Referencing

Referencing means other Cavalry scene (.cv) files can now be imported as ‘Assets’ and then used in the same way as a ‘Pre-Comp’. This removes bottlenecks by enabling multiple artists to collaborate on a project and work on individual tasks in parallel speeding up the production pipeline.

Referencing can also be used as a way to ensure consistency across projects where the same source assets can be referenced within multiple Scenes.

Tracking tool

It’s now possible to track flat surfaces (planes) in video footage and overlay graphics/animation by using a Corner Pin Shape — useful for common tasks like screen replacement.

Luminance Blur

One of the 11 new Filters shipping with Cavalry 2.5 is Luminance Blur which means a Layer can be blurred based on the luminance values of another. In the example above, the high luminance (bright) values of a Multi-Point Gradient Shader are being used to blur the text.

Export to Project

A new ‘Export to Project’ command has been added to the File menu. This exports the Scene along with any connected Assets to a new Project directory which can be used for archiving or sharing Scenes.

Layout Group — Wrapping

Layout Groups now support wrapping and new spacing modes expanding the possiblilties for creating responsive templates.

Spherise Filter

The Spherise Filter can be used to map an input Shape onto a sphere that can be rotated creating a faux 3d effect. Use the visbiltiy settings to reveal the inside of the sphere and add lighting effects including shadow and bump.

Not forgetting:

• Drag/drop reordering for lists including Arrays.
• New Bit Depth options for ProRes (macOS only) and PNG rendering.
• Improvements to Pre-Comp Overrides and Components.
• Several updates to the JavaScript APIs.
• Shortcut Manager improvements.
• Plus many more enhancements and bug fixes.

Check out the full Release Notes.

Download

Download the installers via your account and give Cavalry 2.5 a try today.

What’s new in Cavalry 2.5? was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Maria Cruz is a Denver based Brazilian creative, art and music lover, with a strong background in animation, design, and storytelling. With experience at top-tier studios, she has contributed to high-profile projects for clients such as Google and Airbnb, balancing creativity with technical skill. Beyond production work, Maria is passionate about education and building community, sharing her thoughts with over 8,000 followers on LinkedIn.

AJ: Many thanks for taking the time to talk to us today Maria. Can you tell us a little about your background and your journey in motion design?

MEC: I’ve always been a creative at heart. Drawing and coming up with silly stories since I can remember. My background is in graphic design, and I’ve been working in the creative industry for over 12 years. My journey into motion design began about eight years ago, driven by an inner desire to explore something new after years as a graphic designer. At the time, I had no idea what motion design truly entailed, but as I discovered its possibilities, I felt an instant connection. It was like coming home — reconnecting with an early passion for animation and storytelling that had shaped my creative thinking long before I even realized it. From that moment on, I started teaching myself how to bring designs to life and never looked back.

AJ: How would you describe your design aesthetic?

MEC: I try to return to the fundamentals — using simple geometric forms, bold colors, and a process of stripping back visual complexity only to reintroduce it with intention. Simplicity is a powerful way to express ideas and concepts. I often reference the foundational principles of animation and experimental animation works from the early 1900s. At the same time, I’m drawn to vibrant color palettes and gradients, I guess that’s a way of incorporating modern perspectives and technologies into these early references.

AJ: Who are your biggest influences in the design world?

MEC: So many incredible studios, artists and art movements play a part in my pool of references. I’m also always searching for more and grabbing references from different medias. My main inspirations (and aspirations) are David Bowie, who I consider a true experimentalist, Bee Grandinetti, Julia Schimautz, Vero Calderon and the design work of Ibrahim Rayintakath. I think each one plays a different part in my creative process, sometimes it’s storytelling, other times colors, textures and concepts. I’m always drawn to unique ways of telling stories, and they all do it brilliantly.

AJ: Can you talk to us about some of the projects you have worked on that you’re most proud of?

MEC: I’ve been very fortunate to work on many amazing projects alongside incredibly talented teams, but if I had to pick one would be Romina. My participation was small, but meant so much to me. Beautiful things come when we work on something we truly believe, and team up with people that believe that with you.

Romina was a short film with a limited budget and a tight timeline, so we had to rely on a team of over 20 animators, each contributing different scenes that came together as a whole. Despite the constraints, the project flowed seamlessly, and we had the creative freedom to do our best work. Collaboration is one of my favorite aspects of this industry — it should always go hand in hand with motion production.

AJ: When did you actually start using Cavalry?

MEC: Less than 6 months ago, I was tempted to join the Cavalry wave and was quite quickly sucked into the efficiency and the easy to learn structure of the software! Working with big agencies often means adapting to the quirks and limitations of certain software without questioning how things could be done better. I immediately clicked with Cavalry because it felt like the tool was intentionally trying to solve daily problems and show us better ways to do our work, and presenting the industry with easier and smarter solutions.

It also felt very intuitive, and a good tool for a self-taught person like me. I was able to poke around and come up with very interesting solutions and experiments that were exciting and brought back that energy when you learn something new and everything feels magical!

AJ: How has Cavalry helped you in your day to day workflow?

MEC: Finding better and quicker ways to solve daily problems and tasks that should be simple, simplifying workflows and setups that would take hours are now made in minutes and very few clicks. It also allowed me to make experiments much quicker and more successfully, it’s almost too easy to make something that feels good in Cavalry! It’s intuitive and it only takes a bit of curiosity and poking around to find new solutions.

It has definitely saved me hours of work, and allowed feedback to be addressed much more quickly. I know now that I can easily jump into Cavalry to solve issues I would spend hours working on in a different tool, and in a much more procedural and editable way.

AJ: Which other artists using Cavalry do you rate at the moment?

MEC: Tristan Jung’s work always catches my eye — he’s incredibly talented and creative and I love keeping up with his experiments. Fafa’s work is brilliant and the perfect example of Cavalry’s flexibility and tool efficiency paired with amazing animation skills. And of course, Elena Kudriavtseva work is state of the art, with creative vision and tool knowledge at its best. Her passion for experimenting never stops to amaze me!

AJ: How do you see the design industry evolving in the next 5–10 years?

MEC: A lot has been changing and we know why. It’s hard to predict what are going to be the next industry trends and what the future holds, as a lot has progressed in a short period of time. New tools are coming up almost everyday, while improvements and updates to old ones keeps them up to date with technology trends. I believe many of these innovations will be integrated into our daily workflows, enhancing efficiency and pushing creative boundaries.

However, while efficiency is often the driving force behind these updates, it can sometimes lead to increased workloads rather than better work-life balance. I hope to see technology not just optimize workflows but also empower artists to focus on themselves and their creativity process rather than repetitive tasks.

Ultimately, I believe that for technology to truly benefit us, it needs to be developed with and for creatives. We should all play a role in shaping the tools we use, ensuring they support and enhance our work rather than dictate it. Collaboration — between artists, teams, and companies — will be the key to meaningful and sustainable growth in the industry.

AJ: Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us today Maria, really interesting perspectives and it’s always great to see your work.

— — — — — — — —

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MEET THE CAVALRY CREATORS… MARIA EUGENIA CRUZ was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cavalry 2.2 is here with a raft of new features and improvements. 🙌

We’ve picked out some of our favourite additions here including support for OpenType, a new Gradient along a Stroke feature, the Knot and Stitches Behaviours plus a new options for Falloffs.

It also includes improvements to editing keyframes, a new Quick Mask mode and much more.

Check out a quick run down from Ian on our YouTube channel:

👋 Cavalry is free forever to use or go Pro and unlock a world of creative possibilities. A Professional subscription to Cavalry is available from £16/month (paid annually) — sign up here.

Download the installers via your account.

OpenType

Take your typography further by applying OpenType features like Ligatures, Fractions and Superscript to a Text Shape. Manually style your text or use the new Apply OpenType Style Behaviour to affect text in a procedural way.

Gradient along a Path

Gradients could always be added as strokes but now they can also be applied along a path opening up a myriad of creative possibilities.

Check out this 1 minute YouTube tutorial to get started.

Falloff improvements

Cavalry’s existing Falloff now includes options to create radar like effects with the Sweep Shape Type and it’s now possible to use a custom Shape as a Falloff.

In addition, the new Range Falloff can also be used to isolate the indices within sub-meshes.

