01 / The spot · 2026

Engramme.

A 15-second film for memory that comes to you.

Engramme is Memory-as-a-Service: ambient intelligence that surfaces what you need, no query. The Creative Designer take-home set the challenge: bring a relevant memory into a daily app on its own, with nothing typed. I chose Slack, and I held to one principle, surface, don’t amend. The compose field stays empty. The memory arrives beside it.

Motion / brand · take-homeambient memory0:15 · After Effects

Finished spot · After EffectsAudio on · click to play

02The brief

What the brief gave me

The take-home asked for a 5-to-15-second film where Engramme surfaces one relevant memory in a daily app on its own, and the user never types to summon it.

Ambienthow it runs

Engramme lives in the background of the apps you already use. There is nothing to open.

Proactivehow recall fires

The memory surfaces on its own, linking now to a moment weeks back. You never open a search box or prompt it.

Besidewhat it never touches

It sets one memory next to your words and recedes. It never edits the message. You stay the author.

From the Engramme Creative Designer take-home: surface a relevant memory at the right moment, with no search box, no prompt, and no keystroke.

03The idea

From the brief to the film

The goal

The brief set the bar: bring a relevant memory into the exact moment it’s needed, before the user goes looking for it. Less is more, so every frame has to earn its place, and the memory has to land as relief.

How I built it

I set it in Slack, where recall fails all day. A teammate asks about the Q3 positioning. The user starts to reply, then reaches to go hunting. Before they can, Engramme surfaces the answer from their own call three weeks ago, beside the empty field, then recedes. Six hard-cut beats, one thing moving at a time. It never touches the message, never sends, never edits. The user stays the author. The memory comes to them.

04The craft

Three tools I built to make it

The ad needed memory imagery no stock library sells, so I built my own procedural tools with Claude Code. Each one generates motion straight from Engramme’s thesis, memory is not search, so nothing on screen ever reads as a query or a result.

01Procedural tool · Claude Code

Recall

Recall is an organic node-memory field I built for a pure-black stage: monochrome dot nodes joined by hairline associative edges, with recall firing outward from a single hub in a jittered radial burst. The position paper argues memory is a proactive associative network, not a database, so I wanted imagery derived from that thesis. Nodes surface in place out of the dark, latent dots twinkle as dark matter, and the associations propagate across the field. It opens and closes the ad: the memorome surfacing a memory out of ambience.

02Procedural tool · Claude Code

Photo Node Particles

Photo Node Particles takes one photo, dices it into a grid, and disintegrates part of it into floating fragments held on faint tether lines that converge on an origin point, running as a seamless six-second forward loop. I built it to show a single memory coming apart into nodes and still holding together. The tethers do the work: they are the associative edges, so even mid-burst the image reads as connected recall. It carries the moment a remembered detail breaks into its parts, calm and monochrome, never a results list.

03Procedural tool · Claude Code

Memory Stream

Memory Stream conveys photos along an invisible preset path, straight, wave, arc, or s-curve, as one continuous forward loop over a near-black field. Each photo scales and fades up out of the dark at the head of the path, travels, then re-darkens at the tail. That surfacing-from-black is proactive recall arriving unbidden; the re-darkening returns the memory to dark matter, still there, un-lit. A slight desaturation makes each image read as remembered, not a raw file. No path in view, no query, nothing typed.

Between them, these three tools authored the ad’s whole memory language, so every frame of recall was generated from the thesis itself, in Engramme’s monochrome-on-black.

05Memory is not search

Memory is not search

Every beat of the ad makes a claim from this paper visible, so I let Engramme’s own research say why memory surfaces itself instead of waiting to be searched.

We argue that proactive, lifelong memory is fundamentally unlike search.
Engramme · “Memory is Not Search” · §1
The memorome is the entire collection of memories from an individual lifetime.
Engramme · “Memory is Not Search” · §2
Memories that are not spontaneously surfaced or suggested become irretrievable, the dark matter of memory.
Engramme · “Memory is Not Search” · §4

06What I learned

The restraint is the product

Engramme wants to end forgetting, and the hard part was keeping it warm, close to your words instead of watching over them. The memory sits beside them, never inside them, so you stay the author. I built the whole look from three tools I wrote with Claude Code, and each one had to hold that same restraint, so the ad brings up one memory and lets it go.

The best memory doesn’t announce itself. It’s there, the moment you need it.

Next project

02Cover Genius

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