Daniel Allison
Motion Designer and Video Editor
Recently, I've come to discover that there's an equal level of excitement and patience required to learn a new language.
As a creative in the motion design space, AI-generated assets are slowly becoming part of my day-to-day design process, whether it's brainstorming a new idea, fleshing out an existing one, or expanding on storyboard ideas.
AI is a tool, and every creative knows that a tool that's useful needs to be studied. You need to practise with it as much as you would with every other tool that's relevant to your creative process so it can help you produce the best results possible.
AI prompting is one of those skills that needs to be studied because the past couple of weeks have shown me that it is easier to pick up a new language on Duolingo than to give an AI a set of instructions and have it give you an excellent result.
No. That outcome usually arrives when you're almost burning through the last of your credits, the ones you spent your last month's salary on.
My goal this year with AI has been to break that uncanny valley barrier. I want people to look at my work and find it indistinguishable from real-life subjects. This means paying attention to every micro-gesture, expression, and piece of body language there is.
These are the languages I tend to infuse into the prompt box so that when something comes out the other end, it is at least impressive.
Like this little video below, where towards the end, the character on the sofa relaxes her hand onto one of the throw pillows.
Bellissima!
It's the little victories for me.
I know there's this whole debate online about how AI should feel like AI and shouldn't have to feel human. Otherwise, why use it, right?
Well, I'm of the opinion that pushing a tool to the very limits of its capabilities is the best proof that a tool truly has limits. And when it comes to AI, we've not even begun to scratch the surface yet.
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What if booking a restaurant didn’t require sending 5 DMs and waiting for a reply?
That was the problem behind this NexTable piece.
I didn't want to make another product video where a UI appears on screen, gets animated for 30 seconds, and disappears.
The challenge was simple:
How do I make someone feel the frustration of the old experience, understand how NexTable solves it, and remember the product afterward?
So I built the video around a simple visual progression:
Frustration → Discovery → Booking → Real-world use.
The opening uses an AI-generated live-action scene to establish the frustration before NexTable even appears.
Once the product enters, I switch to UI animation and let the interface do the explaining. The search-to-booking flow is animated step-by-step so the viewer can understand the product without having to think about it.
For the transitions, I used match cuts to connect the different stages of the story instead of treating each shot like a separate scene.
Then I brought in actual live-action footage of someone opening NexTable at the end.
That was intentional.
After showing the product through motion and UI, I wanted to finish by putting it back into the real world.
Even the audio was treated as part of the design. I edited the background music around the animation and adapted the AI voiceover for a more natural Nigerian delivery.
The result is a product video that isn't trying to impress you with motion for motion's sake.
Every visual decision has a job:
make the problem recognizable.
make the product understandable.
make the solution feel easy.
That is the kind of motion design I want to keep making.
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I made a full product video for a brand that doesn’t exist.
No brief.
No assets.
No feedback loop.
Just an idea, and the responsibility to execute it.
And it exposed everything.
No stock footage to fall back on, so I built my own B-roll.
No UI was handed to me, so I figured it out.
No one telling me what’s “good enough.”
Just me vs the work.
It was uncomfortable.
Frustrating.
At some points, I wanted to drop it.
But I didn’t. I couldn't.
Because I realized something:
Waiting for permission is the easiest way to stay average.
So I kept going, refining, adjusting, fixing, until it finally clicked.
The pacing became clearer. The sound made my feet tap. The voice felt human. Everything fell into place.
The result is Vantage,
a web app concept for creatives ready to move from freelancing to running structured studios.
It’s not perfect.
But it’s real.
And more importantly, it exists.
Create like nobody’s coming to save you.
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Recently, I worked on this project for HUMB Africa.
It was an interesting process diving into Figma and building the storyboard from there. After that, it was all about bringing everything together to communicate the right message, from tone and sound design to background music. I also used match-cut transitions to move seamlessly between scenes.
The client was really impressed, and so was their target audience on X.
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