Facebook 2017 Year In Review

In 2017, I had the opportunity to help out Buck Design with rebuilding and enhancing their workflow for their Facebook Content Films projects.

This tool would analyze an AE project, run a pre-flight check to alert the user of any potential issues, and then export data from the project for Facebook to insert user content into the animation and render the whole thing.

The pre-flight component of the tool would use a list of potential issues (categorized into ‘errors’ and ‘warnings’), and show the user a list of all layers or comps that triggered each warning. They’d be able to double-click on a specific item to jump directly to the layer in its comp, where they could resolve the issue promptly and continue export.

The export stage requires a lot of iteration over AE properties, as this is a serializing task; look at everything in the AE project, and export it as plain data matching specifications from engineers at Facebook.