Runway Launches Motion Sketch Turning Doodles Into Video

Your rough sketches can now drive motion on screen. Runway’s new Motion Sketch feature lets you draw arrows and outlines on top of a still image and turn that guidance into a short video clip in minutes, collapsing storyboarding, keyframing, and prompting into a single, visual step.

Instead of wrestling with long text prompts, you mark where things should move and how fast, then let an AI video model fill in the frames. It’s not flawless, but it is a strikingly fast path from idea to moving footage for creators who think with a pen more than a paragraph.

What Motion Sketch Actually Does Under the Hood

Motion Sketch converts your pen strokes into motion cues—direction, magnitude, and rough object boundaries—and feeds them to a video generation model such as Runway Gen-4.5 or Google’s Veo 3 and Veo 3.1 (both selectable inside the app). Under the hood, the system predicts depth and optical flow to warp the source image over time, inpainting newly revealed areas as objects move. The result is a few seconds of animation that broadly follows your arrows and shapes.

In early tests, it handles camera wiggles, gentle pans, drifting clouds, and character movement surprisingly well. Complex physics, occlusions, and fine-grained deformations remain harder: limbs sometimes clip through objects, props can duplicate, and scribbles can briefly appear before the model cleans them up.

Make a Doodle-to-Video Clip in Just a Few Minutes

1. Step 1: Open the Runway app and choose Motion Sketch from the creation tools. You can start from any still: upload a photo, generate an image on the platform, or sketch a crude scene on a blank canvas.
2. Step 2: Tap Sketch and draw guidance directly over the image. Use arrows to define direction, short ticks for speed (more ticks imply faster), and outlines to indicate what should move.
3. Step 3: Add a short text prompt for intent—one sentence often helps the model disambiguate (for example, “The snake slithers along the branch to the right”). Keep it concrete and minimal.
4. Step 4: Pick your video model (Gen-4.5 for cinematic texture or Veo for smoother dynamics), choose duration (5–10 seconds is a reliable range), and set resolution based on your credits budget.
5. Step 5: Export the sketch overlay, then hit Generate. Review the clip, refine your strokes or prompt, and re-run. Two or three quick iterations usually nail the intent.

Early Results and Real-World Examples from Tests

We saw a frontier family scene evolve as scribbled bird shapes turned into ominous flying creatures and the crowd bolted in the direction indicated by arrows. The clip sold the idea, though a child briefly phased through a fence—an artifact of imperfect depth estimation.

A hand-drawn snake on a tree branch produced trippy side effects on the first pass: duplicated segments and flickering legs when multiple arrows conflicted. Adding a single line of text and simplifying to one directional cue stabilized the motion—still stylized, but coherent.

On a real photo of a lakeside park, a few wavy red-and-orange lines became a bonfire that lit up the frame, with subtle flicker on nearby trees. The initial doodles flashed for a beat before dissolving—common in the current build but often reduced in subsequent takes.

Key Strengths and Current Shortcomings to Consider

What works: visual-first control, quick previs for ads and films, and rapid ideation for storyboards and social posts. For teams that dread prompt engineering, drawing motion beats can feel natural and fast.

What still trips it up: nonrigid bodies (snakes, fabric), occlusions (hands behind props), and topological changes (objects splitting or merging). Expect occasional ghosting, clipping, or transient overlays. Like other generative tools, iterative prompting and clear constraints pay off.

This lands in a market hungry for faster video. Wyzowl’s 2024 State of Video Marketing reports that 91% of businesses use video and most plan to maintain or grow output, putting pressure on teams to produce more without ballooning budgets. Motion Sketch directly targets that pinch point.

Who Will Benefit from Motion Sketch in Practice

Creators and marketers can turn static art into animated hooks, educators can bring diagrams to life, and film teams can test camera moves before a shoot. One creator on X summed it up as a relief for people who “think in pictures” rather than prose prompts.

Pricing and Access for Runway’s New Motion Sketch

Motion Sketch is available with a Standard Runway subscription at $12 per user per month, which includes 625 monthly credits. The feature sits in the app’s creation workspace; import an image, open the Sketch layer, export the overlay, and generate. Higher tiers add more credits and export options.

Pro Tips for Cleaner Motion and More Consistent Clips

Use one arrow per object to avoid conflicting signals. Keep strokes on the moving subject, not the background, and avoid drawing through joints. Add a single, specific sentence to guide intent. Start with 5-second clips to iterate cheaply, then upscale the best take. If a limb clips through an object, redraw a tighter outline and reduce speed.

The bottom line: Motion Sketch won’t replace meticulous animation, but it meaningfully narrows the gap between a napkin sketch and a compelling video beat—and it does it in minutes.