Work / Featured
Meta Advertising Pipeline: a rebuilt pipeline, and packaging cut from three days to three hours
Project packaging time, cut by over 90%.
Team
A dozen motion designers, junior to senior
I co-led
Motion systems, with Alex Vela leading: the pipeline rebuild, then the tools on top
Decision I owned
Fix it inside After Effects, without changing how anyone animates
Context
At DEPT, I co-led motion systems for Meta's advertising pipeline with Alex Vela, who led the team and supervised the work. The team produced a high volume of After Effects work, and much of it had to be localised for other markets. Before a localisation team could touch a file, a designer had to prepare it: find the layers that needed translating, tidy up everything else and package the project for handoff. In my first three months at DEPT, Alex and I rebuilt the production pipeline, then I built the tools on top of it.
Three days of prep before anyone could translate
- 01Preparing a project for localisation took about three days, and the steps were the same on every file.
- 02That time came out of designers' weeks: packaging was production work, not design, but nobody else could do it.
- 03Localisation teams only needed the translatable text, yet every project arrived with hundreds of layers to wade through.
- 04Any fix had to work inside After Effects, for a dozen motion designers, from junior to senior, without changing how they built their animations.
A rebuilt pipeline, then the tools on top of it
01
Co-rebuild the production pipeline
In my first three months, Alex Vela and I rebuilt the entire production pipeline: file structures, storyboard workflows and packaging processes, so every project followed the same structure.
02
A packaging tool, built for the team
A tool for After Effects, nicknamed Mary Poppins because it tidies up a whole project in one go. It started as a handful of scripts for the slowest steps and grew into a plugin the whole team installed and used.
03
Written with AI, tested on real files
The scripts were written with ChatGPT, then tested and refined against live project files. AI made the scripting fast. The real work was knowing exactly which manual steps to remove and how the designers actually structured their projects.
04
Packaged as a team plugin
The scripts were packaged into one plugin with a simple panel, so a designer runs the whole preparation in one step rather than as a sequence of scripts, and every handoff comes out the same way.
05
Karton: responsive UI animation in After Effects
I also implemented Karton, a responsive UI animation system inside After Effects, which eliminated a custom-coding dependency across the team.
How it works
1
Reads the whole project
The plugin walks every composition and layer in the project, so nothing depends on how carefully a file was organised by hand.
2
Labels and recolours layers by type
Every layer is labelled and recoloured by what it is. Anyone opening the project, designer or translator, can read its structure at a glance.
3
Shies everything except translation layers
Every layer except the ones that need translating is set to shy, so the localisation team opens a project and sees only the text they have to work on.
4
Packages it for handoff
The project is packaged the same way every time, ready to hand to localisation without a designer walking anyone through it.
Result
less packaging time
motion designers use it, junior to senior
team standard since
Why it matters for your team
Almost every creative team has a step like this: repetitive, invisible in planning, and paid for in designer hours on every cycle. It rarely looks big on its own, which is exactly why nobody fixes it.
The Mary Poppins tool was built around one specific pipeline and would not drop into another one as is. What carries over is the approach: depending on how a pipeline works, the same kind of tool can be built around it, especially for localisation.
Finding that step, measuring it and replacing it with a tool your team actually uses is what my Pipeline Audit and Build services do. The audit finds and quantifies the waste in one real pipeline; the build turns the best opportunity into a tool like this one.
