A Scale Story
Client: Snap, Inc
Role: Co-Creative Director, 2D/3D Motion Design
Executive Producer: Kyle Thompson
Technical Director: Ben Pococha
Co-Creative Director: Ryan DeCarlo, Marcus Herring
Producers: James Howell, Ashlee Buss, Brian Butcher,
Brooke Partain, Maria Faxas-Lawrence
Editor: ZaK Kinzinger
2D Leads: Marcus Herring, Ben Pococha, Ryan DeCarlo
2D Artists: Jeff Jip Jeong, Denis Ogorodov, Sean Dowey, Jonathan Minaya, Jessica La, Tim Williams, Nate, Jay, Sean H, Justin B, Amanda, Dathan, Thomas Bailey, Luca Cioci, Jesse Kiewiet, Dom Soo, Kevin Esckew, Cameron Burr, Sherif Higazi
Creative Services/Vault: Abby Rogers, Kira Martins, Michael Lipton, Selah Green
3D Artists: Eric Ramen, Faraz Abbasi, Ryan DeCarlo
Background
Snap Partner Summit is the company's biggest stage of the year, where Snap shows its partner ecosystem, creator tools, and AR platform to the people who build and pay on it. The 2023 summit was a live, giant-screen keynote in LA, streamed globally. No room to be rough. I came on to co-creative direct the motion.
Problem
A keynote this size isn't a design problem, it's a scale problem. 400+ slides across a massive screen setup, hundreds of Snap assets to place, a full design team working in parallel, and one requirement under all of it: every frame had to look like it came from the same place, and survive last-minute changes on a live clock. Build that many slides by hand and two things break: the look drifts, and it can't take the changes that always land the night before.
Challenge
The screen size made rendering brutal. A six-second update could take 40 to 50 minutes to render, and the connection between LucidLink and the artists' machines would drop mid-process, killing renders we couldn't afford to lose. Every change cost time the schedule didn't have, and the content kept moving right up to the wire.
Approach
So we built the system before we built the design. We broke every scene into separate elements, so any piece could be re-rendered or swapped without rebuilding the whole thing, and stood up a motion system the entire design team could work inside, keeping the Snap aesthetic intact no matter who was animating. That's what held 400+ slides to one voice and let us absorb constant late changes without blowing the timeline. Re-renders dropped from 40–50 minutes to 10–15. On a live keynote clock, that's the difference between shipping and not.
Two highlights sat on top of the system work. A Snap x DJ Kygo collaboration brought Snap AR into the live music space, a different kind of concert experience built for the stage. And a Snap x Coca-Cola activation turned a vending machine into an AR experience, letting people dispense and customize a drink in augmented reality.
Making-Of Snap Summit
ADDITIONAL VIDEOS WITHIN SNAP SUMMIT
TBA
Results
The keynote streamed globally from LA to roughly 30,000 viewers and ran clean, live. The motion system held across 400+ slides and a full team of designers, kept the Snap look consistent under constant change, and cut render times by more than half and built to survive exactly the kind of last-minute chaos a live keynote throws at you.
SNAP X KYGO