MotionshiftUnlocking AI-powered video & animation.

A person at a laptop showing the Motionshift homepage, “Create winning animations in minutes with AI”, beside a coffee mug.

At a glance

Design thinking: Serve the marketer on a deadline first. Every video starts from a template, so nobody has to animate by hand.

Problem: After Effects could take a year to master, and a 60-second professional video could cost $8,000.
Approach: Continuous interviews and an assumption map set the direction. Beta testers then worked through concrete ad briefs in Maze.
Outcome: A 2,500+ waitlist in three months, 50 beta users and $125K pre-seed. It was paused when co-founders left and funds ran out.

Role: Lucie as co-founder and CEO, covering product, design and marketing, everything but engineering, for fifteen months. The team grew from three to six.
What we designed: User research
Product strategy
AI product design
Usability testing
Visual identity
Pitch deck
Duration: 1 year 3 months
Platforms: AI video editor (web app)
Website and beta waitlist
Brand and social media
Pitch deck

Everyone wanted motion. Nobody had a year to learn After Effects.

Interview synthesis board: user quotes grouped under speed, customisability, easy interface, ad performance and templates.

Assumption map: “Motion and videos are more engaging than static images” branching into marketers making their own 3D videos.

Three findings that set the product’s direction.

Ongoing interviews · assumption map · customer segmentation · primary persona

Animating by hand was the bottleneck.
Motion had to come ready-made, from templates and a motion library.
Evidence
After Effects could take a year to master; interviewees called keyframing labour-intensive.
Non-designers relied on premade templates.
Every video would start from a template.
Evidence
Casual creators struggled to build artwork themselves; premade content was how they got started.
Marketers needed many variations, fast.
Swapping content and resizing for each platform became core editor actions.
Evidence
They struggled to test video variations quickly, and noted an ad must catch attention in its first three seconds.

The decision

Build first for the marketer on a deadline, not the motion designer.

Designers looked like the natural first users, but their expectations of what the tool could do were very high.

Marketers had tried outsourcing, which went over budget, and After Effects, which was too slow to learn. Serving them fitted Motionshift’s aim of making motion and 3D video accessible.

Primary persona sheet for a digital marketer: bio, behaviour, goals, pain points and most used apps.

Backed by Antler to build the product faster.

Antler is a global early-stage investor. It put in the $125K pre-seed round and ran the workshops the team joined. The money went on building faster and getting to market sooner.

The Motionshift team in Motionshift T-shirts with two Antler team members beside an Antler cube.

The first version worked like Canva for 3D motion design.

Users dragged in 3D objects, applied preset motions drawn as custom pictograms, and arranged a scene. Then testers asked for multiple cameras and complex animations, and the editor kept growing.

3D scene editor with a side toolbar for templates, 3D objects and motions, and a timeline below. — 01

Motion library of preset motions with pictograms, beside a Motion panel listing the motions applied to an object. — 02

The pivot

Drop the full timeline. Let text instructions and AI do the animating.

Users wanted complex animations, and that meant a flexible timeline. Two developers and Lucie could not build one.

When AI tools arrived, the editor kept only the essentials, and a timeline came back for an ad’s key sections alone.

Multi-track timeline with motions such as Left & Right, Spin Around and Scale Up stacked per object.

The AI flow, prototyped as a film before it was coded.

The tool wasn’t coded yet, so the flow was storyboarded in After Effects. It turns a video into a template, then swaps the 3D model, colour and footage. That tested the idea before it existed.

Motionshift template editor: a yogurt pot among apricots under “Add Your Flavors”, with assets, texts and a scene timeline.

The template library became the starting point, laid out like Pinterest.

The persona went to Pinterest for inspiration, so the library borrowed its grid. Picking a template opened a stripped-back editor where you change the text, resize for a platform and export.

Motionshift template library: a Pinterest-like grid of video templates for cosmetics, jewellery, drinks and electronics.

Simplified template editor showing a product ad with a size menu for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and other formats.

Beta testers worked through concrete ad briefs, from a drinks can to a necklace.

Keeping testers engaged was the hardest part, so every live Maze test gave them a real ad to make. A rating from 1 to 10 and a ranking of the planned libraries closed each session.

Maze test screen: next task, creating a video advertisement for a new necklace, with a photo of the necklace.

Maze card sorting task: rank the planned libraries of 2D graphics, 3D objects, videos, images, music and animated texts.

Ten adjectives decided the colours.

The moodboard was built on adjectives such as energetic and expressive. Blue carries the optimism and the youthful energy, and pink-violet marks the accents and the creativity.

Schiava Blue#192462
Royal Blue#396BEA
Pink-Purple#BC80F8
Mā White#F5F7FF
Habañero Gold#FFD23C

A sine wave shapes the M, so the wordmark carries motion of its own.

One page to explain a new kind of tool, one button to join the beta.

The hero puts the editor preview in the middle and the roles from the research around it. Every call to action goes to one place, the beta waitlist.

Motionshift website: hero “Create winning videos in minutes with AI” around the editor preview, over further pages.

An honest ending

Motionshift was paused when co-founders left and the funds ran out.

It had won places in soft-funding programmes in Denmark and was close to new funding. Fifteen months of it taught Lucie product, strategy, marketing and design at once.