Knot Behaviour

Automatically add gaps to Paths where a Contour self-intersects. What’s knot to like?

Stitches Behaviour

Fill closed paths with lines that can be optionally connected to form a stitches effect.

And more…

• Many Filters have been optimised and are now a minimum of 2x faster.
• Previews are now shown in the Assets Window.
• New Justify alignment and Path Looping options for the Text Shape.
• Plus many more enhancements and bug fixes — check out the full Release Notes.

Download the installers via your account and give Cavalry 2.2 a try today.

What’s new in Cavalry 2.2? was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Adam Maurer is an award-winning Director, Motion Designer & Editor based out of Portland, ME. His work has been featured in trade publications like Motionographer and distributed via the learning platform, Holdframe. Select clients include Google, IBM, Nasdaq, MIT, Samsung, National Public Media, PBS, Victoria’s Secret, and NBC Universal. A big proponent of R&D, he is continually experimenting with new tools and techniques in search of novel ways to tell stories.

AJ: As one of the true Cavalry OG’s, we’re delighted you’re talking to us today Adam. First up, can you tell us a little about your background and your journey in motion design?

AM: I’d say my interest in video and film as a medium started way back during my skateboarding days — making skate videos with friends in high school. We spent just an incredible amount of time skating, filming, and editing those little skate videos. Around then, I enrolled in a videography program that my school offered through a partner vocational school. So, on a couple days a week, for half the school day, I’d be using Final Cut Studio, editing some pretty silly shorts, and learning some basic broadcast skills. That period definitely solidified the idea that I wanted to do something in the film world, and ended up studying Film & Television at the Savannah College of Art and Design. During my time there, I shot and edited a film about the creation of a children’s home for displaced children in Ethiopia, and that got me involved in the documentary world.

Then, I started my career in Atlanta after graduating from SCAD in 2009–directing a series for AOL, then spending a few years on a feature doc about a charter school that brought together refugee children with American kids. There’s a lot to unpack in there, but I’ll just say I learned the independent documentary world wasn’t really for me, at least not at that point in my life. A combination of how long projects can take coupled with the fundraising process — it was perhaps a bit more difficult than I’d like a job to be, and that’s saying something, because motion design is not exactly the easiest path out there! I’m still interested in it as a craft, and hope to make more, but not as a career.

After moving back to the Northeast — Vermont then Maine — and not long into starting freelance production work, I started to pick up some basic motion design to expand offerings to clients. Kinetic type, lower thirds — the basics — that sort of stuff. Over a couple years motion and editing became the majority of my business. I followed the now well-worn tradition in the motion design industry of folks coming from the film world and finding a place here as somewhat of a generalist, taking existing skills of story, editing, photography and production and then learning design fundamentals, compositing/tracking/roto, character animation, some 3D, some particle work, etc. Ultimately, developing an obsession with Adobe After Effects. I think that that technical compulsion was really what led me to embrace the motion world — as my fascination with workflows, pipelines, systems, processes and learning how to accomplish things technically was a big part of my desire to be a filmmaker in the first place. I feel like this is true for a lot, or maybe even most motion designers. Story and high-concept stuff are one thing, but I think we all nerd out over taking a look at someone’s project file, or if in the middle of a production, curse their name.

So, for the past eleven years, I’ve been kicking around to different studios, agencies, and direct-clients, building my little company and taking on as much of a range of projects as possible — explainers, commercials, training videos, case studies, internals, socials, logo animation, data visualization, graphics packages, visual effects, and more recently, title sequences and interactive experiences. But, yeah, that’s my story…making motion in Maine and raising a cool kid with my wife.

AJ: How would you describe your design aesthetic?

AM: As someone who works in a client-services industry, and hasn’t really “niched-down”, so to say, I am certainly style-agnostic when it comes to commercial projects. I think half the fun and reward of this job is the chance to try new stuff all the time, and experiment with different styles, techniques and ways of story-telling. It’s a big sandbox. That’s not to say I don’t think there’s a certain aesthetic that connects my commercial work — but it’s perhaps more ineffable, to me at least.

In my personal work, however, I’m certainly drawn to mixed-media approaches perhaps more than clean, clinical design, or illustrative work. I like to animate and composite photographic elements that have grounding or reference in the real world. Certainly inspired by the photomontage tradition — and at a low-frame rate, no doubt. Additionally, perhaps as a direct result of spending so much time in Cavalry, I’m also drawn more and more to a mathematical expression of design — repetition, sequencing, formulae. An appreciation for underlying frameworks and patterns.

AJ: And who are your biggest influences in the design world?

AM: Jeez — I don’t know, Adam! That’s a hard one, there’s honestly so many. In the motion design world, some big influences over the years have been Nol Honig, Yaniv Fridman, Daniel Savage, Ordinary Folk, Nicolas Girard, Jordan Bergren, Leo Franchi, Ariel Costa, Chromosphere. Like a lot of motion designers, I have a big reverence for Patrick Clair and Raoul Marks’ work at Antibody, maybe especially the Halt and Catch Fire title sequence — just incredibly badass. What else…big Shane Drinkwater fan. I just love the textural and patterning quality of his work.

AJ: Can you name some projects you have worked on that you’re most proud of?

AM: I’d say maybe my favorite personal project to-date is this tiny film I made, Treasure. It’s a project that sort of encapsulates what I’d like to continue doing, going forward, in regards to my non-commercial work. It was kind of a simple experiment — take a couple photographs and combine them into a single story, told through motion design principles. I found it was a great way to express a little story that was important to me. I’m currently working on another — about my (late) dog — but it’s been slow going. Being the father of a two year old, I’m discovering how hard it is to find time for personal work these days!

Treasure also is a good example of how I use Cavalry on a lot of motion projects. It’s similar to using C4D in conjunction with AE, some elements are animated in AE, some externally in Cavalry, and then they are comped together, with a fair amount of effects work stacked on the Cav render. Then there’s a back and forth iteration process between tools once they are in a setup together.

AJ: When did you start using Cavalry?

AM: Hard to believe, but it’s been almost five years! I started using Cavalry back in February of 2020, during the beta. I’m not sure exactly when you guys first opened the beta, but I think I signed up for it sometime in mid-2019 after seeing the experiments coming from your instagram, and the articles on your Medium page. At the time, I was doing a lot of work for financial-sector clients and the data features, as well as the overall procedural nature were really quite interesting to me. Around the time I got accepted to the beta in early-2020, I had a bit of availability and dove in head first.

That first phase of experimentation, I spent 30 days experimenting with the beta, seeing what Cav was capable of and how it would fit into my workflows. I just pulled up the documentation and started moving through behaviors and utilities one-by-one to see what they did, and making something for that day. After that initial phase of exploration, I was able to bundle all those experiments — their project files, and around four hours of video breakdowns into a combo of free & paid downloads for Holdframe. School of Motion acquired Holdframe not too long after that, which became Workshops, but you can still find those project files on my site. I’m exploring whether to re-release all those video breakdowns for free on YouTube, but it was all recorded in 2020, and I’m concerned that a lot of it is focused on the beta, and Cavalry has had a lot of time to develop since that time… so, we’ll see.

Since then, I’ve been tinkering in Cavalry for both my personal and client work. Almost all my client projects at this point use Cavalry in some way, whether it’s styleframes, concepts, design, motion tests, renders for use in AE, or full sequences. For an animation software, I spend an awful lot of time just designing in it! More recently, I did another deep dive of daily experiments during the ever-popular 36 Days of Type project, which is always exhausting but certainly rewarding. I approached that series without any stylistic guidelines, as that really is my favorite way to do R&D — so there’s a lot of play and fun in those. Those project files are available on Scenery, and any requiring assets over on the Behance page.

My experimentation in Cav has gone beyond animation too — it has made me want to learn some javascript in the process (though I’m mostly in over my head)! So, I’ve been dabbling in making a few tools for Cavalry, for stuff I need in production often, like Null+. Every once and a while I spend some time on a guide tool I’m tinkering with. I’m also brainstorming an array utility…I’ve really come to like arrays a lot.

AJ: How has Cavalry helped you in your day to day workflow?

