What can I make with mixed media animation?

A music video, a lyric video, a title sequence, an Instagram reel, a logo animation, a wedding film, a product clip, a birthday card, a poster that moves, a portrait.

All of these things can be a MIXD animation, and all of them have kinda the same workflow.

Print a short clip as a contact sheet, work on the paper, scan it, export the video. The only variables are which clip you choose and what you do to the paper.

Music video

The obvious one. A band, a singer, a drummer, painted frame by frame while the room stays as video. Choose the part of the song where mixed media lands, usually a chorus or a bridge, and leave the rest clean. You are not painting a full three-minute video by hand on your first try.

Paint the figure, keep the background as video. Or flip it and scribble out the whole room, leaving the singer photographic. Both work. Mixing them within one clip is what makes it feel edited rather than filtered.

Lyric video

Print the frames, write the words on them by hand. One word per beat, or one letter per frame until the word builds itself. Marker on printer paper scans clean, and the handwriting wobble between frames does the animation for you.

The move is to write the same word in the same spot on ten frames in a row, without tracing. The tiny differences make the text vibrate. That is the effect people pay After Effects plugins for, and a Sharpie does it.

Title sequence

For a short film, a podcast intro, a YouTube channel. Two to five seconds, one strong image, the title scratched, painted or cut into it. Scratching works best on laser print: the toner flakes off clean and the title shows up as white lines in the footage.

Shoot the title footage on purpose. A slow push in on a doorway, a hand pulling back a curtain. Give the title somewhere to land.

Instagram reel or TikTok

Vertical, a few seconds, one sheet. It is the cheapest way to test the whole loop, and the format where mixed media gets the most reach, because a real crayon dog in a feed of filters stops thumbs.

Print the sheet, paint it during one episode of something, scan it, post it. If it does numbers, you know what to do next.

Logo animation

Start with a static logo and film it (a phone slowly panning across a paper print is enough), then print the frames and rebuild the logo by hand in every frame. Cut it from colored paper. Draw it with the wrong hand. Collage it from magazine scraps. Export it and loop it.

You end up with a logo that is obviously made by people, which for a small studio or a shop is the whole point.

Wedding or family film

Take ten seconds of the ceremony, the first dance, the kid running down the aisle, and paint it. Better yet, let the couple paint it. Or the kid. Crayon on a printed sheet needs no skill, and the wobble is the charm. Cut it into the film as a chapter break or an ending.

This one gets people crying at screenings. We are not being poetic. It does.

Product or brand clip

A shoe turning, a bottle pouring, a hand opening a box. Print it, paint everything except the product, so the object stays sharp and photographic while the world around it is crayon. For something handmade, flip it. Leave the maker as video and paint the object.

Keep it under five seconds. Brand clips do not survive length.

Birthday or greeting card

Film the person, or the dog, or the cake. Print one sheet. Paint it with whoever is around, scan it, send the MP4. One evening, one sheet of A4, and a card nobody else can send.

Moving poster

A poster is a single image. A moving poster is that image printed as frames, painted with slight differences, and looped. Paint the same poster a dozen times with a different hand each time. The loop has a pulse.

Print on the heaviest stock your printer takes. Paper texture matters here, because the frame fills the screen.

Portrait

Film someone sitting still rather than posing, just breathing, blinking, looking away. Print a few seconds. Paint every frame as a different portrait of the same person. One in watercolor, one in marker, one cut from paper, one scratched. Play it back. It is the same face in many styles, moving.

This one gets closest to what mixed media animation is actually for, in the art-school sense. It is also a good afternoon, and the one we keep coming back to.

What to put on the paper

Every idea above says "paint" but the paper takes a lot more than paint. Scratching, tape, a photocopier, risograph, cyanotype, and what each one does to the scan, is in what can I paint or print on printed video frames. Printing the sheet itself is in how to print video frames to paint on.

The sheets are free. Print one, pick a row from the top half of the table, and go. Whichever one you finish is the right one.