The Challenge
Marbles on Stream branding and Marblefest logos reproduced for portfolio purposes. Copyright © Pixel by Pixel Studios
Marblefest is a community event built around the streamers who take part in it. My contribution was much smaller: a two-to-three-minute opener for Spooo’s stream, designed to set the scene before the event began.
The first opener, in 2021, started with one of Spooo’s characteristically ambitious ideas: marbles travelling towards a huge fantasy building, with Pixel eventually appearing to let them inside. With only a couple of weeks to make it happen, I drew the environments and characters, animated the sequence in After Effects, and learned techniques such as parallax and squash-and-stretch as I needed them.
What began as a one-off quickly became a recurring job. Morbies were added, seasons changed, community jokes crept in and the animation was adapted for subsequent events. The problem was that I had built the original project while teaching myself After Effects. Everything was editable, but not necessarily sensibly editable. Layers multiplied, rendering became increasingly painful, and each new addition made the project harder to maintain.
By 2022, Marblefest was happening more regularly and continually patching the same animation was no longer practical. The challenge had changed: how could I keep making something personal to each Marblefest without rebuilding an increasingly complicated animation every time?
Context
Marblefest is a recurring Marbles on Stream community event, bringing together streamers from the Pixel by Pixel Studios community. My part in it was relatively small: creating a two-to-three-minute opener for Spooo’s stream to introduce the theme and the people taking part.
It became a long-running collaboration for Spooo and I. He brought ideas, music and an impressive willingness to suggest ridiculous things; I worked out how to make them happen. Tomacomics, artist for Pixel by Pixel Studios, created the official Marblefest artwork and logos, which I adapted and animated alongside streamer branding, in game characters; the Morbies and increasingly specific in-jokes.
Knowing the community was an important part of the design. Personalisation wasn't just adding names or logos: it was knowing who needed a frog, a pirate ship, a carrot-shaped spaceship or their particular colours.
Spooo comes up with a crazy idea. I try and work out how we can make it happen.
Constraints
A moving deadline Streamer line-ups could change at the last minute, so final renders were deliberately left close to the event to allow late substitutions without wasting completed work.
Growing project complexity Early After Effects files became increasingly heavy to edit, preview and render, eventually forcing changes to both workflow and structure.
Personal without starting again Each Marblefest needed to reflect a new theme and different streamers while retaining familiar community characters, artwork and visual references.
Working with shared assets Official artwork, Morbies, music and community references came from multiple collaborators, requiring clear permissions, attribution and careful adaptation.
Design Strategy
The approach evolved in two distinct stages. The first was about reuse. After the original hand-illustrated animation became increasingly difficult to maintain, I began designing assets with future Marblefests in mind. Tents were created in neutral colours so they could be recoloured and branded for individual streamers, scenes were built from reusable components, and the project was broken into more manageable sections for rendering.
By 2023, another change was needed. I had upgraded my PC, but the older After Effects project did not transfer cleanly to the new setup. Rather than continuing to wrestle with a project already carrying two years of additions and workarounds, I changed the approach again.
This was also when I began using generative AI for some of the bespoke visual assets I had previously illustrated myself. It reduced the time spent drawing every individual environment, costume and prop, leaving more of the production time for personalisation, compositing and animation.
That opened up a more interesting way of working with the Marblefest artwork too. Instead of treating the supplied logo as a finished graphic to reveal at the end, I could dissect it and make its components part of the story. In the Space opener, for example, pieces of the black-hole logo floated independently through the animation before assembling into the finished artwork. Later themes turned Morbies, marshmallows and other elements from the supplied artwork into performers within the opener itself.
The AI-generated elements were still deliberately personalised to the individual streamers and then composited and animated by hand. The time saved on illustration wasn't used to make more content; it gave me more room to make the animation itself more ambitious.
Design Process
Each opener usually began with a theme, a piece of artwork and a conversation with Spooo. There was rarely a formal brief. Ideas developed through Discord messages, screenshots and increasingly specific suggestions until I had enough to start working out what was actually possible.
The early process was heavily illustration-led. For the original 2021 opener, I drew the scenery, castle and characters myself, then built and animated them in After Effects. Much of the technical process was learned through making: experimenting with parallax, animating marbles with squash and stretch, and discovering, sometimes painfully, how decisions about layers and project structure affected rendering later.
As Marblefest became more frequent, I started designing for the next version while making the current one. The 2022 festival scene used a small set of tent designs that could be duplicated, flipped, recoloured and personalised with streamer branding. I also began rendering individual scenes separately before assembling the final video, rather than asking one increasingly large After Effects project to do everything at once.
