Higgsfield AI Motion Designer: I Tested the Claims transcript

Spoiler [music] alert, it's all fake. Higsfield AI Motion Designer is not what they want you to think it is. I've tested out myself and in this video I'm going to show you my authentic first impressions of how it performed. And I put chapter markers if you just want to skip there. But I want to talk about the promotional video real quick because it is a blatant [music] false advertising. It follows this young woman who's just talking to an AI agent.

It looks a lot like chat GBT voice and she's just asking for things and those things magically appear inside of After Effects. She doesn't even have to touch the computer. [music] I'm 99% sure that all of the footage in this promo video is AI generated and that's genuinely impressive. It looks consistent from shot to shot and from what I've been told, Higsfield is a really good product for [music] using video generation models to create convincing footage, but I can guarantee you that none of the motion graphics that you see in this piece were created by their own product.

This whole marketing campaign is centered around the idea that Higsfield is bringing you the power of GPT6 Astra, [music] which is the latest frontier model from ChatGpt. The thing is, they don't give you access to that model. You have to bring that model to Higsfield. All they're giving you is an extension that you install into After Effects and an MCP server. That's model context protocol. And it's just a way for AI to control apps.

So, when you install that Higsfield plugin, you're just creating a bridge between Chat JPT or Claude, which they don't say anywhere on the page. You can also use Claude to use After Effects. And you don't need Higsfield to do that. You could literally ask Chad GPT or Claude to build an MCP server for After Effects for you and start asking your agents to just make you things inside of After Effects. [music] I've done it.

It actually works really well, but AI is just terrible at animation at this point. And AI Motion Designer from Higsfield doesn't bring anything new to the table. What you're really getting with their plugin is the ability to link it to your Higsfield account and [music] use credits that you've purchased or your subscription to generate assets as you're talking to ChatGBT or Claude. and you'll see how that works with my tests.

[music] Besides that, I'm sure there's custom tooling and prompt engineering that is built into their plug-in that guides chat GPT [music] to create interpretations of what you prompted to build very specific types of motion design, which is taking creative control away from you. And I don't see how that's helpful. [music] And I want to be very clear that in this video, I'm being extremely critical of Higsfield and specifically their marketing.

Their social media posts are complete ragebait and they're claiming things that are just absolutely not possible with their own product. I'm not saying that I don't think AI can get there. I am not going to be surprised at all if in the future we can literally talk to our computers and see the motion design that we have in our head appear before us inside of After Effects. [music] But we're not there yet. And AI Motion Designer from Higsfield is not that.

So give this video a like and let's take a look at my first impressions of AI Motion Designer from Higsfield. I know I've been talking a lot, but I just want to share my frustration with the setup process. Following Higsfield's own instructions, it took me almost an entire hour [music] to get ChatGpt to be able to control After Effects through their own MCP server. The first thing I asked for using the commands that Higsfield told me to use [music] gave me a video generated by Higsfield.

There was nothing built in After Effects. [music] And when I pushed on chat GPT, it found a bunch of errors that it had to diagnose and fix in Higsfield's MCP server so that it could actually communicate with After Effects. It wasn't a great start and it took almost an hour, but I'm going to spare you watching any of that and we'll just get to the very next prompt where I was successfully able to get Chad GBT to build stuff in After Effects.

I want you to animate the comp that I have open in After Effects. It's my logo as a shape layer. You're the motion designer, so you decide how it should be animated. Just make sure it's in a 1080p comp at 30 frames per second. Do not generate any assets. Only use After Effects, the existing shape layer in the open comp and create everything else inside of After Effects. We'll send that off and hopefully it starts to use After Effects.

There are key frames. Let me just check on Chad GBT. Okay, so it's just checking its work. It actually finished. Let's see what it did with the animation. Okay, honest opinion, that's not half bad. It used trim pads to bring the face on. It even animated the eyes blinking a little bit, and that's great. The thing is, this is not unique to Higsfield in any way. They just created an MCP server, which I've done myself. I can control After Effects with Cad GPT or Claude through my own extension that acts as a bridge between the two apps.

And if we take a look at my credits, I didn't even use any credits on that generation. That was entirely chat JPT, most likely with some custom tooling and prompt engineering that came from Higsfield. But that is taking creative control away from you and allowing Higsfield to say, "This is what your motion design project should look like." Now, as you can already tell, I'm convinced this is a waste of your time and your money.

