Luke Bolus

Sure, I’ll do my best to respond over text but it’s easier to talk through and well… Twitter(X)… There are several things happening, and many things that have been setting us up for the change. And really, it’s inevitable that marketing agencies, small/big direct clients, and so on will ask for more output. Naturally that’s expected from every industry. Less work, higher output, cheaper prices. Let’s set aside Ai right out the gate. Ai doesn’t play a role in my hot take, but it certainly will accelerate/assist. This change is just the natural evolution of marketing and production needs. Look at the emerging technology that lets artists still be the artists, like @rive_app. Most artists haven’t even thought one layer past the fact that it has a canvas to design on, and that you can keyframe animations. It spits out code… You develop art work with variables that can be changed on Scale. This is a fairly new frontier and not everyone thinks in this capacity, nor want to be bothered to. Duolingo is on the cutting edge of this kind of workflow. youtube.com/watch?v=fgOqvyPi… What does this look like in 3-6 years when it’s just a liiittlllee bit more accessible, or the 14 year olds that started with a free RIVE account enter the workforce? Animated ads outperform static image ads by ~3.5x. Why would a business ask you to develop a one off package if they can get an animation system that can be deployed en masse to their signed up users. (i.e. @Strava and @Spotify year end wrap) Okay, so Strava/Spotify are big companies and why would the little guy be worried? BECAUSE your spot in the market is getting eaten up from both ends… Ai quick image/video generation making it easy for clueless people to make things they “think” is the answer to their marketing problems, and motion systems that connect to data for larger brands boost sales. Quick step aside: I really do think there will be space for one-off creative animations, I don’t see that going anywhere. But, it’ll be fewer and it’ll be reserved for the “more talented”. Now, why would people have to set aside their ego? This will be a quick anecdotal look at a project I did at the beginning of the year. 3 weeks before delivery on a 6-month project the client asked to have a certain set of deliverables have quotation marks around the text. The rough re-render sum was ~170 different assets that then had to be placed into 36 different video timelines. This would be a bear in Ae, to open up and edit each composition, render, and then replace in the PrPro timelines. I was put back a little bit by the immovable request the client just threw into the budget with a seemingly small ask; everything had already been rendered. My ego flared at first and I thought “We ALREADY approved this look months ago and doing this is going to take a significant amount of time. Do you know how much this will cost?” But, that was me thinking with my Ae brain. See, we actually built in @cavalry__app and after brainstorming and 2.5 hours we fixed and re-rendered everything. Not only that, but all ~170 renders dynamically rendered to their proper folders. Cavalry is an accessible tool, it’s just under utilized at the moment. Everyone is comfortable with Ae… or at least complaining about how slow it is and not doing anything about it by going to another software. And one main ingredient is API connections… The first time I was introduced to JSON data my brain blew up and I thought “Wait, I can just send this stuff over the internet?” Then I found out Cavalry has and API toolset… AND no-code tools are making building custom apps and data-pipelines easier to build. What happens to the middle of the road studios when one little guy figures out MDAAS (Motion-Design-As-A-Service)? Algo.tv is already cranking ahead. YouTubers want/need lots of motion assets for their daily videos, Fortune 500 companies want mass video systems, social media strategists want high-volume animation content for their daily posts, per-channel/product/client they manage. —— I guess my whole thing — which isn’t profound — is that data is everywhere and as the industry evolves companies/clients are going to want to harness that. One-offs are going to be less relevant, and artists will have to to adapt.