MovieBot

Co-Founder & Senior Product Designer
MovieBot is an AI-powered 3D animation platform that transforms your text into animated video instantly. Simply type a story topic and MovieBot will generate an interactive 3D movie with talking characters based on your prompt. Starting as a part-time consultant, I was hired as a full-time Product Designer and later promoted to Co-Founder and Senior Product Designer.
Overview
Responsibilities
• Product Design
• Product Strategy
• Business Development
• Web Design
• Fundraising
Collaborators
• Ryan Reede (Co-Founder & CEO)
• Tom Suarez (Co-Founder)
• Josh Beeler (Lead Software Engineer)
• Zach Mundt (Software Engineer)
• Josh Rainey (Community Manager)
Objectives
1) Design a mobile app for creating 3D animation.
2) Integrate cutting edge AI to speed up the production process.
Traction
1.7m
Exports
801k+
installs
May '22
Product Launch
35
Updates released
4.5
Average rating
2,649
Discord members

MovieBot Flow

Generate

MovieBot instantly generates 3D animation based on your story topic using generative AI.

Edit

Every video is an interactive remixable 3D world, allowing users to maintain full creative control of their AI-generated videos.

Export & Share

Export and share your videos to YouTube and TikTok in one tap.

The Interface

3D animation is a tremendously complex multidisciplinary art form that has traditionally required a desktop computer & highly technical skills to create. Figuring out how to squeeze what was essentially a Blender lite into a 5-inch smartphone screen was a core design challenge we solved in the following ways:
Generate Screen
The Generate Screen offers an exceptionally simple UI for generating movies. Start by typing a story topic, then choose your characters, voices, a world, and a style for the script. Hit the juicy yellow button to bring your story to life!
Story Editor
Every movie you generate is a 3D scene you can remix in the Story Editor. Swap out your characters, world, and voices. Record your own body animation with ragdoll physics or capture face animation with the selfie cam.

Logo Design

My primary goal for the MovieBot logo was to create something easily identifiable and playful for our younger target demographic. I knew from the start I wanted something that represented a cute moviemaking robot, but finding the exact shape to represent that proved to be challenging. I received feedback from my team that one of my favorite ideas, a camera with a little antenna, looked a bit too similar to a fish. Other shapes were too complex or scary. Ultimately, I explored over 50 concepts before landing on the final rainbow movie clapper (featured above).

Web Design

Setting out to build our website, I was heavily inspired by Apple's elegant pages in the way they highlight key features in a very organized and clear way. On desktop, the home page prioritizes a QR code call to action that links the viewer to download the app.
Insights
Creating MovieBot was an incredibly fun, rewarding, and challenging experience. I learned a few key lessons along the way:
1. Prioritize user feedback
Our product development process was heavily influenced by community feedback, but we didn't always prioritize everything they asked for. We greatly improved the product over time, but I found prioritizing product features within such a wide possibility space of a mobile 3D animation app extremely challenging.
2. Most guests do not want to perform
Earlier versions of MovieBot heavily relied on guests to perform scenes as 3D characters by recording their voice and face. While this concept of movie karaoke ("Movieoke") was cool, we discovered that most people were uncomfortable performing in this way, and we did not see the traction we were hoping for. Pivoting to AI proved to be much more successful for us in terms of the volume of content our guests shared online.
3. Unity is not ideal for designing UI
Creating UI in Unity was a big bottleneck for our team and a constant frustration for me. I spent countless hours working with our engineers creating UI elements that native apps would otherwise get out of the box for free. Our Unity project became a complex mess of prefabs that had to be carefully navigated to avoid stepping on someone else's work. I would recommend building your UI natively if you have the opportunity to do so.
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