AM: After Effects still remains at the center of my workflow, as it’s a compositor — everything ends up there — it’s sort of the hub of my system. But, it doesn’t mean I start there anymore. There have been so many things that I’ve brute-forced in AE that just don’t make sense to do in AE. So, over the years, I’ve used Cav more and more as a replacement for a lot of tasks in AE. Cavalry really has become an extension for anything that is even slightly tedious to do in AE. There’s just so many examples where a request would come through — something that would take hours or even days in AE — could be done in minutes in Cavalry. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true! Then, of course, because it’s more procedural, the revisioning is more streamlined as well.

Now, thinking about proceduralism — my interest in it goes back to that reverence of process and workflows — it’s just the ideal way to set up a system! Flexibility…knowing that something will change down the road, and how hard do you want to make that? When working in AE, I’ve always tried to maintain that approach in my set-ups, but Cavalry makes it a lot easier, and generally without all the precomps! There’s something to that idea of connecting anything to anything that gets at my tinkering brain.

In addition to being an extension for typical motion design workflows, Cavalry’s ability to output SVG, and dynamic rendering on a large scale has also allowed me to branch out into different service areas — experiential, namely. Recently, I’ve had a few large-scale dynamic rendering projects for Yale, MIT and Colby College, utilizing Cavalry as a project management and asset generation tool, creating design layouts, button states, content slides, loops, and more for these big interactive experiences run on touch-screen kiosks through an interactive software, Intuiface. Those projects are not flashy. These are largely data and content wrangling projects, and Cavalry really has made those not only possible, but also a pleasure to work on.

But, yeah, I really cannot state how much of a boon that the dynamic rendering functionality, along with the google sheet integration has been. It’s pretty cool to set up a dynamic system in a single comp, and be able to hit a button and walk away while Cav spits out render after render. It’s funny, now, more and more of my projects are really managed within a spreadsheet, and it’s rather a satisfying place to be! There’s nothing more gratifying than handling all the copy updates for a revision round in a couple minutes, when that used to be something that could take quite a long time. Smart folders too — being able to manage image/image sequence content in the OS rather than in-application is pretty powerful for both setup and revisions.

AJ: How do you feel Cavalry is different to the other motion design apps out there?

AM: I’ll be yet another to compare your software to a 3D application — but it’s certainly apt! It has all the benefits of modern 3D tools while being firmly rooted in two dimensions. I’m primarily a 2D designer and prefer it as a medium, and never much liked working for 2D in a 3D application. I think that’s one of the reasons Cavalry really struck a chord with me.

But also, one of the things that’s great about Cav is that it’s really, really good at what it’s being developed for — vector-based motion design. While I would certainly like more compositing tools in Cavalry, I don’t need them — I have AE for that. But, the big problem with AE is that it’s become so many things for so many people — it’s a compositor, it’s a motion graphics app, it’s a visual effects tool. And because it’s so many things, it’s bloated, and it’s relatively slow. I don’t actually like criticizing After Effects, because I do love the tool, but despite a lot of good work from the team over the years to modernize and improve performance, I don’t know that it will ever be as modern of a tool in the speed aspect as something that was written more recently. It just has so much technical debt. That’s one of the reasons Cavalry is so refreshing, and what I think sets it apart — it’s focus on what makes it useful, and the performance as a result of that.

AJ: Which other artists using Cavalry do you rate at the moment?

AM: Man, there are so many good ones. I’ve been a big fan of Matheieu Dellabe’s work, he’s really approached Cavalry in a unique way, and I’ve enjoyed all his R&D, along with the actual reel he made for those — such a great way to present a series of experiments. I’ve been a fan of Dominic Brooks’ FUI work — he’s been using it for quite a while too. It’s just so nice to see someone utilizing Cavalry through a compositing mindset, though it helps that he’s crazy talented too! Tristan Jung just recently did his own 30 day experiment with Cavalry, and he really had some smart setups in there. Some other folks worth mentioning — fafa_motion, Mario De Meyer, Jesper Bolther, Romaine Loubersanes, Lori Hamasaki, Antonin Waterkeyn have all been doing some awesome work using Cavalry.

More on the workflow-artistry side of things, Greg Stewart has been doing a lot of interesting stuff with Dynamic Rendering, as has Daniel Van Veldhoven. Daniel did a million renders for the fun of it! The discord community is great because I get to see from the sidelines what some of these folks are working on tangentially through their setups or problems they are trying to solve. So, everyone should definitely come join the discord! It’s a great place to learn from some amazingly talented folks.

As for the developer-artists, I’ve also been a big fan of what Remco Janssen has been doing with Scenery, he’s really doing a great job of bringing the community together, and I think it’s great that it’s based around project files. I think that’s one of the best ways to foster education, as it’s not really spoon-fed to you — you have to dig around and make those connections to figure out what’s going on. So, it’s really laying a good technical foundation for the Cavalry community. He’s also got one of the single best tools for Cavalry out there, Curves. I’ve also really appreciated the tools and tutorials from Matt White and Elliot Mosher, who are such boons to the community and its knowledge-base.

AJ: How do you see the design industry evolving in the next 5–10 years?

AM: That’s a good question and I’m inclined to think it’s going to move in a few directions, but AI, for sure. Though, I do think that AI will be more of a tool (or rather, many tools) to use than what a lot of designers worry about — replacement. It’s all changing so fast anyway, that it’s hard to even talk about in a meaningful way. We’ll see where that all ends up.

At least in terms of the motion design industry, I think about what Ryan Plummer said in a Twitter post earlier this year. He talked about how we’ll need to “create in volume”. As change affects the industry, as it always does — clients will inevitably ask for more output — and we’ll need to adapt to that new reality. He describes a scenario that’s not unfamiliar to me. Client needs a very simple copy update, but on a large series of deliverables. Traditionally, this would be a huge problem, and something that would take quite a bit of time updating and rendering out of AE, potentially going to edit, and could balloon costs on a project, or you eat that on a fixed bid or whatever. But, because it was built, procedurally, in Cavalry, and you have the ability to natively dynamically render a ton of outputs, it’s not an issue anymore…it’s more of an expectation. And that expectation will not be regulated to agencies or studios, but to individual artists as well. Ryan’s a smart guy, and what he said I think is true — based on my client work over the past few years — that the big changes coming for us in the motion design world will be ones of volume, and ones of systems-thinking. But, thankfully, we’ve got Cavalry for that!

AJ: Adam, thank you so much for your time, it’s been fascinating to hear more about your background and how you’re combining Cavalry with other tools to speed up your workflow. Thanks also for being so generous with your time on Discord and sharing your scene files with the Cavalry Community. Keep up the fantastic work!

AM: Absolutely, no problem. Great chatting with you too, Adam — see you around the discord!

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Meet the Cavalry Creators… Adam Maurer was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Elena Kudriavtseva aka @heyalisamotion is a freelance motion graphics artist currently based in Bali. With over 10 years of experience, her work explores all aspects of motion design from template making and classic narrative animation to collaborating with brands to develop motion language complimenting their identity. For Elena it’s all about finding the best way to tell the story and connect with people, and if it’s colourful, playful and bold even better!

AJ: Many thanks for talking to us today Elena! Can you tell us a little about your background and your journey in motion design?

Elena: My journey with motion design started 16 years ago with a romantic gesture, of all things, when I decided to make a slideshow for my boyfriend. I simply had so much fun with it that I realised I had to follow this path and learn more. It’s funny that a simple slideshow led me to become a professional motion designer.

Back then there weren’t as many resources and I basically taught myself After Effects by clicking everything to see what it does and by reading a ton of books to pick up the design principles. For the first few years, I was just playing around with After Effects and Premiere Pro, until I discovered I could make motion design templates and sell them online. Back then it seemed almost impossible, something that only professionals could do. So when I decided to try it out, I didn’t tell anyone as I had no idea whether it would work or I would fail miserably.

To my surprise, it actually worked well and when I finished university I was already making some money online, and since nothing was holding me back in my hometown, I bought a one-way ticket to Thailand and left when I was 22. At that time I also had a freelance client from Canada who found me through my templates page, and I’ve been making enough between sales and freelance to travel full-time. Of course, it was a very budget way to travel but I was 22 and moving to a new country every few months, couldn’t wish for more.

