AI chat is single-player. Sauna made it multiplayer.
Spaces let you pull a coworker into a conversation you'd already had with the AI - full history, prompts, answers, everything. Useful, but unfamiliar: nobody had seen it, and nobody was asking for it. The launch video had to make a strange idea feel obvious before it could make it feel valuable.
Client: Sauna by Wordware
• Visual asset creation • Motion Design • Sound Design •
About the project
THE PRODUCT
Sauna is the main product of Wordware, the San Francisco team behind the largest seed round in YC history. It's an AI assistant a whole team works in. Spaces was its new feature: pull a coworker into a conversation you already had with the AI. They see the whole thread — and if the AI got something wrong three messages back, they say so and it corrects itself in front of everyone.
THE PROBLEM
Everyone already knows what AI chat is: private, solo, disposable. Spaces breaks all three at once. A feature nobody has a word for can't be listed - it has to be shown happening to someone.
MY PART
Wordware wrote the script and shaped the narrative. My job was to make sure it landed. I built the visual assets, designed how each scene would be shown, animated the video and layered in the sound design. But the part that mattered wasn't the execution - it was deciding what the viewer needed to see at each moment to follow an idea they'd never encountered before. Which interface detail makes the feature obvious and which one just crowds the frame.
Every call was made against the same test: does someone who's never heard of Spaces understand it by the end, and do they stay long enough to get there.
Design Decisions
It opens on real posts about AI taking people's jobs, with one phrase in each kept sharp and highlighted while the text around it drifts out of focus. The viewer reads a headline instead of a screenshot and has the stake in about a second - which is all a muted LinkedIn video gets.
Red and green are the only colours in the film. Red carries cost: the highlighted fears, the glow tightening around Sebastian, the burn figure. Green carries human action: Invite, Join, and every message a person types. Halfway in, the viewer reads state before reading words.
Onboarding cost is invisible, so it's given a price tag - a counter climbing to $1.37M beside Sebastian's face, with one line of what he's thinking underneath. A number rising next to a person lands. "Lost context" doesn't.
No screenshot appears whole. The sidebar arrives first and small, then the Space, then the tabs, then connections turning green one at a time, then the dashboard. Each element shows up only when it's needed, so a product with this much surface never asks the viewer to scan a screen.
When Sebastian points out that Brex is missing, the fix isn't described. The dashboard cards slide in over the conversation and the burn figure counts from $78.4K to $112.4K while he's still typing. It's the one beat that proves why a second person in the thread is worth anything, so it's held longest and everything around it is cut tight to pay for it.
How I work
Most of my time on a project goes into two questions: what does the viewer need to see first, and what's the one moment that has to land. Everything else gets built around the answers. On this one that moment was a number correcting itself in front of someone.
Explore more motion projects ➔
AI chat is single-player. Sauna made it multiplayer.
Spaces let you pull a coworker into a conversation you'd already had with the AI - full history, prompts, answers, everything. Useful, but unfamiliar: nobody had seen it, and nobody was asking for it. The launch video had to make a strange idea feel obvious before it could make it feel valuable.
Client: Sauna by Wordware - San Francisco
• Visual asset creation • Motion Design • Sound Design •
One of four animations produced across a five-week collaboration.
About the Project
THE PRODUCT
Sauna is the main product of Wordware, the San Francisco team behind the largest seed round in YC history. It's an AI assistant a whole team works in. Spaces was its new feature: pull a coworker into a conversation you already had with the AI. They see the whole thread — and if the AI got something wrong three messages back, they say so and it corrects itself in front of everyone.
THE PROBLEM
Everyone already knows what AI chat is: private, solo, disposable. Spaces breaks all three at once. A feature nobody has a word for can't be listed - it has to be shown happening to someone.
MY PART
Wordware wrote the script and shaped the narrative. My job was to make sure it landed. I built the visual assets, designed how each scene would be shown, animated the video and layered in the sound design. Most of the work sat in one decision, repeated scene by scene: what does the viewer need to see at this moment to follow an idea they've never encountered before. Which interface detail makes the feature obvious, and which one just crowds the frame.
Every call was made against the same test: does someone who's never heard of Spaces understand it by the end, and do they stay long enough to get there.
Design Decisions
It opens on real posts about AI taking people's jobs, with one phrase in each kept sharp and highlighted while the text around it drifts out of focus. The viewer reads a headline instead of a screenshot and has the stake in about a second - which is all a muted LinkedIn video gets.
Red and green are the only colours in the film. Red carries cost: the highlighted fears, the glow tightening around Sebastian, the burn figure. Green carries human action: Invite, Join, and every message a person types. Halfway in, the viewer reads state before reading words.
Onboarding cost is invisible, so it's given a price tag - a counter climbing to $1.37M beside Sebastian's face, with one line of what he's thinking underneath. A number rising next to a person lands. "Lost context" doesn't.
No screenshot appears whole. The sidebar arrives first and small, then the Space, then the tabs, then connections turning green one at a time, then the dashboard. Each element shows up only when it's needed, so a product with this much surface never asks the viewer to scan a screen.
When Sebastian points out that Brex is missing, the fix isn't described. The dashboard cards slide in over the conversation and the burn figure counts from $78.4K to $112.4K while he's still typing. It's the one beat that proves why a second person in the thread is worth anything, so it's held longest and everything around it is cut tight to pay for it.
How I work
Most of my time on a project goes into two questions: what does the viewer need to see first, and what's the one moment that has to land. Everything else gets built around the answers. On this one that moment was a number correcting itself in front of someone.
Explore more motion projects ➔