From Space Marblefest in 2023, the process became less dependent on me illustrating every asset from scratch. Generative tools could provide starting points for environments, costumes and props, which I then selected, adapted and personalised around the streamers. That might mean a carrot-shaped spaceship for Bujuxx, tentacles for Shambugi, a rose-covered ship for Zagarose or a frog tucked onto LT's dashboard. The details depended on knowing the people involved, rather than simply generating something that matched the theme.
Music increasingly shaped the process too. Rather than simply placing a soundtrack underneath a finished animation, visual jokes could be built around particular moments in the track. When the Season 60 music unexpectedly produced an enormous trumpet solo, for example, the obvious solution was to send trumpet-playing Morbie Bloop across the sky in a balloon.
The process was never particularly linear: theme, artwork, music, community knowledge and whatever ridiculous idea appeared in Discord all fed back into one another until the opener felt like that particular Marblefest.
The Solution
What began as a single hand-drawn animation eventually became a series of themed openers, each designed to set the scene for Spooo’s part of Marblefest while remaining recognisably connected to the community around it.
The format changed whenever the existing approach stopped serving the job. The original castle animation gave way to a modular festival ground that was easier to update. When that project became impractical to carry forward, Space Marblefest became an opportunity to start again, combining generated assets with more ambitious animation and a much closer integration of the Marblefest artwork.
From there, each opener could develop its own visual idea rather than being another variation of the same template. Morbies carved a Marblefest logo from ice, populated a Brady Bunch-style grid, sailed down a river and marshmallows danced through a hot chocolate factory. Streamers appeared in personalised costumes, vehicles and environments, while music, logos and community jokes increasingly became part of the storytelling.
Using AI to generate assets freed me to spend more time experimenting with the supplied Marblefest artwork. The logos could be separated into individual components and brought into the animation itself. Sometimes I worked backwards: the Space logo assembly was animated as a disassembly first, then reversed to create the final reveal. In later openers, characters and objects from the artwork could dance, sail, carve ice or drift through the scene.
There was deliberately no single final template. The solution was a workflow flexible enough to change with Marblefest: reuse where it made sense, adopt new tools when they removed unnecessary production work, and keep the creative effort focused on the details, animation and humour that made each opener feel specific to that event.
"The streamers made Marblefest. My job was to set the scene."
Impact
The opener became part of Spooo’s Marblefest routine for around four years. It was only a few minutes at the beginning of a much larger community event, but returning streamers began to recognise the details made for them, while new themes gave us another opportunity to build in jokes, references and surprises.
Some of the strongest evidence of its impact came directly from the people represented in it. One streamer watched the Space opener repeatedly with his family and asked for his own copy; Mike, CEO of Pixel by Pixel Studios, described the Food Trucks opener as “killer”. Those reactions mattered because personal recognition had become such an important part of the work. The aim was for people to spot something and immediately know why it was there.
The project also had a significant impact on my own practice. It became a four-year testing ground for After Effects, illustration, modular design, compositing, generative tools and increasingly efficient production workflows. Mistakes in one version directly informed how I built the next.
Eventually the Marblefest format changed and Spooo no longer opened every festival, bringing the regular opener routine to an end. The collaboration did not. I now create new themed animated assets for his Marblefest streams, including Morbie channel redeems that viewers can trigger, often repeatedly and chaotically, during the event.
The two-minute opener disappeared, but the job it had been doing - setting the scene, reflecting the theme and giving the community something recognisably theirs - simply found a new format.
Design Artefacts
Looking Ahead
Looking back, Marblefest is a fairly accurate record of me learning by making. The first opener contains decisions I would never make now. Everything was on its own layer because I thought that made the project wonderfully editable. In reality, those things should have been pre-comps. Render times became ridiculous, seasonal additions were increasingly awkward, and at one point I was rendering without being able to preview the animation properly.
But each problem changed the way I approached the next version. I learned to build reusable components, separate scenes, render in manageable sections and think about future changes before they happened. When a new PC made the older project impractical to continue using, I was much more willing to abandon the existing solution rather than preserve it simply because I had already invested time in it.
The arrival of generative tools created another useful shift. They didn't replace the creative part I enjoyed most. Instead, they reduced the amount of time I needed to spend producing individual illustrations, allowing me to put more effort into animation, personalisation and playing with the official Marblefest artwork. It reinforced something I had already learned through modular design: efficiency is most valuable when you reinvest the time it saves.
Perhaps the biggest lesson, though, is that good creative work does not always begin with a beautifully defined brief. Sometimes it begins with a Discord message describing an enormous mythical building full of marbles and someone saying, essentially, can we do this? Four years of Marblefest taught me to be comfortable answering: I don't know yet, but I'll work out how.