Claude’s new motion design ability

I gave Claude a short brief: make a showreel, as if it were applying for a motion design job. This is the film it came back with.

The brief

Make a dynamic 15-second motion graphics video that shows what an incredible motion designer you are, like it’s your showreel for a résumé. Go all out.

The result

What it gets right

The reel is a list of fundamentals. Timing, spacing, easing, overshoot, follow-through. A junior reel usually shows effects; this one shows the vocabulary underneath them. Asked to prove it was a good motion designer, it went straight to the things a good motion designer is actually judged on.

It is also made in code, not rendered as a finished clip. Every curve in it is a number that can be changed. That matters more than how it looks: it makes the film a draft you can direct, not an image you either accept or regenerate.

What it doesn’t do

The brief asked it to show that it is an incredible motion designer. It answered with a textbook - clean, competent, and entirely about motion itself. There is no idea in it beyond “I know the craft”. No point of view, and no reason for this particular film to exist other than the brief.

That is less a flaw than the honest edge of the tool. The central idea, the taste, and knowing what to leave out still come from whoever writes the brief and decides what stays.

Trying it on real work

A week after this reel, I used the same kind of model, with a design skill, to add the small interactive line drawings now on this site - the tray of case cards on the home page, and a figure for each service.

The first three versions for the home page were well made and wrong: a stack of layers, a product on a turntable, a projection floor. Each took minutes to produce, each passed its own checks, and none of them was right. The fourth - a tray of cards that riffle through on their own - was. The drafts were cheap. Deciding was not.

What this changes for creative work

The first draft is nearly free; choosing isn’t. More of the work becomes direction: briefing, comparing, rejecting, and being able to say why.
Craft literacy matters more, not less. To ask for an overshoot instead of an ease-out, you need to know the difference and when it matters. The people who get the most out of these tools are the ones who could do the work by hand.
The brief becomes the product. A vague brief now gets a confident, polished, generic answer - fast. Only a precise one gets somewhere worth going.
Motion moves into the medium. When animation is code, it doesn’t have to be a video. It can respond to the reader, run live on a page, change with the content. That is a new kind of design, not a faster version of the old one.

Where it leaves the creative director

I don’t think the role shrinks. It moves earlier and gets sharper: defining what good looks like before anything is made, and holding that line when a hundred fast, plausible options arrive at once. The machine can now make the showreel. It still can’t tell you which film is worth making.