Shadowmation is the Yeşilçam Animation style that recreates Karagöz shadow play with AI: a backlit screen, perforated and colored leather puppets, and the flicker of the lamp behind them. You bring the story and the characters; the studio stages it as a shadow play and animates it with a 2.5D animation engine, with narration, dialogue and music. This is the style we most wanted to get right, and this post is about why and how.

Why Karagöz

Our studio is named after Yeşilçam, the street that gave Turkish cinema its golden age. Long before cinema, though, there was the perde: a stretched white screen, a lamp, and a single master puppeteer voicing every character in a Karagöz play. Karagöz and Hacivat, the quick-tempered commoner and his learned, pompous friend, have been arguing on that screen for centuries. It was storytelling with light, and in a real sense it was the first animated screen many people in this part of the world ever saw.

When we planned the Cinemation family, it felt wrong to offer anime, cartoon and clay and leave out the form that is closest to home. It also felt like a genuinely useful look, not just a nostalgic one. Shadow play is expressive, readable at a glance and instantly distinctive in a feed.

What makes the look

A convincing shadow play is not a silhouette on a white background. The details that give it away are the ones we spent the most time on.

  • The backlit screen. The light comes from behind, so the screen glows warmly and unevenly, brighter at the centre.
  • Perforated, colored leather. Traditional figures are cut from translucent leather, dyed and punched with small holes, so light comes through in color and in patterns.
  • Lamp flicker. The flame behind the screen is never steady, and the whole picture breathes a little with it.
  • Puppets pressed to the screen. Figures are sharpest when touching the screen and soften as they move away from it.

Getting the animation engine to respect all of these at once, scene after scene, is the hard part of this style, and it is where most of our testing went. A film where the lamp flickers in one scene and the screen turns into a plain white wall in the next is not a shadow play; it is a mistake.

Your characters, as puppets

Like every Cinemation style, Shadowmation lets you add up to four characters with Add character. Give each a Name and describe the look in terms of colors, outfit and accessories, or upload a reference image; the image wins over the description and the puppet follows it. You can tell a story with the classic pair, or cast your own: a baker and a tax collector, a fisherman and a gull, a teacher and a class clown.

Each character can have a Voice. In a traditional play one puppeteer voices everyone; here each puppet gets its own fixed voice, so it sounds the same throughout, and captions show who is speaking. Because the puppets are drawn by a 2.5D animation engine rather than a video model, there is no mouth animation or lip sync; the video-model styles work differently, as we explain in lip sync that keeps the voice.

Speech modes that suit shadow play

Karagöz is a dialogue art. The humour lives in misunderstandings between two characters, so Dialogue is the natural mode. Both works well if you want a storyteller’s opening, the way a play begins with a prologue before the puppets start talking. Narrator suits folk tales told in the third person, and Silent gives you a beautiful, wordless loop for an installation or a stage backdrop. Switch Captions on for dialogue and the speaker’s name appears with each line.

What people can use it for

  • Folk tales and fables, retold for a new audience in a form that matches their origin.
  • Satire and commentary, which is what Karagöz has always been used for.
  • Cultural and museum programming, where the look itself teaches something.
  • Classroom introductions to tradition, history or storytelling.
  • Brand stories for businesses with a local or heritage identity, told in a way nobody else in the category is using.

A tip from our own tests: write short exchanges. The rhythm of shadow play is fast back-and-forth, and a 60-second film with eight crisp lines feels more like Karagöz than one with three long speeches. If you want help, Write dialogue with Sam drafts lines from your story and cast for a small token cost.

How to make one

  1. Open Animation and choose Shadowmation.
  2. Write the story in a few sentences under What should it tell?
  3. Add two characters, name them, and give them contrasting voices.
  4. Set Speech to Dialogue or Both, captions on or off, and a length between 10 and 120 seconds.
  5. Choose Professional for a quick draft or Premium for the best story and scene craft.
  6. Check the Estimated cost, create, watch the preview, and press Get video for an MP4, WebP or GIF.

A note on respect

Shadowmation borrows the look of a living tradition. We did not try to reproduce specific historical plays or claim to replace the masters who still perform them; the puppeteer’s art is far richer than any generated film. What we hope is that the style sends people back to the real thing, and gives new stories a screen to play on. For a longer look at the history, read our article on Karagöz and Hacivat in the digital age, and for the rest of the family, the Cinemation looks.

Frequently asked questions

What is Shadowmation? Shadowmation is a Cinemation style in Yeşilçam Animation that stages your story as a Karagöz-style shadow play, with a backlit screen, colored leather puppets and lamp flicker.

Can I use my own characters instead of Karagöz and Hacivat? Yes. Add up to four characters with a name and a look description or reference image, and each becomes a puppet.

Does Shadowmation support dialogue? Yes. It offers Narrator, Dialogue, Both and Silent, with captions that show the speaker’s name.

Which formats can I export? MP4, WebP or GIF, in 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1.