Seventy-three ways for a scene to enter

The catalogue itself was a real step. Every animation played live in the actual video engine, not a mock-up, on a public animations page and in the editor's new Add animation library, where one click drops a ready-made scene into your film.

Underneath, though, its seventy presets were built on about nine scene types: a statement, bullets, a big number, a counter, a comparison, a chart, a quote, an image and a gallery. Each preset had its own sample copy and mood, but a hook was a statement and a statement always entered the same way. Scroll the page, or watch a film, and the same entrance came back again and again.

The fix was to separate two things we had treated as one: what a scene shows, and how it enters. The how became its own layer, a motion, that can be applied to any scene of the right kind.

Each motion is a pure function of the frame number. Give it frame 12 and it always returns the same position, scale, opacity and blur. That one decision has a big payoff: the preview in your browser and the render on our server produce exactly the same frame, so what you pick in the editor is what you get in the MP4.

The first version shipped 23 motions in two families, and only scenes that asked for a motion used one. Every scene without a motion rendered exactly as before, so no film already in progress changed by surprise.

Later the same day, fifty more motions brought the library to 73, split almost evenly between the two families:

• Text motions animate a headline word by word: rise, pop, typewriter, cascade, blur, flip, wave, glitch, stamp, shatter, elastic, roll-in and more.
• Block motions animate a whole scene: wipes, an iris, horizontal and vertical splits, a curtain, a card flip, a spring, a glide, a perspective tilt and more.

Every one of the seventy presets in the catalogue now carries a distinct motion, so the page reads as seventy real animations rather than seventy captions. Before shipping, we rendered twelve of the new motions on the server and checked that they produced twelve different frames, with no crash.

An entrance is only half of an animation. The other half is where it lands, because that resting frame is what the viewer reads while the voice speaks. Reviewing the library frame by frame, we noticed that the iris settled into a circle that kept the corners of the picture cut off for the whole scene.

We fixed the iris so it opens fully, then made sure no motion could repeat that kind of mistake. An automated check now runs every motion to its held frame and requires a clean finish:

• full opacity
• no leftover blur
• the clip fully open
• position, scale and rotation back to normal

The slow drift we use on still images is the one deliberate exception, since drifting is its job. All 73 motions pass, and a new motion that never comes to rest cannot ship.

A library only matters if films use it. Each motion now carries an energy, from calm and elegant to bold, playful, dramatic or techy, plus a one-line description. The planner, the model that writes each storyboard, receives the whole palette grouped by energy and picks a motion for every scene to match its beat.

We then tested the planner on a realistic product site and graded its picks. When it chose, it chose well, but not every time: sometimes it left the opening hook with no motion at all. So code now guarantees the floor. If a scene has no motion, a problem hook draws from a punchy set, a payoff from a triumphant one, and every other scene from a tasteful, varied set. In the test, every scene got a distinct motion that fit its mood, with no two neighbours alike.

A film now has rhythm. The hook can drop in hard, a quote can fade in calmly, a big number can land with weight, and no two scenes in a row move the same way. Each scene settles on a clean frame before the voice gets to the point, so nothing is half-visible while it matters.

You can browse every motion on the animations page, or make a film and let the planner choose for you.