Oxenfree 10 Years
Project details
Client:
Oxenfree Film & Motion
Creative Direction:
Kenneth Hendren, Kyle Harter
Design + Animation:
Kenneth Hendren
Technical Animation Lead:
Kyle Harter
Tools:
After Effects, Expressions, VS Code, Render Tokens, MOGRTs, JSON, Extendscript
Good friends at Oxenfree Film & Motion needed a cohesive motion design system to support content for their “10 Years of Oxenfree” milestone that celebrated both their legacy and their future. Fellow motion designer Kenneth Hendren and I jumped at the opportunity to build a motion system that could operate in lockstep with a larger design system. Together, we shaped the look and feel, defined the motion principles, and produced a robust toolkit of After Effects files and MOGRTs for both 16×9 and 4×5 formats. Kenneth led design and animation, while I focused on technical animation, custom tooling, and MOGRT development, collaborating closely to establish both the creative direction and the system’s underlying infrastructure.
The primary challenge was translating motion principles into reusable editorial assets. Through close collaboration with Creative Director Ben Gill, we clarified motion’s role within the design system, ensuring the solution was clear, actionable, and production-ready.
Behind the Scenes
Motion Principles
We began our journey by conducting an audit of Oxenfree’s motion footprint across their projects and website. Working alongside Ben Gill, we honed in on key terms that were important to the Oxenfree team. We landed on the words tactile, depth, and realism. These key words called back to Oxenfree’s approach to crafting brand films for their clients. With creative direction locked in, we iterated through several rounds of motion tests that resolved in these core motion principles that would serve as our North Star throughout creative execution.
Toolkitting
Building a useful and efficient toolkit takes both a systemic and programmatic mindset. This was my time to shine, as creating structure and opening up the expression editor in After Effects is what gets me up in the morning. Developing a toolkit that scales to 16x9 and 4x5 aspect ratios comes with a whole host of challenges. Some of those challenges are reducing or eliminating redundant work along with providing the end user, the editors in this case, with the minimum amount of controls to make the most work while remaining efficient. We solved these challenges by building modular component comps for media replacement and text in After Effects that could be used across the various deliverables. Leveraging a bit of javascript to build dynamic rigs along with intentional responsive-design time placement helped us to build a bulletproof and scalable toolkit for the Oxenfree team.
Essential Controls
It’s easy to work in a vacuum when you’re toolkitting in After Effects, so it can become even easier to overlook the user experience of the editor in Premiere Pro. When developing systems for a team, I like to put myself in the eventual editor’s seat. The typical questions that I ask myself are “Are there too many controls here? Do I even know what these controls do? Why does this control not do anything when I interact with it?”. With that in mind, I collaborated directly with Ben Gill to provide only the controls his team needed and nothing more. His team was able to focus on the edit, while not worrying about all of the buttons and sliders in the mogrts, and deliver all of the cuts on time for their content delivery schedule.
Custom Tooling
While Kenneth was getting to work on the designs and motion tests for Oxenfree, I was left to my own devices in creating workflow tools that would contribute to efficiently building out this motion design system. I saw a need for three areas where custom tooling would be helpful to our workflow-naming/organization, centralized bezier ease values, and an easy-to-implement render pipeline. By incorporating the flexibility of JSON files, native After Effects render token functionality, and nifty Extendscript logic, we were able to cut down on tedious tasks and maintain peace and calm throughout the process. I’ve written a longer post with a companion video that you can see here.
