What AI Is Actually Useful for in Motion Design Right Now
AI is everywhere right now, and most of the conversation is about generating images, generating videos, and replacing parts of the creative process entirely.
That’s not how we use it.
At our studio, our work is custom. We design, illustrate, and animate everything ourselves. But AI has become a useful internal tool around the process. We use it to explore ideas faster, solve technical problems, create better references, automate boring stuff, and fix things that would otherwise cost us hours.
These are the ways AI is actually making our work as motion designers easier right now, with real examples from our projects.
- Ideation: When the client doesn’t know what they want
This is where AI helps us the most.
Clients come to us all the time with something super abstract like: “Can you make that a bit more digital but still human?” That’s not their fault. They’re not designers. It’s our job to figure out what that looks like.
Before AI, if we wanted to test five different ideas, we would literally spend days concepting. Trying different colors, trying different styles, building directions we might throw away completely.
Now we create a simple internal reference first. It won’t be perfect. It’s not something we can actually use. The goal is to figure out if it’s going to work or not.
We use it to generate:
- quick internal sketches of technical things we’re not even sure how they look in reality
- moodboards to align on direction before we design
- 10-15 variations of “technical but warm” or “abstract ecosystem” in 30 minutes
It saves us from going back and doing everything manually, and then not using it at all.
- References for specific assets
Sometimes you don’t need to generate an asset in After Effects. You need to understand how that asset actually looks in real life.
We had a tiny boat placed on a surface in a 2D explainer video. Our lead animator and I were staring at it like, “What is wrong with this?”. It was looking like it was floating.
It was just a simple vector file, but we couldn’t solve the contact and angle. So we went into AI, generated a real-life image of how this object would sit on a floor, and then used that to recreate the actual 2D vector graphic in Illustrator and animate it. Just rotating the camera a little bit and placing another element differently fixed it.
That takes a minute, and you don’t use the AI image as-is. You use it as a reference to draw it correctly yourself.
We use this constantly for:
- unusual camera angles you can’t easily stage
- hands holding specific products, with the right grip and perspective
- machinery and product internals
- complicated character poses and silhouettes
- lighting references and perspective references
Sometimes generating an animation reference for something super specific is just not possible with stock. Now we can see how objects actually interact with real environments, and figure out the rest on our own.
- Expressions, scripts and automation
In my opinion, this is the most useful part of AI for motion designers.
We made a whole tutorial around how we combine Claude with After Effects (via a plugin), and we created a cheat sheet for it. Some people commented on Reddit and YouTube: “these things can just be a shortcut, you don’t need AI for that.” Yeah, some can. But some need reasoning. For example, renaming all character layers to have a specific structure.
What I find very useful is that it’s super fast. If you can’t figure something out on your own, you just literally ask the chat.
That might sound obvious, but I remember when I was starting 10 years ago, one little bug in After Effects was just crashing the whole project. I’d spent weeks on this project. I’d type the error number and error text into Google, and nothing would come up. So frustrating.
Back then, you couldn’t magically find answers. You had to dig through Reddit groups, YouTube, articles, even buy whole courses just to fix one tiny error in After Effects. It was not very productive.
Now I can come up with some sort of automation I want, and I don’t have to manually search for five hours. We sometimes take that for granted.
Our workflow is: describe the behavior in plain language, get a starting expression, then debug it together. And use it to clean up and comment old expressions so someone else on the team can actually read them.
Quick note: Adobe is working on an AI assistant in public beta right now. I haven’t tested it. I’m not sure where exactly to try it yet, but it claims to do something very similar to what Claude is doing inside After Effects. Writing and debugging expressions, organizing the project, multi-step tasks from plain language. Worth checking out.
- The AI that’s already inside After Effects and Premiere
This is not another tool you need to download. These are features inside the software that use AI or machine learning behind the scenes. You might be using AI without even knowing it.
Content-Aware Fill in After Effects: Mask the unwanted object and generate a fill layer around it. The AI analyzes surrounding frames and attempts to reconstruct what’s behind it. Very good for unwanted objects, people, equipment in the corner of a shot.
Scene Edit Detection in Premiere Pro: It finds the cut points from one whole video. It can do cuts for you, prepare different subclips, and add markers. I mentioned this in the previous tutorial.
Genuinely, I don’t need the creative experience of manually finding 67 cuts in a video.
- Poses and references for characters
Performance capture really exists. There are tools like Runway Act-One where you can film footage, add a character, and it mimics what you’re doing. Which is great.
I personally don’t use it that often, because most of the time when we’re working on explainer videos we need either a reference of some super specific motion of what the character is doing, or a reference for the design, or something related to physics and the way objects behave in real environments.
Sometimes when the movement is more complex, reference footage is ideal so you can animate it and make sure it’s natural. And sometimes the camera angle is a bit weird, or the proportions of the character are different, so you can’t imagine how the character is going to look in this weird pose.
That’s where we use AI. Not to animate for us, but to see silhouette, weight shift, limb placement, and how one pose could transition to the next. Then we animate it properly ourselves.
- Upscaling, denoising, and sharpening
Last time we were filming intros for our video courses, all the shots were ready, and then I figured out I used some weird setting on the camera. It was all crap. We couldn’t even use any of it. And I’d spent the whole day recording them.
AI can help you denoise and upscale these videos. It sounds amazing, but keep in mind: if the footage is awful, upscaling will cost you some money. It’s not “I can upscale 20 videos for five bucks.” At the end, we decided to reshoot those, because it was super expensive. If I’d paid a couple extra bucks, I could have easily saved myself a whole day of filming again.
Another real use case I can’t show: it was an After Effects project with a bunch of textures and effects. All characters had separate sets of textures on each body part. Extremely hard to work with, took ages to even preview in After Effects, let alone render.
So we decided to just render in lower quality and then upscale to 4K with AI. For context: the lower version is rendering for a couple of days, and we render in sections. I can’t even imagine what the 4K version is going to need in terms of power and days to render. That’s going to be a huge help for us. Otherwise, we’re just going to lose a couple of days, and I’m not even sure the hardware is going to be able to take it.
Before you re-render for 6 hours or re-shoot, try fixing it.
My opinion on AI is pretty simple: just use it.
I see a lot of creatives trying to stay away from it because they’re scared it’s eventually going to take their job. For me so far, it has done almost the opposite. It just makes my job easier. It removes repetitive work I never enjoyed doing anyway. It gives our designers better references. It helps us solve technical problems faster. It can save us hours of rendering, reshooting, searching, and troubleshooting.
And we still get to do the part we actually became motion designers for. Drawing and animating and making creative decisions.
Instead of being scared of it, ask yourself: how can AI make my job easier? Because right now, that’s where it’s really useful.
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