And that’s how it went for about 7 years, creating templates and freelancing here and there. But I always felt that it wasn’t enough and didn’t fulfil me or maybe it was just a time to move on, I don’t know. So I ended up with a major creative crisis and didn’t work for a while, there was even an NFT stage of my life, which allowed me to save some money actually. And then about 2 years ago I slowly started coming back to motion design, focusing more on finding interesting freelance projects and learning new skills. Cavalry played a big role in where I am now, not only in reviving my love for motion design but also in bringing really great clients. So I’m very grateful for that!

At the moment I am dividing my time between client projects on one side and working on my own products/personal projects on the other. With freelancing what inspires me the most is working on all kinds of projects related to brand identity, brand campaigns, and creative typography. I think it challenges my skills in the right way, the tasks are still new and exciting and it allows for a lot of logical thinking, study, and research. I can see more brands taking motion as part of identity seriously now and understanding the value that consistent and well-thought motion language can bring to the board. So I’m excited to grow and develop in this direction.

People always ask me why is it “heyalisamotion” when my name is actually Elena, so maybe now is a good time to answer that. I come from a simple family, there weren’t any creatives surrounding me when I was growing up and back then my name seemed too mundane and boring to me. In my head, I was always living in some imaginary wonderful worlds full of magic and wonders. So I developed this sort of alter ego personality: a girl who could do anything she wants in a world where everything is possible. As for “Alisa” I guess the inspiration came from “Alice in Wonderland” where everything was “curiouser and curiouser”. And “hey” came from the “Hey Julie” song because I was obsessed with the Scrubs show back then. So there it goes. Now I actually love my name but ‘heyalisa’ became so deeply ingrained in me as my creative personality that I’m ready to deal with some confusion here and there.

AJ: And how would you describe your design aesthetic?

Elena: I’m not sure I can put a label on what my design aesthetic is. But if I had to describe it in a few words it would be: experimental, playful, and ever-changing.

From a visual perspective right now it’s mostly bright playful colors, simple geometric shapes, and a whole lot of typography. I love to explore how things can move and interact with each other to create this almost hypnotising, meditative state. So when people comment or send me a message, that they’ve been watching my animation for 2–3 minutes non-stop, I know I’ve hit the spot. In a world where attention span is getting shorter and shorter, it’s a big deal to be able to grab it for that long.

AJ: How do you see the design industry evolving in the next 5–10 years?

Elena: Honestly, no idea! Things are changing so fast, 5–10 years now feels equal to 50–100 from the past. I’m sure everything that’s possibly can get automated will be automated and that means that inevitably a lot of people will lose their jobs or would have to learn new things. But I think (or at least I hope so) that creativity, authentic content, and human connection will be valued more than ever for at least the next 10 years. And I’m not too worried about AI taking over the world, as long as I focus on being myself rather than following the trends.

On the other hand, the pace of changes is so fast that it definitely gives me anxiety sometimes. I’m sure, we will have to reinvent ourselves a few times through the next decade, learn new software, and adapt to changes. It’s hard. No other generation in the past had to embrace changes with this speed. Yes, life is much easier now in many aspects but our brain doesn’t quite catch up with technology development.

But in the end, tools are just tools. The idea behind everything we do with motion, branding, websites, etc. hasn’t changed at all, we all want to tell a story in a way that connects with other people on a deep level. And I think it will stay the same.

AJ: When did you start using Cavalry?

Elena: It was about a year ago, beginning of September 2023. I guess it was a lucky coincidence that I took a couple weeks off client projects and at the same time stumbled upon a post on Instagram that mentioned it was done in Cavalry. That animation was stunning, I can’t quite remember which one it was, but I downloaded Cavalry immediately. I think the “Cavalry app” name popped up on my feed way before that, especially during the 36DOT challenge, but I needed that combination of factors to come into play — free time and the courage to try something new.

Thought it would be just a fun thing to play around and explore for a few hours and couldn’t imagine how it would all turn out. I think the whole idea of not building up expectations was also the reason it worked so well for me. I didn’t overthink it (normally I do), didn’t worry about how it would fit in my workflow, etc., just installed it and let myself dive right in. There are a lot of things we simply can’t predict, the first animation that I did in Cavalry and posted on my Instagram got me a project with one of my favourite studios a few months later.

AJ: That’s great to hear! How has Cavalry helped you in your day to day workflow?

Elena: It definitely helped me in exploring my own design aesthetic on a different level. I think the experimental nature of the software fits me really well. Of course most of the time I know what kind of motion I want to create to express my idea, so I open Cavalry and try a few setups first. Then it really can go in any direction, as there are unlimited ways to connect things and change attributes to get some unexpected results, it can blow your mind. People always ask me “How did you even come up with that idea”, and I honestly don’t know what to say. I think with Cavalry it just sort of flows naturally when you allow yourself to fall down the rabbit hole.

AJ: How do you feel Cavalry is different to the other motion design apps out there?

Elena: As many other people said before me, it’s sort of a 3D software structure made for 2D motion designers which means it requires a whole different thinking process that is not as linear as in After Effects. If you come from a creative coding or 3D background it will be a breeze to learn Cavalry but for graphic designers or people coming from After Effects the learning curve is a bit steeper. I still think it’s not that difficult and the process is very logical.

For me, a lot of things just make sense in Cavalry. The way I can create super complex setups in minutes not hours still shocks me. It’s also all the small details: working with color palettes, SVG copy/paste, layer groups, magic easing, etc. Everything that I wish was native in After Effects.

I still have to explore the customisability possibilities of Cavalry, but from what I can see, it should work perfectly for building complex motion design systems that are easy to use and edit. As someone who created templates in After Effects for many years, I’m very excited about what Cavalry has to offer in that sense.

AJ: Which other artists using Cavalry do you rate at the moment?

Elena: Of course, when you mention Cavalry, the first name that pops in my mind is Antonin, he always comes up with some fun stuff and mini-tutorials. But since he was already mentioned in the last interview I thought I should probably give a spotlight to other artists too.

I love Cavalry work that Daniel Maarleveld and Studio Lennarts & De Bruijn posted on their Instagram profiles. And from the more recent additions, I noticed Romain Loubersanes started exploring Cavalry too, I would definitely follow him as he is a great artist. And I also recommend checking out Anastasiia Malai Instagram, she started learning Cavalry not so long ago but is already posting a lot of great works in her own unique style.

Besides these artists, there are a lot of interesting animations popping up here and there and recently I started curating an Arena board named “Made in Cavalry” where I pin some of my favourite animations.

AJ: Are there any upcoming projects or collaborations you’re particularly excited about?

Elena: I’m working on an exciting project right now, bringing some motion into the brand campaign of a company based in the US, but I won’t be able to reveal the details until later. Hopefully, it all works out great!

I’m also consistently working on my guide in the background and adding new bits of information there step-by-step. I would love to keep creating more educational content for my YouTube channel once I have more free time and probably work on more organized premium content for those who want to learn Cavalry. I always loved teaching, and it’s one of the things that makes me feel content.

I’d love to do more things offline too and disconnect from my computer from time to time, but not sure in what shape or form that might happen. Whatever the future holds, I’m open for it.

AJ: How do you stay inspired and motivated in such a competitive industry?

Elena: If we are talking about personal projects, inspiration comes both from the outside world and from within. I journal a lot and often my explorations or typography projects are the way to process emotions. Music also helps me get into the right mood to create things.

And of course, I’m always collecting and organizing inspiration for future projects, maybe a bit too much even. I have a couple dozen inspiration boards sorted into categories, so when I need external inspiration I know where to go.

I don’t think I have to motivate myself much. Creating, experimenting, and making art makes me feel alive. And feeling alive is the best motivation there is for me. On the other hand, I struggle sometimes with following all the way through with an idea, animation, or project. How to choose one idea from a million others? How to work through boredom and bad attempts? And how to deal with my insane internal critic? These are the things I’m still figuring out every day.

AJ: Thanks so much for your time Elena. It’s been super interesting to find out about your journey and keep up the amazing work!

https://www.heyalisa.com/

https://www.instagram.com/heyalisamotion/

https://heyalisa.gumroad.com/l/cavalryguide

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

Meet the Cavalry Creators… Elena Kudriavtseva aka Heyalisamotion was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to our new series in which we chat to some amazing designers and studios that have introduced Cavalry into their workflow. First up we have the super talented Felix Pfaffli, founder of Studio Feixen.

