A few years ago we spoke to several animation makers out there, both leading agencies and non-leading ones, to help us make a small animation demo for our app. We wanted it to be in simple classical style animation.

We received several quotes from people but nobody would seek less than $10,000 for a 90 second animation -- an unsaid minimum length for business. We were turned off by most of the quotes or simply turned away with an advice to go a screencast instead.

Obviously we were bootstrapping so we had no choice but to go for a screencast for our launch; but then one fine morning we decided to do the animation entirely ourselves. For they say, when you're stuck between a cliff and a hard rock: GO BUILD YOUR OWN PLANE!

So here's how we made our animation video — an exact sixty second loop for our little letter-writing app.

And just in case you were thinking what happened to the app?: It died an year later.

This minibook has been derived from some of the notes we took back in 2012. This book was baked using Bookiza and sourcecode/manuscript is available on Github under MIT license.