Facebook had a vision to use the video medium to highlight connections between users. They would create high-quality short films, populated by personalized, user-generated content, to elevate users’ experience on the platform. It was an ask at a potential scale into the billions. What does it take to create unique videos for millions (or billions) of users? The scope of the ask only became clear over time, as Chapeau’s technical artists worked with Facebook engineers to create what became a new form of video rendering, which Chapeau and Facebook called Dynamic Compositing.

The videos began as an experience focusing mainly on the most visible content type on the platform: user images. The creative ask at the time was to populate user-generated photos into a short film format. Facebook wanted to use high-resolution, high-design, practically-shot live footage to achieve an organic, material quality in their films that is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to convey using purely CGI video techniques. Through a collaborative development process, Chapeau determined that we’d need find a way to create a simplified data output from a streamlined base video project file. Developing a simplified data output from a complex video project became the core challenge our technical artists would solve.

Over the course of the next several video concepts, additional dynamic content types became entwined with story, which continually presented unique challenges to an already complicated workflow. Chapeau was able to bridge creative and technical disciplines, iterating with Facebook engineers to identify and build a high-end, 3-layer compositing process designed to render quickly while maintaining Facebook’s high production standards. Less layers means smaller files and faster turnaround to more individual users. Essentially, smaller file sizes enable more sharing; sharing builds community, which is what Facebook is all about.