Teach motion design on software every student can install
A course is only as good as the software students can run at home. Premation is free on Windows, macOS and Linux, needs no licence server, and teaches the same timeline, keyframe and graph-editor model the industry uses — so the skills transfer.
Free · AGPL-3.0-only · Windows, macOS & Linux · no watermark
- 01First keyframesPosition, scale and easing on a logo — the first lesson of every course.
- 02Typography in motionText animators and per-character offsets.
- 03Compositing basicsLayers, mattes and a transparent export.
- 04Character animationRig a simple character and walk it.
- 05Effects and particlesParticles and generators for the end-of-term project.
What changes
Labs with licences, and students who cannot practise at home.
The same free installer on every machine, school or personal.
Teaching a tool that only exists inside the lab.
An industry-shaped interface: comps, layers, keyframes, a graph editor, expressions.
Hunting for course material.
Step-by-step guides, Motion Academy lessons and docs that name the real panels.
Your first week
Step 1
Install everywhere
One free download per platform; no accounts to provision for a source build.
Step 2
Follow a guide in class
Start with Your first animation, then the use-case pages as exercises.
Step 3
Grade the export
Students hand in a rendered file; projects are plain files you can open.
The parts you will use most
- Keyframe Animation and Graph EditorEvery numeric property takes keyframes, and every keyframe carries its own interpolation.Feature tour
- Text Animators and Kinetic TypographyThe full After Effects animator model, including the parts most alternatives skip.Feature tour
- Compositions, Layers, Track Mattes and Blend ModesThe stack everything else happens in. Nest one composition inside another, and it renders through its own camera until you tell it not to.Feature tour
- Bones, IK and Puppet Rigging for 2D ArtworkA real skeleton and a mesh deformer, composing on the same layer. After Effects has neither without a plugin.Feature tour
Questions
- Is it free for schools?
- Yes, for schools, students and teachers alike — Premation is free and open source with no education licence to apply for.
- Will skills transfer to After Effects?
- The model is the same: compositions, layers, keyframes, a graph editor, expressions. The shortcuts cheat sheet maps the keys.
- Does it run on older lab machines?
- It needs a GPU from the last several years; check the system requirements page before rolling it out.