A massive expression-driven lower-thirds template library for Telestream — 400 AE projects and 327 customizable Lottie files.
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A massive expression-driven lower thirds template library built for Telestream through Lynn Elliott. 400 After Effects projects and 327 Lottie JSON files -- every one of them customizable through expression controllers rather than manual keyframe editing. Type in your text, pick your colors, adjust your sizing, and the expressions handle everything else: layout calculations, gutter spacing, text overflow, animation timing.
This was one of my earliest large-scale Lottie production projects, running from late 2020 through mid-2021, and it established the template architecture patterns I still use today. The core challenge was building lower thirds that were genuinely customizable -- not "edit this specific keyframe and hope nothing breaks" customizable, but "change any parameter and the whole system adapts" customizable.
The template library spanned multiple series (A through F and beyond), each with a different visual style but sharing the same expression-driven controller architecture underneath. A text-only minimal lower third and a full-featured broadcast graphic with logo placement, social handles, and animated backgrounds ran on the same underlying expression system.
After Effects expressions were the backbone of the entire system. Custom controllers handled dynamic text sizing, gutter calculations, background scaling, and animation timing offsets. Change any single parameter and the whole composition adapts -- layout recalculates, spacing adjusts, nothing breaks.
The Lottie export pipeline required careful expression simplification -- not all AE expressions translate to Lottie's Bodymovin format, so each template needed a parallel expression structure that maintained the same visual behavior within Lottie's supported expression subset.
400 After Effects project files with expression-driven controllers; 327 Lottie JSON animation files; multiple lower-third series (A through F+); expression controller documentation; template customization guide; cross-browser tested web-ready Lottie files.
