Google Cloud Next '25
Project details
Client:
Studio:
Sparks
Creative Direction:
Kait Robison, Lindsey White
Art Direction:
Matt Nelson
Executive Producer:
Rachel Heitzer
Motion Lead:
Dustin Robison
Motion Guidelines:
Matt Nelson, Kyle Harter
Animation:
Kyle Harter, Nicolas Donatelli, Matt Nelson, Jorge Perez, Allan Roysdon, Fabiana Daly, Paul Tobias, Steve Burgess, George Mentchoukov
Tools:
After Effects, Gif Gun, Flow, Render Tokens, Cavalry, Trapcode, Element 3D
For Google Cloud Next '25, Google was looking to elevate it's production value from previous years' events. I teamed up with the studio Sparks to help out with motion guidelines development for the event's two primary keynotes as well as provide animation support in the weeks leading up to the live event.
Working alongside Art Director Matt Nelson, we built out a full system of motion guidelines that would serve as our north star when creating assets to program both keynotes. I was responsible for iterating through 15 categories of assets that would live in our toolkit library. No detail or idea was left not thought of. Everything from how we ease our animation curves, to how treat our typography animation, and all the way to how we incorporate 3D space in our 2D design was included in the final package we shared with our animation team. More on that below.
Throughout production, we worked side by side in building content that would stretch across 9 screens, including a floor screen, that would fill up just over 2+ hours of stage time. I would field my shot tasks from the motion lead, and apply everything we built in the motion guidelines process into action. My shot total tallied up to 37 shots with 20 of them making the final cut to be seen live. One of the most challenging aspects of the production process was the workflow. We had a template equipped with a pixel map from the AV company for the event to ensure consistency from our After Effects comps all the way through to the stage screens. With roughly 11 deliverables for each shot, I templated all of my output modules and created custom render tokens to automatically direct my renders to their specific folders with way less clicks than I would have needed originally.
MOTION GUIDELINES
Motion Toolkit
The final motion toolkit consisted of a series of toolkit compositions, example use cases, and a detailed guide on how to use the assets, do's/dont's, and best practices. This After Effects file served as the starting point for every animator to use when beginning on their assigned shots. In order for this toolkit to be scalable and flexible for every artists to use, I created a series of text layer rigs, gradients rigged with essential properties, and easy to drag-and-drop media replacement properties.
Easing
Anyone who is familiar with motion design or animation, knows how important ease curves are for communicating intentional motion. We needed to have a cohesive set of animation curves for different moments in order to prevent disrupting the viewers' experience. Through testing, Art Director Matt Nelson came up with the ease curves that we would use for animating in, between, and out of elements on screen. It was paramount that the animation read well on giant screens so we aligned on an extreme ease-in as well as an extreme ease out when elements animated off screen. Animating between elements resulted in the peak of the motion being slightly before halfway of 2 keyframes.
Media Replacement
Media replacement is by far one of the more powerful features of essential properties in After Effects. I knew we were going to be leveraging a ton of footage and stills throughout the keynotes, so I took it upon myself to build a versatile precomp rig that could be scaled for 2D/3D space, animate the container the media lived in, and give the user the opportunity to have rounded corners or not with the container. For the motion guideline process, I added in a dropdown control to choose between the 9 shades of the Google Gray as well as the option to turn off/on the wireframe placeholder for flexibility to solve the various asks that trickled in from creative.
Automation
On the heels of leveraging media replacement in our powerful precomp, I knew it was going to be painful to be able to quickly populate any more than 1 image at a time. We needed to save clicks and time with the tight deadlines so I dug into my coding bag of tricks. With the power of code and automation, I wrote an automation script in VS Code to speed up this very process. This script worked by way of the user first selecting the precomps in their composition in the order they'd like the media to be populated and then selecting the same amount of media items in the project panel that corresponded to the same order they selected their precomps. This workflow tool helped to speed up a quick swap of 1 image on a precomp as well as 20-30 pieces of media when we were in our photo universe.
