Webbys From Home

It was April of 2020, and it was time for the yearly Webby Awards. But of course, it was also the beginning of COVID. So our frequent partners at the Webby Awards came to us with an brilliant idea of what to do.

What The Webbys didn’t want to do: Make a long livestream nobody tuned into. Be like everyone else. Be boring.

What The Webbys wanted to do: Make a custom show for every winner, including individualized introductions, a custom award screen, their own personal 5 second speech, and let that export from a website for them to post on social media. All of that custom information would only be finalized about a week before showtime. That’s where we came in.

Besides creating all the standard animations you see in the videos, Konrad and Paul developed a way to export 524 custom videos for all the winners in two halves, so that the 5 second speech uploaded to the website could bridge the two. There was no way we had time to export all of these manually, so with some help from the internet, we built a tool for After Effects that could customize sequences, place them in a specified order, and export. Of course, that only worked correctly around 80% of time—for example, names or titles of winners over a certain length would throw off the text design—so we’d have to go in and correct those manually.

It was one of those all-hands-on-deck projects. Late nights and long troubleshooting calls. But the end result was worth it. At that very strange point in COVID, it was nice to change the conversation on the internet, even for only a day.