Snap AWE 2026 Keynote

Client: Snap Inc. Production: FutureDeluxe Role: Technical Director & Motion Designer

For Snap’s AWE 2026 keynote introducing SPECS, I served as Technical Director and Motion Designer on the Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy keynotes, designing and animating motion graphics with various assets from the client while programming a multi-screen Keynote presentation, ensuring seamless delivery across a fast-paced, large-scale live event in Long Beach.

With dozens of animated deliverables spread across multiple artists, production clarity was critical. I built the pipeline and infrastructure the team depended on to stay aligned and deliver: developing a production spreadsheet that unified naming conventions, status tracking, and links across Figma and Milanote, structuring the Figma file for team production, building the After Effects tooling and templates, writing AppleScripts to automate tasks and efficiently respond to client feedback and requests, and directing artists on render specs to ensure assets integrated cleanly into the final presentation.

Production Tooling

Figma Project Setup

With over 100 slides across two keynotes and multiple artists working simultaneously, managing design and client review required a dedicated project setup. I built a Figma plugin that ingests our production spreadsheet CSV and auto-generates individual slide pages with correct naming conventions, each linking back to the client’s script in Google Slides. Artists can immediately start designing within these pages and push finals to a Storyboard page, allowing the team to step through the full presentation in Figma prototype mode without ever opening Keynote

Cross linking between storyboard and individual pages

AE Project Setup

In the same vein, I built an After Effects script that ingests the production spreadsheet and automatically generates compositions for both center and side screens to specs, correctly named, organized, and ready for artists to work in. Eliminating the manual process of parsing spreadsheet data and creating comps by hand removed a significant source of human error and saved approximately four hours of setup time per keynote. This was accompanied by a ScriptUI panel that helps artists upversion their stringout (a section-level preview of the keynote) along with individual screen previews in a 3-up layout, all with automated folder organization.

Optimizing & Splitting Renders for Keynote

A core challenge in our workflow was that artists animated to voiceover for stringout previews, meaning most renders came in longer than needed for Keynote. Replacing media in Keynote resets its existing programming ( transitions, trim points, loop settings) making iterative updates costly.

To keep the presentation lightweight and ensure smooth playback, I built the Queue Segments script, which automatically extracts only the essential in and out moments of each render. This was critical: it kept file sizes manageable, preserved Keynote programming across updates, and gave the team a repeatable, low-friction path from animation to live presentation.