Case study • December 2025
How Is Animation Made?
Sava Dobroplodni Secondary School, Shumen
How does a drawing come to life — transforming into colour, movement, and finally into a frame of a real film? The answer comes from a man who has spent more than 25 years behind the visual worlds of architecture, cinema, television, and the web.
The workshop where drawings come alive
Students from 11th and 12th grade — specialising in Software and Hardware Sciences, and Fine Arts — had the opportunity to experience the process from the inside. They created their own drawings, then transformed them into coloured illustrations, and finally into moving images using modern AI tools.
Two missions
By revealing the core principles of animation and the language of cinema through hands-on tasks, Nikolay turned the training into a genuine creative experience. He divided the participants into two tracks:
- Characters — exploring how a character is born, what their reactions, emotions, and gestures look like, and how all of this becomes convincing movement.
- Space — building an environment, atmosphere, and visual rhythm; constructing the scene in which the characters will come alive and the story will unfold.
The culmination of the process is a mini film — created by the students of Sava Dobroplodni, who have mastered not only the steps of how animation is made, but the true joy of the creative process itself.
Workshop in action
