How I plan a math explainer

People assume the hard part of making an animated explainer is the animation. In practice the animation is the part with the clearest instructions — by the time I open the editor, I know exactly what needs to move and why.

The work starts with a single question: what is the one thing a viewer should be unable to un-see afterwards? Not a topic, not a chapter of a textbook, but one specific shift in how something looks. If I cannot write that in a sentence, the video is not ready to be made.

Then comes the hardest step, which is finding the honest path to that idea. Most textbook orderings are optimised for logical economy — they present definitions in the order that minimises repetition, which is almost never the order in which the ideas make sense to someone meeting them for the first time. I try to reconstruct the discovery order instead: what problem was someone stuck on, and what was the move that unstuck them?

Storyboarding happens on paper, in ugly sketches, because ugly sketches are cheap to throw away. A scene survives only if I can say what the viewer learns in the seconds it occupies. Scenes that are merely pretty get cut, and it always hurts.

Only then does animation begin. Timing turns out to matter more than visual polish: a transformation that takes two seconds instead of half a second is the difference between watching something happen and being told it happened.

The final pass is the narration, read aloud against the finished visuals. Anywhere I find myself explaining what is on screen rather than what it means, the scene is wrong and goes back.