Explainer video style · Cave painting

Cave painting style explainer videos

Charcoal and ochre on firelit rock, drawn in code. Brief it in one sentence and get a narrated, animated explainer film in the Cave painting style, scored and voiced, in about 15 minutes.

Make one in this style

Or let the director choose a style for your topic.

What it looks like, and when to use it.

Charcoal and red ochre on a firelit rock wall, with negative handprints and animals that move in flip-book poses. Cave painting is drawn entirely in code, so the paint seems to sink into the stone while the firelight flickers across it. It gives any story the feel of the very first one ever told.

Best for

Prehistory and early humans
Big-picture origin stories
Animals and the natural world

Try a brief like

“How early humans learned to use fire”
“Why the last ice age ended”
“How horses were first tamed”

The art direction the director follows.

Every style is a full art direction, not a filter: its own palette, type, motion and music. This is the brief the director works from for Cave painting.

Look: Prehistoric cave painting drawn in code, after Lascaux and Chauvet: a warm ochre rock wall with soft relief, grain and hairline cracks; every figure a fuzzy charcoal contour with sprayed edges, filled flat with red ochre, yellow ochre and chalk white; the paint sinks into the rock, so the wall's light and shadow show through it; negative handprints blown in red ochre; flickering firelight and drifting embers.
Motion: Firelit and alive: the light breathes and wanders across the wall, embers rise, the charcoal grain boils at 9 fps while shapes hold still, animals and figures move in two or three alternating poses like a flip-book on stone, and new images are drawn on along their contour, then filled.
Music: Primal and warm: frame drums, low bone flutes, clapping sticks, a deep drone, crackling fire.
Type: Rough hand lettering (Kalam 700, widely letter-spaced) painted in red ochre into the paint layer, so it takes the rock texture like everything else.