Plugin Everything is a business that was born from a single thought: “This could be easier”.
“We make the lives of our customers simpler by removing mundane and monotonous tasks, which arise in everyday workings of creative software use,” head of marketing Lachlan James Morton says.
Plugin Everything is an After Effects plugin development company that creates presets, scripts, extensions and other tools for artists to help take the tedious or impossible out of their workflow.
“The thing about After Effects is that it has been this endlessly developed product. There has been iteration after iteration slowly making it a monster that can be pretty tricky to handle properly,” Lachlan says.
“With extensive experience both using and developing software for Adobe After Effects, we create tools to enhance the workflow and experience of artists around the globe. With our software being used by teams such as Google, Youtube, WarnerBros Studios and LinkedIn, our products are recognised as top class and used worldwide.
“Founded by James Whiffin in 2015, every line of code and every keystroke, was inspired by his mission to give people back their time. Whether that be time in their day, time for their family, or just more time to make things greater.”
One such example of this is its product Deep Glow.
“The After Effects base glow is pretty much just a blur and to make it look realistic or anywhere near nice you have to take that original glow effect, duplicate it, double the radius and repeat about 30 or so times,” Lachlan says.
“Why should motion designers, VFX artists, compositors, or anyone have to do such a tedious task? So we built Deep Glow, a GPU-accelerated realistic glow plugin.
“While there are many other other amazing glow plugins made by a lot bigger companies, the price tag tends to be far higher on these tools. That's why we get so excited when we see our Deep Glow product compared to them. Just to be compared is a huge honor not to mention the feedback says we compete easily for a much cheaper price.”
They have also done similar things with a range of other After Effects tools.
“Whether the tool is built into After Effects but really lacking, or it isn’t in After Effects at all, we want to ease the process,” Lachlan says.
“We want to take away the dull and unintuitive tasks that stop artists from doing what they do best - being artists.”
Getting recognition from industry professionals has been a big highlight for the Plugin Everything team.
“Yes, the praise is nice but for us it is more the feeling that we’ve made it. We’ve spent a lot of time watching Youtube tutorials about how to do basic things and the same names get mentioned over and over. Suddenly we were one of those names and the feeling is something entirely else,” Lachlan says.
“Another highlight was speaking at Nodefest last year. We were all quite nervous and thought our jokes wouldn’t land but it went well and the audience seemed to really enjoy our talk on plugin development.”
The biggest challenge has been keeping its tools usable.
“Adobe updates After Effects often and usually without a lot of testing, and even updates more generally across windows and Mac OS impact our tools,” Lachlan says.
“It takes a long time to ensure as many users as possible can run the plugins and with every update this is challenged.”
The business has grown since starting in 2015.
“Plugin Everything initially started as a New Enterprise Incentive Scheme business, which provided some initial business training and funding for the first six months,” founder James Whiffin says.
“From there I was running private equity out of my bedroom, while still freelancing as an animator since the business wasn’t bringing in enough revenue. It was my dream for it to be big enough to dedicate all my time and energy to, as well as having additional people involved.
“It took about a year or so before the growth was enough to justify bringing on a second person part-time, in addition to me now being involved full-time. Thankfully being an online business with no fixed location allowed the company to be very nimble and not require any loans or seed funding.
“We became an official business with three shareholders and co-founders - myself, Digby Hogan and Matthew Alexander - about a year later and have seen exponential growth ever since, while maintaining our original lean structure.”
The next six to nine months will be huge for the Plugin Everything team.
“We have a lot of big ideas for tools and we’re pushing into new areas we couldn’t reach before,” Lachlan says.
“We’ve released a long-awaited sequel to our shadow plugin and we recently released two massive plugins for free. Seeing users take these free tools and watching what they can do with them has been amazing. It really nails home the idea of letting users just enjoy the process.”
