Google APIs x SoSD
Automated Data Driven Content Generation with Google APIs for SoSD
The challenge
To provide automation services for non-profit organisations. To challenge our automation services and also to do good in the world.
The idea
We wanted to test our limits on how we can push our tool to help organisations like SoSD save time, energy and resources, for them to be channeled to things that truly matters, like taking care of the dogs. We decided we could leverage Google Spreadsheets to help speed up the content creation process for this project.
Timeline
< 1 week.
Skills and tools used
Graphics, Motion Graphics, After Effects Expressions, Javascript, NodeJS, Google API, Google Spreadsheet, Google Drive.
Project Goals
• Get comfortable with Google APIs.
• Extract data from Google APIs and format it into JSON.
• Create an After Effects Template, based on SoSD’s current design template, with responsive design.
• Integrate data to After Effects.
• Automate the render process.
• Automate the upload process.
Ideation | Research
• Since SoSD already has some sort of a working branding guideline and a couple of designs that were already used. We decided to stick to what is currently used. If required by SoSD, additional templates can be added for this automation.
• There were also alignment issues or offets in the template they were using. So solving this and keeping all designs pixel perfect were also goals we wanted to achieve for them.
Templatisation | First preview
As most of the posts on SoSD’s are images, things were reletively simpler in terms of templatisation. However the workflow for motion isn’t too much of a difference and if needed, we could definitely implement it.
Tool in motion - Google Spreadsheets x Google APIs x Javascript
Script Features:
• Jobs can be turned on by changing the “Ready for Render” field to yes.
• It will be picked up on the rendering machine.
• After rendering, the image will be automatically uploaded to Google drive with the link pasted into the cell in Google Spreadsheets for easy access.
Reflection
We want to keep close connections with such organisations to do more good in the world. We believe that once a common ground is established, we could create more tools that would help the process. For instance, we could help SoSD automate the process of launching social posts, helping to reduce more efforts required that isn’t directly related to taking care of the dogs.
Next Steps
We will be approaching more Non-Profit Organisations.