Ancient Egyptian style explainer videos

Tomb-wall registers: flat colour, clean outlines, hieroglyphs. Brief it in one sentence and get a narrated, animated explainer film in the Egyptian wall painting style, scored and voiced, in about 15 minutes.

Make one in this style

Or let the director choose a style for your topic.

A frame in the Egyptian wall painting style

What it looks like, and when to use it.

Flat colour inside clean dark outlines, figures in the classic profile pose, columns of hieroglyphs and borders of red, blue, gold and green on cream plaster. Egyptian wall painting is drawn in code and laid out in registers, so a process reads like a story carved along a tomb wall, step by step.

Best for

Ancient history and archaeology
Step-by-step processes told as a story
Lessons for school audiences

Try a brief like

“How the pyramids were built”
“Why the Nile flooded every year”
“How hieroglyphs were decoded”

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 Egyptian wall painting.

Look: Ancient Egyptian tomb painting drawn in code, New Kingdom style: a cream plaster wall, flat colour inside clean dark-brown outlines, no perspective and no shading; figures in the canon pose (profile head, frontal eye with a kohl tail, both shoulders facing out); registers on ground lines, columns of hieroglyphs between red rules, borders of red, blue, yellow and green blocks, gold and lapis jewellery; a faded, cracked surface over everything.
Motion: Formal and rhythmic: glyph columns write themselves stroke by stroke, sun rays pulse in a wave, small repeated motifs (a rolling scarab, a rippling water sign) loop on 12 fps steps, and figures move only within the canon pose — a raised arm, a turned head, a lifted cup.
Music: Ancient ceremonial: harp, lyre, sistrum shakes, frame drum, a reed flute over a low drone.
Type: Hieroglyph columns as decoration, drawn as stroke glyphs between red rules; English titles in a carved serif (Cinzel 700) in dark brown or gold, inside a cartouche or a register band.