PHONT Studio is an AI-powered plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro that transforms speech into expressive, animated subtitles directly inside Premiere's editing workflow. Unlike traditional subtitle tools, PHONT analyses not only what is being said, but how it is being said. By understanding emotion, emphasis, pacing, and speech patterns, PHONT generates dynamic, fully editable Motion Graphics Templates (MOGRTs) that visually reflect the energy and tone of the speaker.
Client
PHONT
Year
2026
Project
Adobe Premiere
Pro Plugin
Category
Product Design
& Developement
I led the product across every layer: UX, animation, development and distribution.
I ran user interviews with 20+ video editors to define the problem, designed the full plugin UI in Figma, built it using AI-assisted (Claude Code) development, created the entire MOGRT animation library in After Effects using code-based templates, ran live usability testing across two rounds of iteration, and shipped it.
I also designed and built the product website using Lovable: studio.phont.ai.
The Problem & The Solution
Video editors were round-tripping between three tools to do one job. Premiere transcribes but can't animate. After Effects and CapCut animate but break the timeline; export, re-upload, re-import, lose control at every step. The result was captions that took up to an hour per video and still looked like every other reel on the feed.
PHONT Studio fixes that. One plugin, inside Premiere. It reads the energy and emphasis in your audio and generates expressive animated captions directly in your timeline, fully editable, per-caption control over style, timing, emphasis, and colour. Save presets per client. Override anything the AI gets wrong. No exports, no round trips, no starting from scratch every time.
The Plug-in
Designing for a Premiere Pro panel means designing for a narrow strip of screen, used by someone mid-edit who doesn't want to think about the tool. Every decision was about reducing friction. One-click generation, style presets with motion previews so editors aren't picking blind, and per-caption overrides so nothing the AI does is locked in.
Using Claude code for developement meant I could iterate the plugin quickly, testing, catching issues, and fixing things on the fly between user calls.
The Animations
I built the full animation library in After Effects using code-based MOGRT templates, dynamic, parameter-driven, written in ExtendScript and JSON. Each style responds to the intensity, emphasis, emotons, duration, and position of every word. The result feels hand-animated. It generates in seconds.
The Distribution
The plugin is live on Adobe's official marketplace for Creative Cloud extensions. Getting it listed meant going through Adobe's review process, which added a layer of validation beyond just shipping. Alongside that, I designed and built studio.phont.ai to support the pre-beta launch and get editors to sign up.
