Vixel

Focal Agent (now Propertybox) provides photography and marketing services to real estate agencies across the UK. One of those services is property videos — produced from the professional photos taken at each property listing. These videos combine room-by-room imagery, local points of interest (schools, transport links, supermarkets), text captions, and a voiceover narrated by a voice artist from a written script.

Originally, every video was handcrafted by a designer in After Effects — a time-consuming process that didn't scale. If a single agency branch had 50 active listings, that meant 50 individual videos to produce and maintain.

To address the scale problem, the team had built an internal platform that tried to automate video creation. The concept was: configure every visual setting in the system — transition styles, animation types, text effects, colours, timing — and the platform would feed all of that into After Effects running on a server, which would then render the video.

On paper it made sense. In practice, it didn't work.

When I joined the team, I looked at the problem differently. The old system was trying to describe animations through settings and then build them in After Effects. That's the hard way round — After Effects is a design tool, not a settings consumer.

My proposal was to flip it: build the template in After Effects first, with all the animations, transitions, and motion design already done, at full quality. Then use the system only for what it's actually good at — managing the data that changes per property: images, captions, points of interest, agency branding.

Vixel is a video template management and order platform. On the production side, a designer creates a property video template in After Effects — with all the motion design, branding, slide structure, and placeholder data already defined. That structure is exported and uploaded to Vixel as a template.

On the agency side, an estate agent logs into Vixel, selects a template assigned to their brand, and creates an order by supplying the dynamic content: property photos, room captions, voiceover script, and points of interest. Vixel handles the rest — dispatching the render job, scaling infrastructure as needed, and tracking the order through to delivery.

• Faster production at scale. A branch with 50 properties no longer needed 50 individual design sessions. One template, created once, covered all of them automatically.
• Better output quality. Freed from the constraints of the settings system, designers could build high-quality motion templates in After Effects — more complex transitions, stock video inserts, polished motion design.
• Elastic infrastructure. VMs spin up on demand based on order volume, meaning peak periods no longer created a backlog.
• Reduced internal overhead. With orders processed automatically through Vixel, the team's involvement in day-to-day video production dropped significantly — less customer service, fewer manual interventions.
• A product that could be sold. Vixel became a platform Propertybox could offer to agencies directly — not just an internal tool, but a commercial product with a clean user-facing interface.

The most important thing I learned here was about where complexity lives. The old system had put complexity in the wrong place — it tried to express creative decisions (animation, motion, transitions) through a data interface, which is fundamentally the wrong tool for that job. Recognising that mismatch, and proposing a way to move each concern to where it actually belongs, was the core insight that made everything else possible.

This project also showed me how much a product's design can be shaped by its underlying technical architecture. The old platform was hard to use partly because of its UI, but mostly because the architecture forced it to expose things that should have been invisible. Changing the architecture changed what the UI needed to do — and made a clean, simple interface possible.

Working on something end-to-end — from identifying the problem, to proposing the concept, to designing and building the platform — gave me a different perspective on product design. You make better decisions when you understand the full picture.