WTF is a Motion Kit, and how do I make one?

What's a Motion Kit? We're glad you asked. Motion Kits are the animated graphics packages Mochine creates for you, based on your brand and your instructions.

Good graphics take a lot of pieces: a color palette, fonts, a logo, visual treatments, and motion presets. A Motion Kit combines them into a library of eight animations:

• Titles
• Transitions
• Quotes
• Kinetic word stacks
• Stat callouts
• Bullet lists
• Lower thirds
• Captions

Here's an example of what an Apple Motion Kit might look like, using liquid glass.

So how do you make a Motion Kit for your brand? There are a few ways. Let's walk through them.

Start with your website

Every new Motion Kit starts in the brief panel in Mochine. If you have a strong, well-designed brand, the easiest approach is to plug in your website. Mochine checks out the site and pulls out your colors, fonts, and logo.

Want a Motion Kit for a sub-brand or a campaign? Give Mochine that site instead. Whatever page you feed Mochine, that's what it treats as your brand.

Or describe the look

Don't have an established brand? Describe a look and feel instead. Be as concrete as you can, and skip generic adjectives. "Cardboard cutouts with hand-drawn text" works better than "fun and creative."

Here's an example of a Motion Kit based on that prompt.

Contrast that with this prompt, which asked for 80s retro graphics.

You can use the description even if you've given Mochine your website. Describe what your site doesn't show, like how your brand should move:

• Pace. Calm or punchy.
• Entrances and exits. Soft fades or hard cuts.
• Energy. How loud the whole thing should feel.

Bring a logo and fonts

Describing your brand? You can still provide a logo and pick fonts. SVG is best, but a PNG at a good resolution works too. Name any font in Google Fonts and Mochine pulls it in for you.

Approve, then build

Mochine shows you an overview first: the palette, the type, the logo, and a one-line read of the look and feel. Give it a thumbs up and Mochine gets to work. Building your custom Motion Kit takes a few minutes. The lower third shows up first, and the other graphics follow quickly after.

That's it. Your custom Motion Kit now applies to new Mochine videos by default.

Putting it to work

A few tips for using your Motion Kit in your videos:

• Ask for it. To use a Motion Kit on a video, ask for it to be applied.
• Name the graphic. To insert or change one, say which. "Add a lower third to the beginning of the video." "Use the stat callout when I'm talking about ROI."
• Colors and fonts are kit-wide. Change either one and it applies to the whole Motion Kit, not just one video.
• Start fresh instead of stacking. You can tweak any Motion Kit. But if the overall direction is right, try creating a new Motion Kit rather than stacking a pile of revisions on top of each other.

Borrow one of ours

We've got some fun things coming up next week, including a Motion Kit gallery, where you can browse pre-made Motion Kits like the examples above. Did you make something awesome? We'd love to see what you've been working on. Reach out and let us know about it.