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The hard part of 2.5D parallax isn't moving the layers. It's what appears behind them once they separate.
Every layer you cut out leaves a hole in the layer below, and camera movement exposes it. Half the job is painting content that was never in the original image, and making it invisible.
That's why parallax quotes vary so much between studios. You're not paying for animation. You're paying for reconstruction.
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Mux's Creative Director, Rob, had been keeping AI at arm’s length. All he could picture was Will Smith eating spaghetti. Surely it couldn’t be useful in the world of design.
Then he used Claude Code to design and ship a custom skin for Video.js v10. Learn how he went from skeptical to building a live player, with Figma and his design instincts at the center — plus, what he learned along the way.
Give it a read: https://www.mux.com/blog/how-a-designer-learned-to-unsee-will-smith-eating-spaghetti
What happens to a logo the moment you ask an AI to move it? 🌊
I gave ChatGPT my Datum type system, five weights partly filled with water, and asked for a looping GIF where only the tide moves.
First try: it dropped a row, redrew the letters, turned my flat teal into glossy cyan and cycled the whole stack instead of the water.
So I steered it. Only the water line moves, everything else stays locked, and the last frame matches the first. The second try kept all five rows and the type intact, with a seamless 5 second loop built with ffmpeg.
Still to fix: thin seams in the teal at the tide’s peak, and the rows rise in sync instead of rolling like a swell.
Original on the left, loop on the right.
Which of your stills would you animate first, and what are you afraid it would break? 👇
tilt animation