Tom Douglas, 2D animator and motion designer. Frameby frame.
Tom Douglas, 2D animator and motion designer. Rough pencils, clean lines, and characters you'd swear were breathing.
go on, try it
keep it scruffy
Eighty-one seconds
of moving pictures.
Six of the twelve
principles.
Disney's animators wrote twelve rules in the 1930s. Every one still holds. Here are six of them, running live.
Squash & stretch 01
Gives weight and give. The ball flattens when it lands and stretches as it falls.
Anticipation 02
A small move back before the big move forward. It tells the eye something's coming.
Slow in, slow out 06
Nothing real starts or stops instantly. Spacing bunches up at both ends.
Arcs 07
Living things move in curves, not straight lines. Heads, hands, thrown hats.
Follow through 05
The body stops; the loose bits don't. Hair, ears and antennae catch up late.
Timing 09
Same distance, different number of drawings. The frame count is the feeling.
Recent work.
| FRAME | ACTION | CLIENT | YEAR |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0001 | Launch Day | Tech start-up | 2026 |
| 0240 | Little Planets | Children's broadcaster | 2026 |
| 0612 | Mr Drizzle | Weather app | 2025 |
| 1088 | Blobby Goes Out | Festival short | 2025 |
| 1440 | Season idents | Regional TV | 2024 |
ALL PROJECTS AND CLIENTS ARE EXAMPLE PLACEHOLDERS
Tea, pencils,
and a light box.
Tom is a 2D animator and motion designer with fifteen years of TV, adverts, explainer videos, social content and the odd festival short. He makes motion graphics, motion toolkits and sizzle films, and takes a project from graphic design and storyboards through video production and post production. He animates in Adobe Animate and After Effects and edits in Premiere Pro, so one person can be animator, designer and editor on the same job. He still roughs everything out in blue pencil first, because the drawing is where the creative life is. Then it gets cleaned up, coloured and delivered in whatever format you need.