions and export: Word-by-word captions in 100+ languages are added for you. Change anything scene by scene, then export in 16:9, 9:16 or 4:3.

A 60-second Short is about 8 to 12 scenes and a 10-minute video about 75 to 120, which is why drawing them by hand is the part most creators hand to AI.

Method 2: animate stickmen by hand

Hand animation gives you full control over every pose, which matters for fight scenes and physical comedy. It is also much slower: at 12 frames a second, one minute of animation is up to 720 drawings or poses. These tools are the usual places to start:

• Pivot Animator: free Windows software built for stick figures. You pose a jointed stickman frame by frame and it plays the frames back as animation.
• FlipaClip: a frame-by-frame drawing app for iPhone and Android, with onion skinning so you can see the previous frame while you draw the next one. The easiest way to animate stickmen on your phone.
• Blender (Grease Pencil): free 2D drawing and animation inside Blender. Powerful, with a steeper learning curve.
• Adobe Animate: paid professional 2D animation software with rigs and tweening, used for polished stick figure animation.
• Canva: not an animation tool, but you can place stick figure graphics on slides and add simple motion for basic explainer videos.

Whichever tool you animate in, you still need a script, a voiceover and captions, and you put them together in a video editor before you export.

Which method should you use?

Use AI if you want to post narrated stickman stories or explainers often, on YouTube, TikTok or Shorts. The work that decides whether a video does well is the story and the hook, and AI gives you back the hours you would spend drawing scenes.

Animate by hand if the motion itself is the point, like stick fights, dance or slapstick, or if you are learning animation. Many creators do both: AI for the story channel, hand animation for the occasional showpiece.

What makes stickman videos work

The stickman channels that grow tend to follow the same rules, whichever way they make their videos:

• Hook in the first second: open on the most surprising moment or question, like “Day 1: I woke up alone in the Arctic”, not on an introduction.
• One recurring character: a stickman viewers recognise from video to video turns one-off views into a series people follow.
• Short scenes: change the picture every 5 to 8 seconds so there is always something new to look at.
• Movement: animated scenes hold attention better than still images, even when the motion is simple.
• Captions: most short-form video is watched with the sound off at first.
• Post as a series: “Day 1 to Day 100” survival stories and “how did humans invent…” explainers give people a reason to watch the next one.