One toolkit to automate an entire motion design pipeline.
MDKit v6 release video
Context
In early 2022, the motion team at Vidsy was strong but the scale of content production meant even routine tasks multiplied into hundreds of clicks.
Creating compositions, adapting formats, ingesting freelancer projects, prepping deliveries. Each one manageable in isolation.
Collectively, a significant drain on time that should have been spent on the actual work. I built the first version of MDKit to fix that.
Create Comps tab: Sidebar open, help-text visible.
Role
- Workflow analysis
- UX design
- Full-stack development (Bolt CEP, React, TypeScript, ExtendScript)
- Rollout and documentation
Create Formats tab: Sidebar open, help-text hidden.
Solution
- Built one-click composition setup with correct naming, safe-zone guides, durations, and dimensions.
- Automated project ingest: relinking, folder cleanup, duplicate removal, and standardisation across internal and freelancer files.
- Created rapid format adaptation and localisation tools for platform, language, and safety-zone variations.
- Added delivery automation for audio stems, edit files, and archive-ready project exports.
- Designed the UX as a single unified panel so the entire workflow lives in one place.
Internal Edits tab: Sidebar closed, help-text visible.
Impact
Twenty-plus designers use it every working day. Over 1,000 hours saved per year.
It eliminated the inconsistencies between internal and freelance workflows, removed the most error-prone manual steps in the pipeline and became the backbone of Vidsy's motion production process.
MDKit started as a ScriptUI panel. It's been rebuilt four times as the team's needs grew, moving through vanilla JS CEP to React, and the current version runs on React, Tailwind, shadcn and Bolt CEP.
Each rebuild wasn't cosmetic. It unlocked capabilities the previous architecture couldn't support.
Four years in, now on its sixth major version and still the first thing the team opens every day.
The next phase is already in prototype.
A native SwiftUI macOS app that talks directly to After Effects and handles tooling that sits outside what a panel can do. Same pipeline thinking, no longer constrained by one.
