Hey —
I build a lot of things. I have almost never let anyone watch me build one.
That's a strange thing to realize about yourself. I'd finish a tool, write it up, post a link, move on. And the entire time, the actually interesting part — the part where I'm clicking around, changing my mind, undoing, going "no, not that" — stayed private. Because it's messy. Because it's me on camera not being good at something yet.
So I started a series. It's called Level Up. One free tool per level. One video. Me actually making something with it, start to finish, no script and no polish pass.
Level 1 was Typo — type a line, hit play, kinetic text falls into place.
Level 2 is up now: animated backgrounds. You shuffle a field of moving shapes until you like the feel of it, then flip the whole thing from flat 2D into tumbling 3D solids in one click. Export it transparent — an alpha channel or a depth matte — and drop it straight into OBS or DaVinci Resolve behind whatever you're doing.
Watch it get made → youtu.be/Nw1nKsAdmAI
Or skip watching me entirely and go make one → frame.startingframe.com/background
Here's why I'm telling you about it instead of just quietly posting it.
If you wait until you're good at something before you let anyone see you do it, you will wait forever. I know because I did that. For years. I had the tools and the ideas and I kept them behind a door until they were ready, and "ready" never arrived, because ready isn't a thing that arrives — it's a thing you decide you're done waiting for.
The levels aren't a ranking. There's no level you have to earn. It's just the order I happened to get to them in, and you can start at any of them, today, for free, without telling me who you are.
Level 3 is Scene, the stream-graphics one, as soon as I get it recorded.
Ship anyway.
— Brian