A Type Story
Studio: Framestore
Role: Lead 2D Motion Design: designed the typographic motion system
Background
Gatorade's latest campaign put type at the center. FOREVER. ATHLETE. The words weren't supporting the film, they were the voice of it, riding live-action sport across every format the campaign touched.
Framestore brought me on to design the system: a scalable typographic motion language that could carry that voice from the :30 down to every social cut.
Problem
Type has rhythm. An edit doesn't care. Every cut came in at a different length, and the type had to live inside all of them, never rushed, never dragging, always landing like it was cut for that exact shot. Pace it wrong, and the words stop feeling like a voice and start feeling like a caption.
Challenge
Animating live type at campaign scale is brutally manual. The standard route, convert text to outlines, animate point by point, locks every decision the moment you commit, and this campaign needed the opposite: a system that could absorb new edits, new lengths, and new copy without rebuilding from scratch each time. Exploration had to happen up front, fast, before any direction locked.
STAGE ONE: PRODUCTION
Approach
I started wide, a run of motion variations across the logo, the lockups, and the type itself. The expected hero was the lightning bolt. It wasn't. The energy lived in the letterforms. How the words moved is what carried the campaign. Explore wide, find where the energy actually is, commit. Then I built the system around it.
The real enemy was the edits. Every cut came in at a different length, and type is rhythm, too fast and it's a caption, too slow and it's a funeral. So instead of animating to each edit, I put speed-ramp controls right into the presets. Edit comes in short, the ramps flex. Comes in long, the ramps flex. The type fits the cut, and I never touch it again.
Then the part I love: instead of rigging words, I rigged the alphabet. Most of the letterforms, built as presets, animated once. When the client came back with new copy, and they always come back with new copy, nothing got re-animated. The word got assembled from letters that already knew how to move. The most manual job in motion design, turned into spelling.
Socials
:30 Spot
Results
One system, every output. The type carried from the :30 through socials, product cuts, and logo lockups, same voice at every length, no rebuilds. And that's the line I use for this one: the system wasn't just scalable across formats. It was scalable across words.