ERIC FILKINS

YOUTUBE 
EFFECTS

Effects are a fun and easy way to be creative on YouTube.  


I was a founding member of YouTube’s initiative that brought AR camera effects and creative tooling to YouTube’s camera and editing surfaces. 

I led the creative and artistic development for over 100+ effects that have been used by over 27.5 million creators and viewed 48+ billion times. 

company—YouTube
launch—20222024
role—Creative/art direction
Our team was responsible for productionizing proprietary capabilities like object recognition, pose detection, and facial tracking. 

I collaborated closely with engineering, product, research, and design teams to understand and unlock realtime rendering capabilities that we built our effects around. 
 As we embarked on building effects for YouTube, we were truly starting from zero. I helped the team bootstrap our corpus with low cost creative effects using After Effects and Skia’s Skottie framework to create full frame overlay designs. 

Some of the early effects we launched in 2022 are still some of the most popular effects today. In 2023, we launched our first batch of effects that were built off of emerging generative technologies. 

I helped the team explore and understand how capabilities like image-to-image, StyleGAN, ControlNet, and differential diffusion could be used in creative applications. 

Since their inception our generative effects have been viewed over 3 billion times.