Hand-drawn animation for video, without an animator
A drawn scene gives a documentary, an explainer or a brand film a warmth that stock footage does not have. Hiring an illustrator and an animator for an eight second insert is rarely in the budget.
Here you describe the scene the way you would brief an illustrator, a subject and an action, and the plugin draws and animates it in the chosen style.
The prompt behind this clip
This exact text produced the clip above, word for word:
📝
A steam locomotive crosses a tall stone viaduct over a misty river valley, pistons pumping, wheels turning, a long trail of smoke drifting behind the train
Settings: Animation tier, Ink style, 16:9, 1080p, 60 fps, 8 seconds. The page plays a smaller copy of the render.
How to make it in Premiere
Open your project and go to Window → Extensions → Butter Motion. The panel docks next to your other windows, so you never leave the edit.
Set the chips under the prompt to match your sequence: 16:9 and your sequence frame rate, 8 seconds for a scene with one main action. Matching aspect, resolution and frame rate means the clip lands on the timeline with nothing to conform.
Background: a full scene like this one stays With background. Animation can also render Transparent if you want the drawing over your own footage.
Switch the tier to Animation and pick Ink in the style dropdown at the top left of the composer. Auto also works: it picks the style from your prompt.
Paste the prompt, put in your own text and numbers, and press ↑ (or Cmd+Enter / Ctrl+Enter). The card goes through queued, generating, checking layout and rendering. It takes a few minutes, and you can keep cutting while it works. An Animation scene takes about 2 to 4 minutes and runs up to 10 seconds.
An Animation scene arrives with its sliders already open (for subscribers): main colours, the texts on screen, overall speed and optional elements. Anything they do not cover, type into the Tweak bar ("make the smoke thicker"). The style stays the same.
Press To timeline. The clip is rendered on your computer, imported into the «ButterMotion» bin and placed at the playhead.
What to change for your scene
A subject and an action. "A steam locomotive crosses a tall stone viaduct" is the whole idea. Short prompts work, the plugin fills in the details.
Add the movement you want to see. "Pistons pumping, wheels turning, a long trail of smoke" tells it what should move.
Pick the look. Ink is hand-inked lines and hatching on warm paper. Painterly, Watercolor, Chalk and Pixel art are other drawn styles, Clay 3D and Toon 3D are three-dimensional ones.
Tweak, do not restart. "Make the smoke thicker" in the Tweak bar keeps the same style and scene.
Why not stock animation
Stock illustration clips are made for someone else's story and rarely match each other in style. A generated scene follows your script, and every scene in the same style looks like it came from the same hand.
What it costs
One generation at the tier you picked: Flash 7 credits, Ultra 10, Animation 15. Transparency, resolution, frame rate and length do not change the price. For subscribers the controls and the first tweak on each generation are free, and each tweak after that is 5 credits. Rendering and dropping the clip on the timeline cost nothing, and there is no watermark. Plans and credit packs are in the pricing section, the details in How credits work.