Felix Pfäffli is a graphic designer based in Lucerne, Switzerland. He founded Studio Feixen in 2009 and was inducted into the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) in 2013 as its youngest-ever member. His work includes projects in various design areas. Whether it’s graphic design, interior design, fashion design, type design or animation, the only constant remains the in-depth examination of color, shape and typography.

AJ: Hey Felix, thanks for joining us today. We’re huge fans of your work and look forward to hearing more about your studio. Can you briefly tell us a bit about your background and the founding of Studio Feixen?

Felix: I founded studio Feixen by myself in 2009, when I finished school. I needed a name for the studio and I decided on the name Feixen because it was my nickname back then. It’s a very old German word, which means to make a very strange face, or also to talk to somebody in a weird way. And I also love that back then everybody called their agencies by their last names and I wanted to do something else.

First I worked on my own for about 7 years. I started mostly as a poster designer. That was always the centre of my work. You know, in Switzerland the poster still has a huge tradition. So it’s really looked at as the royal discipline of of graphic design. Then you have the book design, and then you have type design and these are the the 3 things that all the graphic designers strive for.

So I started with poster design and had a lot of luck with a job for a cultural centre that is based here in Lucerne, Switzerland, where I where I grew up and I’m still living.

This job was a great platform because the cultural centre needed a poster every week, and I had complete freedom because of Erich Brechbühl’s vision for the centre. Today I’m in the same studio with him again, as when I started with graphic design many years ago. I always call him my graphic design father, because I met him really early, and he taught me a lot.

He led the design for the cultural centre, which was totally open, so every poster had to be completely new. So you can imagine when you start and you have to put out something every week, it’s challenging. And this output was the foundation of the studio. Somehow this job led to a lot of visual languages because they wanted every poster to be completely different. So I had to reinvent myself every time. And I think this practice of reinventing, searching for new visual languages, searching for new methods of doing something, that’s really the core of the studio.

Then at some point it naturally started to grow. But we were never very big. I think at the biggest we were 4 people permanently, and then at some point, we naturally shrank back to 2 people which we are now. Today it’s only myself and Robin Eberwein, who started as an intern and then just stayed. So everything is very much like a family and on a small scale.

AJ: Yes, bigger is definitely not better, especially when it comes to design.

Felix: Yeah especially because my interest is really that I like to design. So the bigger you get the less you spend time designing.

Nowadays we also spend a lot of time with research. For example, I’m just working on a publication together with Josh Schaub about motion graphics, because we realised there is no comprehensive publication on the subject to pick off the shelf. These are huge projects that can take 2 or 3 years. Robin and I also run a type foundry together now. Simultaneously we are working on projects for the the Paris metro, we are creating some custom type for one of the biggest mobile companies and we are working with a furniture company getting a new chair released soon. It’s a big mess.

Our projects are not really based on logic, they’re more based on our interests.

AJ: What is the core philosophy or vision that drives your studio?

Felix: I would say that the studio is run by the interests of the individual members. For example the last person that left the studio was Raphael Leutenegger, and while he was here we made a lot of stuff connected with food. We made an exhibition that was edible, we opened our own pizzeria and then when he left the studio he went into gastronomy. I want to also provide a space where people can explore what they want to do even though it’s totally stupid or crazy.

AJ: In terms of the studio output, how would you describe the aesthetic to to someone that hasn’t seen your work before.

Felix: I feel like it’s a very based on Swiss tradition. There is a huge interest for rules, for grids, for order. But at the same time there’s also a huge interest in the opposite, and our goal is to keep trying to make it just work together. Compared to classic Swiss design it’s much more colourful, much more playful.

AJ: And who are your biggest influences in the design world?

Felix: I already mentioned Erich Brechbühl, he’s a very interesting figure, especially here in Lucerne. Locally, he founded a graphic design festival. He’s very a community focused guy bringing people together. He went to the school of Niklaus Troxler and he is another figure that is very well known around here. He’s known for his jazz posters. He loved to do graphic design and he also loved jazz. So in the end he founded a Jazz Festival in the middle of nowhere in Switzerland and his whole life he was running the Jazz Festival and at the same time made incredibly beautiful posters for the festival.

AJ: Following his passions, I love that. What current design trends are you excited about?

I don’t know if these are design trends, but maybe they are. At the moment I’m very interested in coding as well as designing. I’m coding a lot of the websites that you see our studio making.

I have come to realise that the coding has become simpler and more accessible. For example, I’ve just coded a brush where I can make a line, but then it behaves really like a liquid line, so it drips down and it flows down. I’m really interested in that deeper connection between digital and physical.

I also think that with Cavalry you don’t just animate something from left to right any more, but you think more about like how something could behave.

AJ: In the design industry things have changed more in the last 18 months than they’ve changed in the last 20 years, I’d say. Where do you see things going in the next 5 years?

Felix: That’s difficult to say. There are new possibilities, right? We have new abilities, especially with AI, and it gives you new opportunities. But the funny thing is, work is the same. It’s just like, oh, I have an AI tool. But when I want do make something really, really good, I’m not faster with these tools. I’m just, you know, working on every single detail for hours and hours until the work really has the shape I want, it’s exactly the same if I built that out of clay. AI is just another tool.

I’m not actually really worried about the future. I’m very interested and looking forward positively.

AJ: Education is a big part of what you guys do, could you tell us how you juggle being an educator and running a studio?

Felix: Yeah, of course that can be difficult but I have a good situation, I always have six months where I’m teaching and combining that with client projects and the other half of the year I’m completely off school. So I always have this time where I can concentrate completely on our work. And then I go back again into teaching, and as soon as I’m a little bit fed up with teaching, it stops so I have the time to recover again, because it is hard to juggle both at the same time. I’ve been teaching for almost 15 years now, so I’ve got used to it.

The longer I teach, the more I realise it’s more about everything else, you know? It’s more like talking with each other, understanding somebody’s feelings. Sometimes they are related to design, sometimes not. It’s more like figuring out how somebody ticks.

AJ: When did you guys start using Cavalry?

Felix: Oh, that’s difficult to say. I hope we were quite early! I just I stumbled upon it, I think that I published a project and somebody asked in the comments if it was made with Cavalry. And then I was like what the hell is Cavalry?

I just tried it out, and I immediately felt like, this is such a step in a much better direction than what I can do with after effects.

If I tell somebody about it I always say it’s like a 3D program but in 2D. It has the same thought process as 3d, it has a much more generative way of thinking behind it.

AJ: Yeah we’ve heard people call it 2dini or Cinema 2d!

Felix: I’ve found it really amazing. And you can do so much stuff that is so complicated in other apps. We always found complicated solutions before and now with Cavalry, it’s suddenly easy and possible. I think it’s amazing.

AJ: Great to hear. And so how’s it helped in your day to day workflow?

Our studio is always searching for new visual languages. We are also very interested in new technology, so we try whatever application comes on the market. We search for new possibilities. And I think with Cavalry, it’s definitely the tool that we use because it’s closer to how we already think, especially as we already have some background in coding.

And now with Cavalry we can just take a number connect it to the other one, and it’s how are brains are wired. So we use it a lot, for all kind of projects.

You realise because you can connect everything, the possibilities are endless for new kinds of new visual languages.

AJ: Are there any other artists out there that using Cavalry that you follow?

Felix: Yeah, definitely, the one that springs to mind is Antonin Waterkeyn. I wrote to him very early on when he just started working with Cavalry, I think he’d made just a few animations back then. Since the Cavalry community was smaller back then, somehow I felt instantly connected. I loved how he tried to search for new ways to use this software in a similar manner like we search for these new languages. He really shows off what you can do with Cavalry.

AJ: Absolutely, we love Antonin! Thanks so much for talking to us today Felix. We’re just in awe of the work you make and we’re so pleased to have you as part of the Cavalry community.

Felix: Absolutely my pleasure.

https://www.studiofeixen.ch/

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

Meet the Cavalry Creators… Studio Feixen was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Beyond the headline features new to Cavalry 2.0 there have been various smaller updates and improvements to speed up your workflow and open up new possibilities.

What’s new in Cavalry 2.0?

Check out the release notes for a full list of all the updates but here are some notable improvements.

Motion Paths

If you’re old enough to remember rolling a toy car down a slope with some ticker tape behind it during a physics lesson at school, then you’ll recognise a Motion Path!

