Today I'm speaking with Justin Taylor, editor, motion designer, and founder of Hyper Brew, a company that builds plugins and automation tools for creative teams.

If you listened to my conversation with Adam Plouff, you'll know that Adam builds many of his tools on top of something Justin created called the Bolt frameworks. Adam makes the tools. Justin makes the tools the tool makers use.

This episode goes deeper into the development side than most. We talk about what "pipeline" actually means at studios like Buck, how the Adobe plugin landscape evolved from expressions to CEP to UXP, and how Justin turned open source into a business model. If that's not your world, the conversation opens with his journey from churning out product videos to automating the boring parts, and closes with where video tooling is headed (AI, Figma acquiring Weavy, and whether we'll all be writing our own tools soon).

Topics Discussed

From shooting product videos to automating the edits in Premiere Pro
Working at Verasity CoLab and sharing tools with a mid-size video team
Getting ProIO on aescripts and meeting Lloyd Alvarez
Meeting Zack Lovatt at SIGGRAPH and the Adobe dev community
Working at Buck as a creative technologist on pipeline development
What "pipeline" actually means at studios like Buck
Building tools for Cinema 4D, Figma, Nuke, Maya, and Houdini
The early days of Adobe plugin development before proper documentation existed
Going full-time with Hyper Brew
The tagline evolution from "software solutions for video" to "we automate the boring"
Working with Eric Moore from Brand Autopsy on messaging
Adobe Video Partner Program and testing beta builds
The Adobe plugin landscape: expressions, ExtendScript, CEP, and UXP
Why Adobe moved from CEP to UXP
How Bolt CEP became Bolt UXP, Bolt Figma, and Bolt Express
Getting funding from aescripts, Figma's Creators Fund, and Adobe
Custom tools for clients: image recognition, OCR, custom captions for a sports league
Languages used: JavaScript, C++, Rust, Python, Lua
Why extensible tools (Premiere, After Effects, Figma) win over closed ones like Affinity
Klutz GPT and why Hyper Brew doesn't use AI for client code
Custom vs off-the-shelf tools: 50% vs 100%
Remotion and agents for video
Figma acquiring Weavy

People Mentioned

Adam Plouff (Battle Axe) uses Bolt CEP for Overlord
Zack Lovatt documented undocumented Adobe APIs, connected Justin to Buck
Lloyd Alvarez (aescripts) hosted ProIO
Danny Perry (Plugin Play) uses Bolt CEP
Good Boy Ninja uses Bolt CEP
Michael Delaney worked with Justin at Buck
Eric Moore (Brand Autopsy) helped with Hyper Brew messaging

Tools Mentioned

ProIO automates importing and exporting in After Effects and Premiere
Bolt CEP / Bolt UXP / Bolt Figma / Bolt Express open source frameworks for plugin development
Klutz GPT experimental AI script generator for After Effects
Overlord Battle Axe tool for Illustrator to After Effects, built on Bolt
Vite the bundler that powers the Bolt frameworks
Remotion programmatic video in React
Weavy AI video generation, acquired by Figma