2023

Automation, workflows, and Motion Storyline

Where Motion Storyline fits in

Three common approaches taken in development are include using templates, hiring out custom development, and using automatic generation sometimes created by A.I.

While templates can look flashy and promise to be an out-of-the-box solution, they reveal weakness over time when trying to adapt them from a general purpose use to a more specific use case. 
Full automation (which can be done with A.I.) is getting more powerful but in general doesn't necessarily provide a finished, polished end result on it's own. In practice it can be much more effective when used as a tool for a human expert, saving them hours to complete tasks by doing redundant parts of the task and suggesting possible results, and letting the expert pick and choose any parts they like and taking over for parts the A.I. got wrong. 

Custom building is a tried and true approach, but if new technology or smarter approaches can reduce any build time and costs, to stay competitive it is always a good idea to reduce costs if there are no significant disadvantages or side effects. Sometimes these are not immediately apparent - for example a fascinating development building upon templates is no-code. These tools are great and just like templates save a huge amount of time, but as soon as you need to do something outside the capabilities of the tool you may face the problems of needing to go to custom building but not being able to properly or easily adapt the project built on a template or a no-code tool using a custom building approach. 

Unfortunately if find yourself in this situation it might be very common to find a developer or shop that would prefer to rebuild the project from scratch. This can be avoided if you know your use case and match it to the template or no-code tool (or technology stack, in general) and don't need to go outside their limitations, and no-code tools continually grow more powerful and cover more edge cases, but business innovations also continually grow into new areas as well.
Motion Storyline is intended to be used with existing technology and not replace a system that already works, but at the same time provide enough technology that it can still work on it's own if there were no pre-existing system for it to work with. Automations and integrations include Notion, Figma and Netlify.
  • Figma for design system tokens
  • Notion for internal content writing and organizing
  • Netlify for hosting - edge caching makes it the most competitive option for technical SEO
Motion Storyline builds a pattern based template by combining design settings (or tokens) with pre-built components, similar to Canva.
If you wish to integrate with a current website using your own set of technology, this is done by using Motion Storyline to export a blog, technical documentation, or series of landing pages. This can be deployed on Netlify and placed as a subdomain of your website url, or nest the exported folder in your project and linking to them. This process is not without it's own set of problems and will constantly be built on and improved if possible.

A.I. is good at working with structure, which is a fundamental part of Motion Storyline. For example, by default video recording is recommended as a structured project (see documentation). A common use case for structure is taking a pre-recorded video conversation and breaking it into structured topics (the A.I. can do this with high accuracy results) and breaking down chunks for various social media posts or blog style posts. Another use case would be to turn post format into an animated promotional video arranged by feature topics - if you have set up your project in the recommended way or use A.I. to create topics than you can do this by allowing content slots and animating the transitions (which can in turn pull from design settings). 

Let's compare that to a common "Create videos from a podcast" SaaS product. These pull in some content, give you some animated background video and background music options, and overlay the podcast audio. Throw it up onto YouTube and you now have your podcast on YouTube. Which is great.

Motion Storyline actually takes the topics of the talking points from the podcast (and omits the full content), and accompanying visual if available and creates a promo that actually makes sense as a teaser for listening to the podcast. The difference would be like if you have ever seen a movie trailer preview that was actually just a 2 minute clip taken out of the movie vs watching an actual trailer edit, which is much more exciting and can tell the story from an overview perspective.

Topic breakdown can be useful in both directions - building by topic can be a great internal organization tool, but also has some internal process implications - for example in recording videos, recording smaller chunks by topic makes editing mistakes and making updates possible or easier in a new way because it is not necessary to re-record an entire video, just that particular section. 
Not that anyone needs A.I. to create project structure, it's just a complexity to sweep under the rug. Content creation is hard and creators have enough to worry about already.