I love working on projects that balance creativity and clever engineering…and when the team at Instrument asked me to help build out a full season of content for Nike Kids, it was an easy “oh hell yes.”
The creative direction was already strong, but the challenge was scale: dozens of videos, countless variations, and a tight timeline. My goal was to design a motion toolkit that could not only deliver for this campaign but also become a reusable system for future Nike Kids productions.
The project centered on developing a highly dynamic, fully art-directable motion framework inside After Effects, optimized for editing in Premiere Pro. I built a library of animated title and text components with robust control panels. allowing editors and producers to quickly adjust layout, color, and animation behavior without ever opening the project files.
Each component was structured using expression-driven parameters that governed typography scaling, timing offsets, and motion hierarchy. The idea was to make the system feel “alive,” responsive, and flexible…adapting instantly to new content while maintaining Nike’s kinetic, youth-driven visual language.
To extend that flexibility, I also engineered a dynamic illustration system that could fill, recolor, or outline vector and raster art on demand. The kicker: it worked seamlessly across nearly 300 animated assets. This allowed for an incredible degree of creative freedom without manual intervention saving time, minimizing error, and ensuring total visual consistency.
Some of the cool stuff in action:
Nike Kids’ tone is all about energy, confidence, and play, and the motion language needed to match that spirit. I leaned on the principles of anticipation, overshoot, and rhythmic tempo to give every transition and title a sense of physicality — the motion equivalent of a sprint and a laugh rolled into one.
The system was built not just to animate beautifully, but to empower editors and producers — making motion design scalable and fun. What started as a potential scramble turned into an incredibly smooth process, thanks to a little foresight and a lot of system thinking.
Role:
Art Direction, Motion Design, Video Editing