But I'm going to throw something more complex at it so that we actually use some video and asset generation from Higsfield and combine it with their MCP server to see how expensive it is and how good it actually is at following my directions. Now, because this chat has the context of how to actually use Higsfield's MCP server, I'm just going to continue it here. What I want to see is a quick bumper that looks like stopotion animation where my logos are printed out on white copy paper.

I'd like to see a bald up version of that paper animated up into the center of the frame and then unfurled to reveal that logo printed on that paper. Then I'd like to see it crumpled up again. some kind of fun animation. Again, stop motion happen on the screen with that paper and then unfurl one more time to reveal the text version of that logo and then finally crumple up and transition off the screen so that I can proceed with my video.

I want this to be photorealistic, so use a combination of generating assets through Higsfield and animation inside of After Effects. I'm leaving the design direction and animation completely up to you because you are the motion designer and I'm not. And then I'm going to end my prompt with something I do with a lot of my prompting, which is ask clarifying questions if you have them before beginning. And I think that's just a really smart thing to do when my actual usage for chat GPT and credits from Higsfield are at stake.

So I'm going to send this off and we'll see what we get. Okay, so it is asking questions. How long should this bumper be? I'm going to say 5 to 6 seconds. What should sit behind the paper? We're going to say a photoreal, tabletop, or studio surface. Should I add paper crumpling and movement sound effects? Yes, let's include sound effects. And in fact, let's add music, too. This is the part that I don't like where it's actually exporting an MP4 so that it can check its own work rather than just letting me watch it and asking for my input.

In fairness, I did say it was the motion designer, not me. All right, that's time. Let's watch this for ourselves in After Effects. Okay, listen. I'm going to be 100% honest with you. That's impressive. It is impressive that I can speak to chat GPT and end up with something that I had imagined in my head. And it's honestly pretty close. There are things about it that I don't like, but it made the entire animation for me, generating the assets for me, so I didn't actually have to physically print this out on paper and actually take my own stopmotion animation photos.

It animated those assets using the same techniques I probably would have myself and it even made sound effects and music. Now, I didn't give it any direction on the music. I don't particularly like the music, but I'm still pleasantly surprised with this result. The reason I'm not instantly recommending this to everyone and saying that Higsfield has solved motion design is because I could already do this with my own MCP server and my own extension for After Effects that ChatGpt built for me.

And so can you. It's as easy as asking ChatGPT for what you want. The benefit of the Higsfield integration is that they have good asset generation. ChatGPT understood what I was asking for and Higsfield was able to generate these assets for me. But the work being done in After Effects, that's all Chat JPT. I'm going to play this one more time. Honestly, it's fun. Now, if I went in here and started pixel peeping, I see a ton of weird compression artifacts.

I don't know if that's AI generated, if it was trying to add that texture or what, but I would have rather seen none of my logo when it's crumpled up and have it appear as it's coming out. Now, between this frame and this frame, I can tell that the logo shrinks down. And I would really like that to be photoreal to where it seems like that was actually printed on the paper. And we use that same piece of paper the entire time.

There is a slight drop shadow there, but it is rotating with the paper. So, that's not photoreal. And it didn't really do much with the background. I was expecting more than just a subtle paper texture using my brand color when I asked for a studio kind of setup. I thought there could be some elements around the frame, but again, I let chat GPT make those calls. And the great thing is this is all actually built in After Effects.

These are real layers. There are key frames. If I go into this comp, I'm going to see that animation taking place. I'll withhold key frames on the opacity of those layers. That doesn't bother me too much. I probably would have handled it slightly differently. And then back in this comp, if I press U, there are a whole lot of key frames and expressions. So, let's go into the effect controls. It added a drop shadow, renamed it, and then added a bunch of expressions and key frames.

I'm not exactly sure what these are meant to do. Hold each photograph pose for three frames. So, it's just posterizing the time. And I don't know why there are key frames on each one of these, but that's essentially what it was trying to do, which was posterize the time. I would have done that by either dropping the frame rate of the comp or just applying the posterized time effect. But if you're asking AI to animate something for you, you probably don't care that much how it's done.

