Ryan Duggan
I'm the Executive Creative Director at LVLY, a post-production and motion design studio in its fifth decade, woman-owned, with three divisions under one roof: LVLY Studio for CG, VFX, design and animation, LVLY Editorial, and Decibel for sound. I was brought in to art-direct, and also to figure out how a studio like this works with AI, which turns out to be most of the job now.
I've been a creative director since 2015 and in post, animation and motion for about seventeen years. The work has ranged a lot. The Sphere in Las Vegas. 3D billboards in Piccadilly Circus. Live AR and mixed-reality sports broadcasts where actors in mocap suits call the game as cartoon characters. Keynote screens the size of a building, character animation, brand films, the occasional live-action spot directed over Zoom from my apartment.
On AI, since everyone asks. I think it's one tool on the bench next to After Effects, Cinema 4D and Resolve. It gets you sixty-five, seventy percent of the way there, and the rest is still roto, tracking, comping, sound, and someone with taste making decisions. I'm wary of the people saying motion design is finished and wary of the people saying AI is a fad. Both lanes are full. The middle is where the actual work is happening.
Outside the job I've always made things. Sketchbooks, dumb GIFs, painting in Photoshop late at night. With two young kids and a job I care about, that time mostly disappeared for a while, and what AI has given me is a way to keep exploring. So I'm spending a year making short films with it, to see whether you can make something decent rather than more slop. The first one is called Tradecraft and it's about my brother sabotaging my fantasy football team. The films and the breakdowns go up on YouTube as the Year of Shorts.
I write about all of this at Maybe We're Fine, a Substack for people in this industry who miss the way things were and are cautiously hopeful about what's next. And I built Hold State, a Mac app that remembers every AI image and video you make, with the prompt and the tool and the version, so you don't have to.