Styles
Motion designers spend countless hours creating animations that are used once and then forgotten. Every new project starts from scratch, even when the visual language is the same.
Styles change that.
A Style is a reusable motion design system. You design it once, and CucoStudio applies it to any story—matching layouts, animating text, placing media, and adapting the timing automatically.
Instead of delivering a single video, you’re building something that can generate thousands of them while remaining fully editable in After Effects.
Design once, infinite takes.
The Shot
A Style is fundamentally a collection of Shots.
The shot is the core unit of the video; when CucoStudio renders a story, it fits each section into one of the available Shots
The more diverse the shots, the greater the range of story expression.
Each Shot is an After Effects composition stored inside the ORIGINAL_SHOTS folder.
The Shot has three principal components:
Controller
A null layer called ‘controller’ which holds two slider-control effects called enter & exit, where both have two keyframes going from 0-100 representing the advancement of the animation
You can use the Toolbox to link any set of keyframes to the enter & exit controlls, making your animation relative to the one in the final shot, and easy to correct.
Frame
A precomp that will hold any visual media attached in the section. Even if you duplicate the frame precomp, it must have the same name.
The name should match the shot name + -frame:
shot: "hero"
frame: "hero-frame"
Text
Similar to the frame, the text is a precomp layer that holds a text layer called textBlock. The textBlock will hold the text coming from the section, like captions or general titles.
If you’d like to create text animations, the toolbox has two presets that will get you started.
The name should match the shot name + -text:
shot: "hero"
text: "hero-text"
mainComp
The main timeline. The whole video is assembled here; the final export comes from this composition.
Inside the mainComp you’ll get all the shots sequenced when the video is done, if you need to change the duration of any of the shots, after the video is created, you can use the Reset mainComp button to reealign everything clean.
mainControl
A null-layer at the video level. It holds the three Trinity parameters and the three color palette values. This is what connects global settings to everything in your style.