All our Motion Design Painkillers

Opening After Effects project files and wanting to burn them to the ground because they're so chaotic

Creating 50+ timed text layers by hand because After Effects has ZERO native caption support

Tracking clients in messy spreadsheets with no proper CRM to manage outreach

Spending 20 minutes building a sliding number counter by hand when all you need is a simple number animation

Spending 30+ minutes of your precious time manually animating cryptex style animations

Learning expensive freelance lessons through painful mistakes with no mentor to guide you

Having to manually adjust the workarea bar and enter your render settings each and every time you render a comp

Boring single-color Echo trails with zero creative control over individual copies

Being terrified of reaching out to dream clients with no clue what to say

Building HUD elements manually and recreating the same interface elements from zero on every sci-fi project

Dealing with a world of freelance chaos because you're winging it in your freelance business

Manually creating gradient ramps for blur maps, switching between comps just to adjust focus, and generally becoming annoyed with camera lens blurs in Ae.

Staring at a blank page not knowing what to include in a professional proposal

Having no idea which clients pay on time until they surprise you with a 60-day delay

Running your business in Notion but still exporting proposal PDFs in Illustrator

Creating scope documents outside Notion with PDFs you can't update after sending

Building futuristic UI elements from scratch when clients want "Minority Report" on a stock budget

Following the exact same time-consuming steps every time you need to create a split second zoom effect

Manually creating shape layers for every single word because After Effects has zero native underline support

Having to duplicate layers one by one and calculate complex rotation maths just to rotate layers round a circle in AE

The absolute tedium of splitting paragraph text into lines by hand, repositioning each line manually, and then creating perfectly sized mattes for each manually. Seriously, just automate it.

Scope creep destroying projects because you have no proper SOW defining what's included

Clients requesting changes to stages you thought were finished causing endless revision loops

The ridiculousness of having to use the polygon tool and a bunch of manual steps just to create triangles in After Effects

Writing orbit expressions from scratch with trial-and-error radius values for every single layer

Spending hours tweaking complicated noise patterns and displacement maps

Clients expecting you to write scripts when you have zero copywriting experience

Spending hours making dozens of random geometric shapes with perfect spacing and rotation

Building storyboard layouts from scratch every project with no go-to template

Boring generic drop shadows with zero style options making everyone's work look identical

Building 3D DNA helixes from scratch

The complex and time-intensive way of rendering out multiple sections of the same comp via the render queue settings

Flat lifeless footage needing Instagram-quality color grading when you don't have the skills or time

Spending hours building sci-fi HUD dials with shape layers for 5-second background elements

Creating nulls and parenting layers one-by-one when you just want to slide a group of things off screen

Building the same text animations from scratch every project with no organized library to reuse

Manually creating dozens of HUD elements and graphs when deadlines are tight and it should take minutes

Having to create a retro screen look by hand because the client has been playing too much fallout.

Creating camera rigs manually and trying to remember isometric rotation values for every project

Having to provide the client with an impressive technical logo animation even though their budget is limited.

Having to come up with a unique logo animation when the client just doesn't have the budget

Creating glitch effects for 20+ titles manually and keeping the style consistent across everything

Pasting text that imports with random fonts and sizes that completely destroy your layout

Trying to remember the expression to wiggle along a single axis.

Scrolling through 200-layer timelines clicking one at a time because there's no "select all above" button

Opening Chrome, Googling "lorem ipsum", copy, switch to AE, paste - breaking flow for dummy text

Building glitch effects that don't look cheap when most presets scream "free pack"

Googling "Instagram story dimensions" for the 500th time this year