How Did Whiteboard Animation Videos Start? From Vaudeville Chalk Talks to AI Doodles

Film historians generally regard J. Stuart Blackton's 1906 short Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, in which chalk drawings on a blackboard seem to come alive, as the first animated film recorded on standard picture film. A century later, in January 2007, Adweek reported that UPS would spend about $35 million launching a TV campaign in which a man explained shipping by drawing on a whiteboard with a brown marker.

Those two moments bookend the story of the whiteboard video. The style feels like a YouTube-era invention, but its roots go back to stage performers who drew while they talked. Here's how it went from vaudeville to TV ads to viral lectures to the software and AI tools people use today, and what that history tells you if you make explainer videos for a shop, a course or a channel.

Before film: the chalk talk

A chalk talk is an illustrated performance in which the speaker draws pictures in real time to make a point. Chalk talks were hugely popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, appearing in vaudeville shows, Chautauqua assemblies, religious rallies and smaller venues.

One of the earliest chalk talk artists was the illustrator Frank Beard, who published Chalk Lessons; or, The Black-board in the Sunday School in 1896. Other performers built acts around "lightning sketches," drawings they changed rapidly while the audience watched. Cartoonist Winsor McCay began doing vaudeville chalk talks in 1906. In one act he drew two infant faces and aged them step by step.

The appeal was the same one whiteboard videos rely on now. You can't look away from a drawing that isn't finished yet, because you want to see what the lines turn into.

1900 to 1906: drawings that move on film

Blackton was one of those lightning-sketch performers, and he took the act to film. His 1900 short The Enchanted Drawing, produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company and shot on Vitagraph's rooftop studio in Brooklyn, shows a man drawing a face on an easel and then "lifting" a drawn bottle and hat off the paper. It used stop-camera substitution: film the drawing, stop the camera, swap something, start again. Its Wikipedia entry notes that the Library of Congress considers it a proto-animation film.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces went further. The artist's hands draw the first lines on a chalkboard in live action, and then stop-motion makes the drawings seem to complete and move by themselves. Chalk talk, hand, board, reveal: the core of a modern whiteboard video was already there.

2007: a brown marker on prime-time TV

For decades the drawing-while-talking format lived mostly in classrooms and boardrooms. Then UPS put it on national TV.

Adweek reported that the "Whiteboard" campaign, created by The Martin Agency in Richmond, Virginia, was UPS's biggest marketing push in at least five years. Each spot showed a man drawing UPS services on a board and ended with the "What can Brown do for you?" tagline.

Slate's April 2007 review added the backstory. The man at the board, Andy Azula, was the campaign's creative director, not an actor. He filmed sample spots himself to pitch the idea, and when UPS tested professional actors, focus groups kept picking him. The spots were directed by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, and a professional illustrator worked on set redrawing the board between takes. Azula says on his portfolio site that the campaign grew to just over 50 TV spots, plus outdoor ads, banners, a website and even a subway takeover.

The same year, a small Seattle company called Common Craft began making short explainer videos with whiteboards and paper cut-outs. Its "Twitter in Plain English" has been viewed more than 10 million times since March 2008, and a video it made for Dropbox's homepage was viewed 25 million times.

2010: RSA Animate goes viral

The format's next big moment came from a London institution. Starting in 2010, the Royal Society of Arts turned selected talks from its events into whiteboard animations made by the studio Cognitive Media. According to Know Your Meme's history of the series, illustrator Andrew Park made one early RSA piece by filming himself drawing on paper with a Flip camera.

The first RSA Animate went up on YouTube on March 10, 2010. Three weeks later, on April 1, came an animation of author Dan Pink's talk on motivation, Drive, which passed 9.7 million views within three years. The first 14 RSA Animate videos gained 46 million views in 2011, making the RSA's YouTube channel the top nonprofit channel worldwide.

RSA Animate set the look many people still picture: a hand drawing fast, black lines on white, and narration that never stops while the picture builds.

2012 onward: software takes over the drawing

Hiring an illustrator and filming every stroke is slow and expensive, so software followed the trend. VideoScribe, a drag-and-drop whiteboard animation tool from UK company Sparkol, launched in 2012 and had more than 250,000 users in 135 countries by April 2014. Instead of filming a real hand, tools like it animate a hand image over drawn lines, so anyone can build a scene from a library of images.

The latest change is AI. Some tools now generate the doodle images themselves from a text prompt, so the scarce skill is no longer drawing but knowing what to say. We look at how that changes the production steps in how whiteboard animation videos are made today.

What this history means if you make videos today

A few lessons have held up for more than a century.

1. Talk while you draw. Chalk talks, Blackton's films and RSA Animate all tied every drawing to what the speaker was saying at that moment. A picture that shows up before or after its sentence loses the effect.
2. Unpolished can beat slick. UPS's focus groups preferred the creative director's plain delivery to professional actors, according to Slate. A clear, natural voice matters more than a perfect one.
3. One idea per drawing. Lightning sketches worked because each one made a single point and then changed. Crowded scenes are hard to follow.
4. The format fits complex ideas. UPS used it to explain logistics, RSA to explain research, and Common Craft to explain software. If your product needs explaining, the style still makes sense.

Whether whiteboard videos still persuade and teach better than other formats is a fair question, and the research is more mixed than the marketing. We cover it in do whiteboard animation videos still work in 2026, and imagine the alternative in what if explainer videos had never existed. For product pages specifically, see our product page video checklist.

Disclosure: some links are affiliate links; ShopperCove may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

If you want the RSA Animate look without hiring an illustrator, AI doodle tools are the current version of the format. InstaDoodle's offer page says it's a cloud app with nothing to install: you paste a script, its DoodleAI engine turns the words into doodle scenes, and you can record or upload your own voiceover and music. It lists a library of more than 1,000 doodle characters and elements, seven drawing hands, color or black-and-white doodles, and an AI image-to-sketch converter for logos and photos. ShopperCove did not test InstaDoodle for this article. InstaDoodle link: Open link (affiliate link)

Tools that help

• InstaDoodle, AI doodle and whiteboard explainer video app. Its offer page lists a lifetime deal for a one-time payment, with the price adjusted to your country and shown at checkout, 150 AI credits, 1080p export, 14 project templates and a 60-day money-back guarantee. InstaDoodle link: Open link

How this was made: facts were gathered on 8 Oct 2026 (IST) from Adweek's and Slate's 2007 coverage of the UPS campaign, Andy Azula's portfolio, Know Your Meme's RSA Animate history and the Wikipedia articles listed below, then written up with AI help and checked line by line against those sources. ShopperCove did not test InstaDoodle or any other whiteboard tool for this article.

Sources

• 01en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk_talk
• 02en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchanted_Drawing
• 03en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorous_Phases_of_Funny_Faces
• 04adweek.com/brand-marketing/martin-ships-ups-whiteboard-campaign-87495/
• 05slate.com/business/2007/04/the-mesmerizing-ups-whiteboard-ads.html
• 06andyazula.com/ups
• 07en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Craft
• 08knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/rsa-animate
• 09en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteboard_animation
• 10en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoScribe
• 11instadoodle.com/cb-special

Related

• 01shoppercove.com/blog/instadoodle-prompt-doodle-videos-2026
• 02shoppercove.com/blog/instadoodle-lifetime-one-time-color-cb-special-october-2026
• 03shoppercove.com/blog/vidtoon-2-1-explainer-videos-for-product-pages-2026