If the end result is what you had in your head, who cares? Well, actually, you should care because if the client has any notes, then you're going to be the one who has to dig through this. I could ask ChatGBT to make changes to this, but I don't want to waste any more usage on this because I have one more prompt that I want to give it. So, on this one, I'm honestly pleasantly surprised with the result. It's actually giving me an After Effects comp that I can then go in and make changes to.

All right, for this next project, I wanted to animate my effects of After Effects logo. And I actually took four frames from my actual animation to use as a story board. But I'm going to give it complete creative control over the style, the colors, textures, the animation, and we'll see what it comes up with. In the open After Effects project, there's a comp with four frames of a title locked up in several different stretched versions.

I would like you to come up with a fun animation using that as reference that brings in the title effects of After Effects. I do not want it to be pure black and pure white. I want you to have fun with it. Use your best judgment. Play with the colors, the texture, the stretching of the text, and the timing. Also, feel free to add in some faux 3D. Don't actually use 3D geometry, though. I want to see this as a 2D primary comp.

I'm a fan of printed textures that looks like it's handmade or maybe from screen printing or print making. Halftone textures are also great. It should feel fun and pop and have some personality. Play around with animation principles to really make this feel handcrafted and like an actual professional motion designer created it. If you need to generate any assets, that's fine, but I would love to have this primarily made inside of After Effects using native After Effects layers.

That being said, if you want to make custom textures, feel free to generate those assets. I would also love to hear some music and sound effects timed to the animation. So, feel free to generate those as well. The frame rate should be 24 frames per second. The entire animation should last about 5 seconds long. The overall progress of the animation should reveal the text in some fun way. Have the text stretch and animate, moving in however you see fit, and then finally animating off the screen.

If you have any questions, ask them before beginning any work. Let's see what we get. I literally just got an email from somebody representing Higsfield asking if I'm interested in doing a sponsored video. They say the budget is between $500 and $10,000. And I can assure you that if I ever do a sponsored Higsfield video, it's because they offered me enough money to pay off my mortgage. All right, it finished. Let's see what it looks like.

I mean, listen, it did what I asked for. It used native After Effects layers. It added texture, which it didn't have to generate any assets for. I don't think that used any of my credits. Just purely chat GPT usage. It added in the sound effects. I don't like the colors at all, but that's besides the point because I didn't specify what colors to use. It clearly used some animation principles like squash and stretch, and the easing isn't horrible.

I really don't like the way that it animates out at the end, but it did animate from referenced PGs. Something that looks passable, but it is not at all what I had in mind. So, what I'm going to do is give it a whole bunch of reference frames from screenshots of an animation that Higsfield posted itself claiming that Higsfield animated all of it. So, I'm just going to give it the name of the folder and say there's a folder in After Effects named Higsfield reference.

I don't have time to give you any more feedback or the budget to create something original. So, I just want you to take a look at the style of all of the screenshots in that folder and apply them to this logo animation. change everything about this original comp. Don't worry about using live text layers to pull off the animation. You're going to need access to the paths anyway, but don't let me tell you how to do your job.

Just update it as quickly as you can to match the screenshot style as closely as possible. Let's see what that does. All right, that only took 10 minutes and I'm honestly pretty impressed. It only used 3% of my Chad GPT usage and it didn't generate any assets through Higsfield, so it didn't use any credits. But let's actually watch the animation. Well, it tried. I honestly was expecting a lot more from this and hoping that it could stick to what I saw on social media and that's just not what I got.

There's more to the animation. The letters are spinning around. It kind of did this faint outline to make it look kind of 3D. And there's even some scan lines to add some textures, but overall it's a terrible composition. I don't really like the design and it doesn't move like what I saw on social media, which is what I was really hoping for. On the other hand, ChatGBT was able to pull this off and it did it through the MCP server that Higsfield is providing.

Now, I don't think it's any surprise that this doesn't look anything like Higsfield's own release video of AI Motion Designer because they have a history of ragebait marketing. It's all completely false advertising. You're not getting what they are saying that you're going to get. Honestly, I don't even like making these videos because I don't want to bring more attention to Higsfield. But the reality is they are a decent platform for generating AI assets.

I just absolutely despise their marketing and it makes me not want to be associated with them at all, even for debunking their videos because I think it's giving them more promotion. But I think I've said enough about this and hopefully you got all of your questions answered about Higsfield's AI motion designer and you now know that you can't trust anything that they post on social media for marketing their own products.

Do something kind for somebody today. I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you in [music] the next one.