Introducing Fastbreak

Why am I doing this?

For roughly 8 years I worked as a motion designer/animator. 

I was lucky to be surrounded by incredibly talented people at places like Brand New School and The Mill, and creating video campaigns for companies like Google, Coca-Cola, and IBM. 

It was fun work. 

After Effects was, and still is, the go-to software for most motion designers. It was a tool I proudly spent years mastering. The learning curve is steep, because it does a whole-lot. Its user-base and use-cases seem infinitely broad. 

Those brands (above) aren’t listed to impress. The reality is, producing rich video has mostly been out of reach unless you had a large budget.

Companies without large budgets to spend, like startups, need to be creative. And they are.

Instead of relying on a big bang launch to highlight new product features quarterly, maybe yearly, many have adopted the "Always be Launching" philosophy–building trust by showing steady improvements over time. And the product demo today is far more than an educational "how to" video. It's a go-to-market strategy–thanks to tools like Screen.Studio, Loom, or Cap that make it easier to produce, and more enjoyable to watch.

Sitting through a product demo requires viewers to care in the first place.

For my last startup I created dozens of personalized videos (manually) for each recipient with very little engagement. The one thing I learned through this was that while demos can be entertaining (I hope mine were), their main use-case is nurturing or educating users. It's not for the top of the funnel, getting them excited about you, purely based on your message and value. 

It's not about anticipation.

I've been obsessed with this idea of: would it now be possible to solve this problem of creating stunning promo videos. 

So, I started to explore ways of figuring it out.

What's the problem I'm solving

I truly believe that the way we communicate online has changed–with an emerging need for something faster, clearer, and more expressive. 

I got into Motion because it says more than a static image—it carries emotion, not just information. Just like reading between the lines is about finding nuance and meaning, the way one frame moves to the next can change how you feel—happy, tense, uneasy.

This makes Video the language of attention. 

But the tools never caught up. Even now, they’re built for pros—either too complex to learn or too flexible to use without experience. Choice feels empowering for everyone at first, but like putting yellow text on a white background, it can quickly backfire. Shoutout to Yale :)

So I started asking: what if AI could help?

Why now?

The AI

By training the model on professional content, inserting the proper guardrails, and providing descriptive meta data, the AI is able to make creative calls on pace, emotional state, and function.

The basics

If you think about animation, there are a total of four core transitions: position, rotation, scale, and opacity. It's the layering of these transitions, and the shifting from one to the next, that give it it's complexity and personality. 

Spreading the functionality of a tool, like After Effects with its broad use-cases and users, does not guarantee a successful outcome. Honing in on one specific use-case, and with a focus on craft, that will.

Code replacing UI

With the advent of WebGl we've been seeing more and more animation on web. When Airbnb first launched Lottie back in 2017, After Effects (AE) was still the prerequisite. You turned your AE Compositions into json data, that you could then embed anywhere on your website or app. Now, that prerequisite no longer exits. Code is circumventing that.

The market

While tools like Cursor, Bolt, Lovable are making it easier for ideas to get built, it puts more emphasis on go-to-market. How can teams attract an audience, when that audience has an abundance of options, and one where waiting one week might shift the entire paradigm.

Teams will need a way to get their messages out the door faster, and in sophisticated ways.

This is just the start, much more will follow. I know this will be a long journey and I'm excited to share my learnings and thinking as I make progress.

Today, we are starting to accept teams and companies to our private alpha. If you are interested in joining early and influencing the direction of Fastbreak, sign up here and follow on LinkedIn..