Motion Paths offer a way to preview the position and speed of a Shape in the Viewport. A dot is drawn to represent the position of a Shape on each frame of its animation. The distance the dots are from each other can then be used as a representation of the Shape’s speed. For example, points far apart from each other indicate a fast moving object (it’s moving a large distance over a single frame). This is particular useful for visualising easing – when a Shape’s acceleration increases or decreases gradually.

Various options for how Motion Paths are drawn can be found in the Viewport settings (the cog icon at the bottom).

Sorting in the Assets Window

It’s now possible to sort assets (images, compositions, groups, data etc) in the Assets Window by Name and Type.

Disabling Attribute Expressions

Cavalry 1.3 introduced Attribute Expressions. They can be added to Attributes with input connections to perform mathematical operations on the values. As a simple example, let’s say you wanted a Shape to move vertically at twice the rate it moves horizontally. This can be set up by connecting position.x to position.y, right clicking on the Attribute, choosing Add Expression… and entering *2 into the Y input. Now the input values from position.x will be multiplied by 2 for position.y.

Cavalry 2.0 introduces the ability to temporarily disable these expressions for checking how the resulting values affect your Composition. Just open an expression by clicking on the π icon and use the checkboxes to enable/disable them.

Font previews

Selecting a font for your creative just got easier with font previews in the Attribute Editor. Now, when you open the Font menu on the Text Shape, each font appears in the list as a preview of how it will render in the Viewport.

Auto-complete hex codes

Entering partial valid hex codes will now auto-complete. For example, entering AB and hitting Return will now result in #ABABAB.

Group selection

Cavalry offers the ability to place Layers into a hierarchy. This means Shapes can be the children of other Shapes creating an interesting paradigm when making selections in the Viewport. This interaction has been overhauled in Cavalry 2.0 meaning you can now select the entire Group or, by holding the S key, select any of its children. Pre-Selection Highlighting (see below) helps identify which Shape will be selected. You can also double click a Shape to drill down to that level. Where a Group has multiple hierarchies within it, once a child is selected, any siblings (Layers on the same level) can be easily selected with a single click.

You can also right click a Shape within a Group to select a parent within that hierarchy.

Pre-Selection Highlighting

When hovering the cursor over Shapes in the Viewport, Pre-Selection Highlighting appears. In previous versions, where artwork being generated contained a high density of Shapes (looking at you Duplicator!), this could create a distracting layer of visual noise when interacting with the Composition. In Cavalry 2.0, the level of detail displayed is now adaptive to the complexity of the Shapes being hovered. For example, rather than highlighting every character in a paragraph, Pre-Selection Highlighting may only show bounding boxes for the words or the entire Text Shape.

Constrain Proportions

The Attribute Editor now includes the ability to constrain values so that when you interact with one, the other will increase/decrease proportionally. For example, if the Width of an Ellipse is 100px and its Height is 150px, when Constrain Proportions is active, doubling the Width, will also double the Height.

Where applicable, a link icon will appear on control rows with two dimensions. Click it to enable the constraint.

Connect multiple Layers at once

It’s now much simpler to create multiple common connections in one interaction. To do this, select several common Layers and hold the Option/Alt key as you make the connection. A connection will be made to each of the selected Layers.

Inline Magic Easing

Double clicking a keyframe in either the Time Editor or Graph Editor will now pop up a window which includes access to the Magic Easing options.

Attribute Editor improvements

The Attribute Editor has enjoyed various improvements including:

• Sticky headers — these are labels that appear to indicate when a Layer‘s UI is only partially visible. Clicking on a sticky header will animate the Attribute Editor to that Layer.
• Animated scrolling — when double clicking Layers to load them into the Attribute Editor, the list will now animate vertically for a smoother experience.
• Header colours — more colour has been added to a Layer’s header for easier visual scanning.
• Dividers — horizontal dividers have been added to visually group common attributes.
• Improved indenting — where Layer’s include Generators (e.g. a Duplicator’s Distribution) their indentation is now more visually uniform.
• Show/hide attributes — certain Layers now show or hide Attributes depending on the state of other Attributes. The new Auto-Animate Behaviour is a good example.
• Inline help — help messages now appear within the UI with hints and tips.

Connections in the Viewport

Connections can now be made by dropping a connection onto a Shape in the Viewport. Simply pick up a connection from the Scene Window or Attribute Editor and drop it onto a Shape in the Viewport. A list will appear containing the compatible Attributes just like they do in the Scene Window.

Flow Rows/Columns

The Grid Distribution now has a new option to adjust the order points are generated in. Points can now be set to flow in columns (then rows) or rows (then columns).

SVG assets hierarchy

When pasting in artwork from apps that export layered SVG (Illustrator/Affinity Designer) into Cavalry, the original artwork’s names and layers are now reflected in the resulting Shapes. Note that Figma do not export SVG to layers.

Procedural Animation Curves

When a Shape is being driven by a Behaviour, the resulting animation curve can now be previewed in the Graph Editor. In the example below, a Noise Behaviour has been connected to the position.x Attribute of a Shape. By selecting the Shape, its movement can be seen in the Graph Editor.

And there’s a lot more to discover! Check out this great video with more tips and tricks from Alex Amor.

Cavalry is free forever to use or go Pro and unlock a world of creative possibilities. A Professional subscription to Cavalry is available from £16/month (paid annually) — sign up here.

Cavalry 2.0. Sweating the small stuff. was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cavalry 2.0 is here with a raft of new features and improvements. 🙌

We’ve picked out some of our favourite additions here including Cameras, Pre-Comp Overrides and Components but check out the release notes for a full list of all the amazing updates.

👋 Cavalry is free forever to use or go Pro and unlock a world of creative possibilities. A Professional subscription to Cavalry is available from £16/month (paid annually) — sign up here.

Download the installers via your account.

Cameras/2.5D

Cavalry now supports cameras!

Shapes can now move in a third dimension when you add a Camera to a Composition. The Freeform and Look At Cameras provide a way to create a 2.5D environment meaning movements like parallax, tracking and zoom are now easy to achieve.

Pre-Comp Overrides

Pre-Comp Overrides are a very easy way to create variations of a main template Composition. By promoting attributes from a Composition’s Layers, they can then be accessed and overridden when that Composition is used as a Pre-Comp within another Composition.

Components

Components are Shapes that contain a collection of other Layers. Attributes from those Layers can be promoted to the Component in order to create a simplified, custom user interface. By hiding much of the complexity, ready made ‘canned effects’ can then be easily shared and reused.

Attributes from those Layers can be promoted to the Component in order to create a simplified, custom user interface.

Simply drag and drop the important Attributes onto the Component to make them accessible outside of the ‘edit mode’. In the example below, the full rig includes eight layers but can be collapsed to just one while retaining quick access to the string, colour and bevel amount.

Auto-Animate

Add a wide variety of animations to Shapes with only a few keyframes using the new Auto-Animate Behaviour. This an incredibly quick way to intuitively create and share animations. Try some of the examples via the Create > Demo Scenes > Text menu to see how Auto-Animate can be used to easily create complex Text transitions.

Add a variety of animations to Shapes with only a few keyframes using the new Auto-Animate Behaviour.

JavaScript Improvements

Our popular JavaScript APIs have had over 100 new features added meaning it’s even easier to create custom workflows and tools for your projects. These updates are also available to the JavaScript Layers opening up more ‘creative coding’ opportunities. Check out the examples in the Create > Demo Scenes > JavaScript menu for inspiration.

Performance Improvements

Cavalry 2.0 includes several everyday optimisations to speed up your workflow.

Speed improvements will be dependent on the Scene but on average you can expect to see ~200% increase in playback speed. Performance improvements will be most noticeable in complex scenes where we have observed speed improvements of up to ~600% . Simple Scenes should see at least a 10% improvement in playback performance.

Performance improvements will be most noticeable in complex scenes where we have observed speed improvements of up to ~600% .

Selecting large numbers of Layers is now ~100x faster and opening large Scenes is now also much faster. In our tests, a 2000 Layer Scene load time is now ~22x faster.

Tapered Strokes

New options have been added to enable a tapered stroke along a Shape to add further interest to graphic elements.

Background Rendering

It’s rare to find yourself waiting too long for a render to complete in Cavalry but it’s now also possible to send rendering to a second process so you are not prevented from continuing to work during those longer renders. Just open the Render Manager and check the Background Rendering option before hitting the Render button.

