Redraw one part, hold the rest — the feature every animator wants

A status update on the single most-requested workflow in hand-drawn animation — where it stands today.

Every animator who’s worked frame by frame has hit the same wall at least once: you need to redraw the mouth for a lip-sync beat, and somehow the pose shifts, because the tool doesn’tunderstand that a character is made of parts — it just sees one flat drawing per frame, mouth and arms and everything else glued together whether you touched them or not.

It’s such a common frustration that it’s practically a genre of complaint across animation forums, regardless of which tool people are using.

The workflow that’s already possible

In Formo, each part of a character — the mouth, an arm, the eyes — lives on its own layer, and each layer keeps its own independent timeline. That's not a cosmetic distinction. It means redrawing the mouth's keyframe does not touch the arm's keyframes, because they're not sharing state to begin with: they're two separate timelines that happen to play back together, in sync, frame-accurate. Redraw one, and the other simply doesn't know anything happened.

Underneath, every one of those timelines is reading off the same 240-tick-a-second clock, so a 12fps mouth and a 24fps blink land on the same beat, frame after frame, with nothing drifting apart over a long shot.

You already have control over each layer today, too: F5 holds its current pose, F6 duplicates the keyframe, F7 drops a blank one to draw into — the same triad Flash animators have muscle memory for, just scoped to whichever layer you've selected. And onion skinning follows you into that redraw: the frame before and after ghost through your strokes on that same layer, so you're never guessing at the pose while everything else quietly holds still around you.

The one-step workflow that’s still missing

What’s not built yet is the one-button version of this: advance the whole character by a frame, and have every layer except the one you’re actively drawing automatically hold its previous pose: a single keypress that says "move everyone forward, but only let me touch this one part." Today, you get the same result by working layer by layer, deliberately, which works, but isn’t yet the one-motion gesture it should be.

It’s the next thing on the list, specifically because it’s the thing that turns "the tool supports this" into "the tool feels like it was built by someone who’s actually redrawn a mouth at 2am and lost the pose underneath it."

Redraw a part without redrawing the pose.