Video Alchemy
Helping producers skip the footage hunt to focus on building stories.
Timeline:
Mar 2025 - Jul 2025
Interface:
Web App
Team:
Role:
Sr. Product Designer
Background
Video producers on the marketing team at MLSE create documentary-style series like The Leaf: Blueprint (Maple Leafs), Open Gym (Raptors), and All For One (TFC). These productions are not only major partner commitments to Bell & Rogers but also an essential way for our marketing team to tell each team’s story throughout the season and strengthen their long-form presence on YouTube.
Role
As Senior Product Designer, I drove ideation and prototyping, turning feedback into production-ready designs. Building out the UX and product vision with help of our dev and data team members and the voice of our producers and marketing team.
Opportunity
Producers had time diverted away from storytelling, stretching them between logistics & creativity.
They may know exactly which moments they want, yet still spend valuable time digging through raw footage to find them, balancing this effort with tight deadlines, storytelling demands, and capturing fresh content like interviews.
Outcome
Video Alchemy: Giving storytellers back their creative hours
Built in partnership with Twelve Labs and AWS. Video Alchemy empowers producers, social teams, and asset managers with smart footage labeling, live footage preview, and generating a rough first draft for editor hand-off.
Approach
Similar to the Double Diamond, my approach starts with learning broadly before defining a direction, then testing ideas widely to arrive at the right solution. I break this into four steps: Listen, Frame, Experiment, and Deliver.
Listen
Stakeholders
From kick-off sessions and recurring alignment meetings, we surfaced key stakeholder priorities from the following stakeholders:
Team | Role | Influence | Engagement |
|---|---|---|---|
Marketing | Primary stakeholder overseeing content and brand across all MLSE teams. | Defined workflow priorities, tagging needs, and success metrics for faster content turnaround. | Dedicated producers to collaborate closely, shaped creative requirements and validated key decisions through ongoing feedback. |
Business Strategy | Explored long-term opportunities and managed relationships with external partners. | Informed roadmap decisions around scalability, white-label potential, and new market use cases. | Facilitated partner discussions and business alignment reviews. |
Users
I led interviews with producers, asking about their challenges and current workflows to build a clearer picture of their needs.
Frame
Common Workflows
Workflow walkthroughs revealed which processes were most important or required significant work. We refined these iteratively, guided by continuous feedback from producers. Here’s how some of those flows took shape:
Experiment
Ideation
I hosted ideation workshops with different groups of producers, using exercises like Crazy 8s and Storyboarding to unlock ideas for their workflows. This gave producers ownership in the final product and let us act on solutions they could use immediately, reducing learning curves and cold-start issues.
Prototyping & Iterations
After ideation with producers, we translated their input into features and flows, creating high-fidelity prototypes that we refined through continuous feedback, bringing the final product into focus.
Impact
The real impact wasn’t just time saved... it was seeing producers rediscover footage that had sat untouched for years. By reconnecting creative teams with the full depth of MLSE’s archives, we helped transform assets that could've remained dormant into stories ready to be told again. Here are a few more numbers from our launch:
Reflection
Video Alchemy was one of those rare projects that reminded me why I love designing for storytellers. Hearing producers use it naturally and even pause to say how useful it was became one of the most rewarding moments of my career.
It gave me a front-row seat to what it takes to create world-class sports content, from hours of raw footage to the final stories that move fans. Watching the process up close deepened my appreciation for the people who bring those moments to life and players with rich history or unique storylines. None of it would have been possible without our incredible team: Hajra Arif, Naghmeh Dezhabad, OJ Adeyemi, William Tran — and the producers (Jenna, Jasmyn, Christopher, Erika, Amir) and MAM (Andrea & Jenn) who shared their time and insight with us.
In the end, this wasn’t just about AI or automation, it was about celebrating creativity and helping people focus on what matters most: telling great stories.
Next Steps
After delivering the core product, I outlined these next steps. While the project’s budget and resources had wrapped, these recommendations reflect where I’d extend or reallocate efforts if continued after the roll out.
Re-do's
Every project’s got its highlight reel and a few plays you wish you could run again. If I had a time machine, these are the moments I’d give a little more TLC.