Wave Deformer

The Wave Deformer can be used to create looping wave distortions along open and closed Paths with options for Sine, Square, Sawtooth and Triangular waves.

It’s extremely easy to use and perfect for creating clean and even deformations for artwork and patterns.

Particles

A HUGE addition to the ‘Experimental’ features is a new particle system which includes several Emitters and Modifiers enabling you to craft a wide range of simulations.

There’s also a new Particle Distribution which can be used to attach geometry to each Particle or, for example, to use a Particle Shape as the input to a Connect Shape (or any Layer that uses a Distribution).

Not forgetting Track Mattes, Increment and Save, Motion Paths, Segment Path, Background Blur Filter, Sorting in the Assets Window, missing font detection, Attribute Editor improvements and much, much more.

Check out the release notes for all the updates and improvements.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the beta. You’re feedback was absolutely invaluable along the way to this release. We salute you. ❤️

Cavalry is free forever to use or go Pro and unlock a world of creative possibilities. A Professional subscription to Cavalry is available from £16/month (paid annually) — sign up here.

What’s new in Cavalry 2.0? was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the great pleasures in developing creative software is seeing the wide variety of amazing projects people are putting Cavalry to good use on.

Here are just a few that we’ve spotted this year from Studio Feixen, Philip von Borries, Dominic Brooks, Mario De Meyer, Pentagram, Antonin Waterkeyn, Remco Janssen, Matt White, Mojiff, Kees Klein Hemmink, About Contact, Zentrumwest, Joyce N. Ho, Anthony Velen, Veritasium and Secta.

In no particular order…

Studio Feixen

First up, this project to promote a new font called Ease by Studio Feixen simply blew us away. So many nice details to promote a lovely variable font — the website is incredible!

Alongside teaching Cavalry to his students, Felix has also been busy creating posters for Museum für Gestaltung Zürich and a multi award winning channel identity for SRF Bounce.

Philip von Borries

Philip is a prolific german freelance 2D animator and designer who works with clients like Apple, Google, Facebook, IBM, Spotify, VICE and Zoom.

He was kind enough to share these amazing animations so that others could learn and be inspired by them.

Resources - Philip von Borries

Dominic Brooks

Dom (AKA Positronic Man) is a UK based motion graphic designer using a wide variety of tools for his work. Cavalry was enlisted to help in creating this beautiful ‘Aerium User Interface Panel’.

https://positronicman.com/

Mario De Meyer

Mario is a Belgian freelance graphic designer with a strong focus on typography. It’s been a real pleasure to see his work popping up throughout this year – it always brings a smile to our faces.

Mario De Meyer - HNY2023

Pentagram

We’re super proud to have world renowned, multi-disciplinary design studio Pentagram as customers and they’ve been using Cavalry as part of their projects for Nordoff and Robbins and Echo among others.

Antonin Waterkeyn

It’s been an absolute pleasure to follow along with Antonin’s experiments in Cavalry. He just doesn’t seem to stop producing amazing work!

https://www.instagram.com/antonin.work/

Scenery.io

Scenery is the new community for everything Cavalry by Remco Janssen where artists including Greg Stewart (Ordinary Folk), Adam Maurer, and Chris Gannon are generously sharing their files as inspiration for your own projects. Sign up and get involved!

• Pencil by @jdgstewart
• Capsule Grid by @acmmaurer
• Social Media Airlines by @chrisgannon

Matt White

Matt White (AKA Pepko) is an artist creating great tutorials and scripts for Cavalry. It’s intriguing to see what he’s building using Cavalry’s JavaScript APIs.

Mojiff

Mojiff’s YouTube channel is full of concise Cavalry tutorials. All killer, no filler! Well worth a watch.

Kees Klein Hemmink

Kees used Cavalry to export SVGs that could then be fed into a plotter to take digital art into physical media.

We love seeing Cavalry put to use in unexpected ways like this.

About Contact

The team at About Contact used Cavalry “to meticulously craft an animated logo that transitioned from starry to spiky as a representation of Plenty’s ‘no-bullshit’ attitude with an unmistakable feminine touch”.

They also used Cavalry to build “a generative design system to create placeholder images automatically based on data from a Google Sheet” for all the content available on Square Mockups.

Zentrumwest

Leipzig based multidisciplinary design studio Zentrumwest used Cavalry to output 2d textures and then mapped those on to 3d models in Blender.

embroidered space - zentrumwest

We love seeing Cavalry fit into the prodcution pipeline like this.

Joyce N. Ho

Buck Creative Director Joyce N. Ho used Cavalry to create a series of beautiful generative artworks which also featured at Semi Permanent Sydney.

Anthony Velen

Anthony Velen shares our love of a good motion poster. His bold, graphic approach is really striking.

His mesmerising work for 36 Days of Type was also among the many that filled our social feeds with flowing typographic motion.

Veritasium

This great documentary on Micromouse, the fastest maze-solving competition on Earth is peppered with explainer animations created in Cavalry — it has been watched by over 14m people!

Secta

It was a pleasure to work with the team at Secta on building an automated suite of templates to promote their corporate football leagues. By simply updating a Google Sheet, upcoming fixtures, results and league tables were quickly exported each week and posted to their social channels.

Thanks to everyone who has shared their work this year. If you didn’t make this article — that certainly doesn’t mean we didn’t love it! Seeing all the weird and wonderful ways you’re all using Cavalry is a huge inspiration to us. If you’ve not yet shared anything, why not make 2024 the year to start showing off?! Tag your work with #cavalryapp and we’ll repost it.

Cavalry is free forever to use or go Pro and unlock a world of creative possibilities. A Professional subscription to Cavalry is available from £16/month (paid annually) — sign up here.

Check out what’s coming soon in Cavalry 2.0 👉 here 👈.

Cavalry projects we love in 2023. was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is a step-by-step guide for getting started with Cavalry’s Web API using a simple football league table as an example.

I should start this article with a confession — despite having many talented developers on the team, I’m not one of them! I’m on a learning journey myself so I hope this helps anyone interested in using Cavalry to represent external data in interesting ways.

Set Up

For this example we’ll be using Cavalry’s Web API to query an API from sportmonks.com. Sportmonks have a free tier which can be used to follow along using API 3.0.

The following script can be written in Cavalry’s JavaScript Editor but I’ve been really enjoying using Stallion from Scenery (aka Remco Janssen) which allows you to script in Visual Studio Code and also includes TypeScript definitions offering autocomplete and documentation while you type. 👍

Writing the Script

We’re going to create a very basic UI for this with a button to trigger the data from the API so let’s start by giving the script UI a title:

// Set the window title
ui.setTitle("Sportmonks API");

Next, let’s create a button:

// Create the button
const updateButton = new ui.Button('Refresh');

In order to access the Sportmonks API, you’ll need a token. This can be generated within your account. Once that’s generated, copy it and save it to a variable called apikey for use later on. To receive data for a league table we’ll also need a Season ID. On the free tier, the Scottish Premiership ID is 21787 (for the 23/24 season) so let’s also save that to a variable:

// Set API key and seasonId
const apikey = 'YOUR_TOKEN';
const seasonId = '21787';

Next we need to create a callback function to run when the Refresh button is clicked:

updateButton.onClick = function () {

}

And then within that function, create a new web client and authenticate it:

updateButton.onClick = function () {

    // Make a new WebClient
    const client = new api.WebClient('https://api.sportmonks.com');
    client.addHeader('Authorization', apikey);
}

Sportmonks offer two types of authentication. For this example we’re using the request header method. As you can see, that is using the apikey variable we created earlier.

