I designed and animated a social ad for WatchUp, a full-stack observability platform for engineering teams, running just over a minute in 16:9 for paid social placement. I built the illustrations in Illustrator, then brought everything into After Effects to animate, working in a clean, Apple style mograph approach with motion graphic recreations standing in for live footage. The ad opens on the pain point, the chaos of scattered errors, latency issues, and infrastructure blind spots that engineering teams deal with day to day, before shifting into what WatchUp actually does and how it brings error tracking, API monitoring, and infrastructure alerts into one dashboard. Voiceover carries the narrative through each beat, while WatchUp's green accent tone anchors the palette throughout, keeping the piece feeling premium, calm, and confident rather than chaotic like the problem it's solving.
Process
Before opening any software, I mapped out the ad's narrative arc: pain point, what WatchUp is, and how it works. Since this was a social ad, I kept the structure tight so the hook landed fast and the value prop was clear well before the one minute mark.
I storyboarded the ad in After Effects, blocking out the three act structure (pain point, product, solution in action) frame by frame. This let me pace the voiceover against the visuals early and figure out which beats needed motion graphic recreations of live footage versus pure animation.
I built out the vector illustrations in Illustrator, designing everything around WatchUp's green accent tone so the palette stayed consistent from the first frame to the last. I kept shapes clean and geometric to match the Apple style mograph direction, calm and premium rather than busy.
In After Effects, I animated the illustrations and built motion graphic recreations standing in for live product footage, dashboards, alerts, and monitoring views recreated as smooth, simplified animations rather than screen recordings. This kept the visual language consistent throughout instead of cutting between real UI and animation.
Once the VO was recorded, I synced the animation timing to the read, adjusting pacing so each visual beat landed exactly where the script called it out, keeping the pain point, product, and solution flow feeling natural rather than mechanical.
I did a final pass on color grading, transitions, sound effects and overall rhythm, tightening timing where needed and exporting in 16:9 optimized for paid social placement.
Tools
Storyboard