Composition

Most motion-design work that looks amateur is not badly animated. It is badly staged: small elements floating in the middle of an empty frame, everything the same size, every beat composed identically. Animation cannot fix that — it just moves the problem around.

This is the layer under ae-motion-principles: what the frame looks like when nothing is moving.

The three faults that make work look generic

Check every beat against these before animating it.

1. No focal point. Something must be the thing you look at. The dominant element should cover roughly 25–60% of the frame and sit where the eye lands first. If the biggest thing on screen is 10% of the frame, there is no subject — only furniture.