At this point you should be in a position to send a Get request. For this we need to build a url in a valid format which, for a Standings request, looks like this:

/v3/football/standings/seasons/{ID}

This base url returns a limited subset of the data available. For our league table we also want the team names and to do that we need to include the participant field. That can be achieved by adding ?include=participant to the end of the url. The final Get request looks like this:

updateButton.onClick = function () {

    // Make a new WebClient
    const client = new api.WebClient('https://api.sportmonks.com');
    client.addHeader('Authorization', apikey);

    // Send the Get Request...
    client.get('/v3/football/standings/seasons/'+seasonId+'?include=participant');
}

Next, let’s add some basic error checking to the function. When making a request, Sportmonks returns a response code. The HTTP response code for a successful request is 200 so lets use an if statement to check for that and return the error code to the Message Bar (console) if anything goes wrong.

updateButton.onClick = function () {

    // Make a new WebClient
    const client = new api.WebClient('https://api.sportmonks.com');
    client.addHeader('Authorization', apikey);

    // Send the Get Request...
    client.get('/v3/football/standings/seasons/'+seasonId+'?include=participant');

    // Check it succeeded.    
    if (client.status() == 200) {
        // do something here
    }
    else {
        console.log('Sportmonks returned error code: ' + client.status());
    }
}

We’re now ready to parse the JSON data and save it to an object within the if statement:

updateButton.onClick = function () {

    // Make a new WebClient
    const client = new api.WebClient('https://api.sportmonks.com');
    client.addHeader('Authorization', apikey);

    // Send the Get Request...
    client.get('/v3/football/standings/seasons/'+seasonId+'?include=participant');

    // Check it succeeded.    
    if (client.status() == 200) {

        // Parse the JSON to an object.
        const obj = JSON.parse(client.body());
    }
    else {
        console.log('Sportmonks returned error code: ' + client.status());
    }
}

In order to check the data is coming through, let’s generate the UI so we have a button to click and then log the data returned to the console. Add this to the bottom of your script (outside the button’s callback):

// Add the button.
ui.add(updateButton);
// Show the UI window.
ui.show();

…and, as a temporary check, let’s send the data from the Get request to the console by adding this to the end of the if statement:

console.log(JSON.stringify(obj));

The script should now look like this:

// Set the window title
ui.setTitle("Sportmonks API");

// Create the UI elements
const updateButton = new ui.Button('Refresh'); 

// Set API key and standingsId
const apikey = 'YOUR_TOKEN';
let seasonId = '21787';

updateButton.onClick = function () {

    // Make a new WebClient
    const client = new api.WebClient('https://api.sportmonks.com');
    client.addHeader('Authorization', apikey);

    // Send the Get Request
    client.get('/v3/football/standings/seasons/'+seasonId+'?include=participant');

    if (client.status() == 200) {

        // Parse the JSON to an object.
        const obj = JSON.parse(client.body());

        // Preview the data in the console.
        console.log(JSON.stringify(obj));
    }
    else {
    console.log('Sportmonks returned error code: ' + client.status());
    }
};

// Create the UI layout.
ui.add(updateButton);
// Show the window
ui.show();

Click the Run Script button in the JavaScript Editor and then click the Refresh button in the UI that pops up. You should see lots of JSON printed to the Message Bar (console) at the bottom of the Cavalry UI. This indicates we have successfully authenticated and sent a valid request.

In order to preview the data in a more readable form you might want to use a service like JSONlint to ‘prettify’ the output. Below is a stripped back version of the JSON response Sportmonks returns. This is a useful step to better understand the structure of the data and how to then extract specific properties from it.

{
    "data": [
        {
            "points": 39,
            "participant": {
                "name": "Celtic"
            }
        },
        {
            "points": 35,
            "participant": {
                "name": "Rangers"
            }
        }
    ]
}

The next step is to filter the data down to just the properties we’re interested in — in our case, the points and name properties. To do that, let’s save the response to a variable and then use the map() method to store the values from all the points properties to an array called pointsResponse.

if (client.status() == 200) {

    // Parse the JSON to an object.
    const obj = JSON.parse(client.body());

    // Store the response.
    const response = obj.data

    // Store all the values from the 'points' property
    const pointsResponse = response.map(a => a.points);

}

Running console.log(pointsResponse); should now return an array of values representing the total points scored for each team — [39, 35, 29…].

We can then access the name property within the participant object using participant.name:

if (client.status() == 200) {

    // Parse the JSON to an object.
    const obj = JSON.parse(client.body());

    // Store the response.
    const response = obj.data

    // Store all the values from the 'points' property
    const pointsResponse = response.map(a => a.points);

    // Store all the values from the 'name' property
    const nameResponse = response.map(a => a.participant.name);

}

namesResponse should return an array of all the team names — [Celtic,Rangers,Hearts…].

Now we have prepared the data, we need to create a Composition in Cavalry containing Layers to assign the values stored in the pointsResponse and nameResponse arrays to.

Create the Composition

In Cavalry:

1. Create a new Scene (File > New Scene).
2. Create 2 Text Shapes (name them Points and Team).
3. Move them in Position X so they are apart from each other.
4. With the Team Text Shape loaded into the Attribute Editor, right click the String attribute and choose Add Array > String Array.
5. With the Points Text Shape loaded into the Attribute Editor, click the + button on the String attribute and choose String Generator.
6. Set the Precision and Padding to 0.
7. Right click on the String Generator’s Number attribute and choose Add Array > Value Array.
8. Use the +Add button to add 11 more indices to both Arrays (for a total of 12).
9. Group the two Text Shapes.
10. Select the Group and click the Duplicator button in the Shelf.
11. Set the Duplicator’s Distribution to Linear, Count to 12, Size to -800 and Direction to Vertical.

You should have something that looks like this:

Passing the data to Layers in the Scene

Back to the script, the last step is to use the data in the pointsResponse and nameResponse arrays to populate the indices for each of the Arrays in the scene. To do this, we can use a forEach() method to set the value of each item in the array to an index of both the Value and String Arrays.

A forEach loop for both properties is added to the bottom of the if statement in the final script below:

// Set the window title
ui.setTitle("Sportmonks API");

// Create the button
const updateButton = new ui.Button('Refresh');

// Set API key and seasonId
const apikey = 'YOUR_TOKEN';
const seasonId = '21787';

updateButton.onClick = function () {

    // Make a new WebClient
    const client = new api.WebClient('https://api.sportmonks.com');
    client.addHeader('Authorization', apikey);

    // Send the Get Request...
    client.get('/v3/football/standings/seasons/'+seasonId+'?include=participant');

    // Check it succeeded.    
    if (client.status() == 200) {

        // Parse the JSON to an object.
        const obj = JSON.parse(client.body());
        
        // Store the response.
        const response = obj.data

        // Store all the values from the 'points' property
        const pointsResponse = response.map(a => a.points);
        
        // Store all the values from the 'name' property
        const nameResponse = response.map(a => a.participant.name);

        // Set each index of a Value Array with the Points data.
        pointsResponse.forEach((item, index) => {
            api.set("valueArray#1", {["array."+index]: item});
        });

        // Set each index of the String Array with the Name data.
        nameResponse.forEach((item, index) => {
            api.set("stringArray#1", {["array."+index]: item});
        });
    }
    else {
        console.log('Sportmonks returned error code: ' + client.status());
    }
}

// Add the button.
ui.add(updateButton);
// Show the UI window.
ui.show();

Hit Run Script again in the JavaScript Editor to reload the UI and then hit the Refresh button. This should now populate the Arrays with the data returned from the API and be reflected in the Viewport!

From here, you can animate the Text within the Group and then add a Stagger to the Duplicator’s Shape Time Offset to create something similar to the example at the top of this article.

Now, each time the league changes, the Composition can be updated with one click of a button.

There are all sorts of APIs available for a variety of different fields including sports, events, weather, music, finance, social media… or maybe you have an internal API and are looking for ways to represent its data.

Sticking with the football theme, here’s a novel way to represent a team’s performance from graphic design graduate Noni.

Noni FH on Instagram: "This isn't the most exciting animation but that's ok because I didn't make it a spreadsheet did. Weekend play with @cavalry.app using the data import feature! Team name, position, points, colours and W/D/L ratio all automatically update when changed in the base csv file. And then the whole league can be rendered out with one button push, all from one comp, using ~6 keyframes :D #cavalryapp"

A set up like this could be driven by API data and then exported from Cavalry on a weekly (or more regular) basis.

Hopefully this article gets you started integrating API data into Cavalry. If you have a project you’d like to explore or any questions then please get in touch via our support channels.

We’d love to see your creations so please share them with the #cavarlyapp hashtag so we don’t miss them. 😃

Cavalry is free forever to use or go Pro and unlock a world of creative possibilities. A Professional subscription to Cavalry is available from £16/month (paid annually) — sign up here.

Using Cavalry’s Web API to create a live league table. was originally published in Cavalry Animation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.