Maxim Kuzlin lost part-time work as a design photographer around the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Originally from Russia and now living in Paris, the 28-year-old with time on his hands stumbled into the world of creating augmented reality (AR) effects for social media. Maxim’s tongue-in-cheek humor and understanding of TikTok’s extremely online culture led to viral filter after viral filter.
His take on Roblox’s default face is in more than a quarter million videos. There’s a yassified minion and a baddie Kirby as glorious, full-body overlays. For a hot minute, my entire FYP was “Krissed” by one of Maxim’s filters. But it was a grumpy, green ogre dressed in skin-tight latex that helped him truly break into the mainstream. Will Smith, Joe Jonas, and Utah’s Department of Transportation all got in on the fun with his “Shrek in the Sky.”
Curious about the people who submit filters to TikTok, I reached out to Maxim and a few other AR effects designers. We chatted about their reality-bending creations and the skills necessary to create one. This article focuses on TikTok’s software for creating filters, called Effect House, but Meta and Snapchat also have options for crafting custom overlays.
While the most influential creators have backgrounds in design, even the average person with rudimentary Photoshop skills (and a dash of patience) can try their hand at filter fabrication.
Creation tools and tips are more accessible than they were a few years ago. Kuzlin says, “It’s way easier right now to start and bring your art into this AR platform.” Masses of people already shoot and edit videos for TikTok. Although the barrier to entry is higher for AR, the company is invested in proliferating Effect House and having more users who create filters.
Last year, TikTok made the app available for developers to give a preliminary whirl. The company then made Effect House available for the general public in April 2022. While it was first offered on masOS, Effect House is now available to Windows users as well.
To start off, download Effect House to your computer and sign in with your TikTok account (or make a new one). Open up the software and click on Templates to see some tutorial projects to get your feet wet. Whether you want to start with the 3D face mask, head tracker, or hand gesture effect, click on whichever piques your interest and the assets will automatically download.
This is likely the moment you’ll start to feel overwhelmed, so don’t let your eyes glaze over just yet. When you tinker with a TikTok filter, the layout of Effect House breaks down into five main sections. Hierarchy includes the filter’s lighting, camera angle, planes, and other elements. Click on anything listed here, and it’s highlighted in the Scene. The Assets section breaks down all your 3D models and textures, and Preview displays what your filter will look like in motion. You can even use a webcam to test the filter on yourself during the creative process. The most intimidating section is Visual Scripting, where you’re essentially programming the effect’s actions and reactions.
Creation software is only helpful if you know how to use it, so bookmark these three key resources. The YouTube page for Effect House is small in viewership, but the content is perfect for visual learners. Watch the videos on getting started, creating that first effect, and visual scripting for a better grasp on the overall process. More of a reader? TikTok’s beginners guide to Effect House is effectively a user manual with sections answering general and technical questions alongside tutorials and a visual scripting glossary. Have a burning question or a desire to connect with a wider community of filter creators? Join the official Discord.
Kim Alban is a product designer from New York City who works for Coursera and dabbles in filter creation on the side. Her TikTok page is filled with accessible advice on AR creativity and using Effect House. She recommends you open up the practice templates and simply adjust the colors at first. “That is the easiest way to start, personalizing it by switching up the colors,” Alban says. “Then, when you want to add more things onto it, you can use Photoshop, but a free alternative is Photopea.”
With the assets already downloaded, you can adjust any provided images in photo-editing software to make them unique or substitute your own image. What about creating 3D models? That’s a little trickier. Luckily, Sketchfab, a major platform for 3D modeling owned by Epic Games, allows you to import models right into Effect House.
Like any skill developed over time, your very first filter will be a mess that’s difficult to make. The AR filters may become less laborious to pull off as you get more familiar with the creation process. The designers I spoke with confessed that many of their most-used filters were created in a single afternoon.
Let’s say you finish making a randomizer effect that displays which What We Do in the Shadows character matches your vibe (obviously Nandor), and you are ready for the world to interact with your masterpiece. First, take a look at Effect House’s guidelines to ensure no rules were broken, like depicting drug use or sexually explicit content.
Then, the Submit button is located within Effect House at the top right corner. A name, thumbnail, category, and demo video are all required as part of the submission process. Sometimes new effects are approved for use in under a week.
For more information on the different types of AR you can create, I reached out to Arthur Bouffard. He works for a marketing agency in the Netherlands that focuses on Snapchat filters. His re-creation of an iPhone on TikTok initially caught my attention. No matter which platform it is, Bouffard considers social media effects to fall into three primary categories: AR commerce, AR experiences, and AR trends.
The AR commerce implications are clear. You can place a pretend couch in your living room and throw on a pair of digital sunglasses before coughing up the cash for actual objects. AR experiences are more in-depth, interactive, and may be location-based. AR trend filters are more on the simplistic side and are often created as part of a larger joke or cultural moment.
In addition to the social applications of AR, the pragmatic uses fascinate Bouffard. For example, your public transportation card could be used to display a route map. He says, “Social AR can get you a lot of views and a lot of exposure, but then more technical AR lets you discover interesting tools, and it gets recognized by the community.”
According to Kuzlin, different platforms are better suited for different types of filters, “In my opinion, Instagram leans more into beauty filters, Snapchat leans into something more technically advanced, and TikTok leans towards the fun and crazy.” He emphasizes the ephemeral culture of TikTok: “It’s important to know that the trends appear randomly, and they can last one week, two weeks, maybe a couple of months. It’s really important to join trends quickly.”
Even someone with a well-established niche within the AR community finds it necessary to stay flexible and adapt to what audiences want. Sophie Katirai is a creator from Canada who now lives in Dubai and creates makeup filters. She even sold one to Kylie Jenner. Katirai compares the ever-changing and cyclical trends of the fashion industry to the trends she sees emerging in AR filters.
She says, “I try to be more natural now, because I don’t want to be misunderstood or make anyone feel like they weren’t beautiful enough so they need this filter to change their face.” Although Katirai sees more natural makeup effects as en vogue, a segment of her fan base misses the more fantastical face filters with saucer eyes and plumped lips.
As you try your hand in filter creation, remember that social media is mimetic. Platform designers iterate on the features of other platforms. Creators take from creators, sometimes in harmful ways. Designers who create popular AR filters see copies and variations of their work proliferate across platforms. Don’t be caught off guard when one of your filters takes off and copycats instantaneously pop up.
Speaking about his TikTok filters, Kuzlin says, “After the Krissed filter, I recreated my Anna Wintour filter with her signature haircut and the glasses.” He made the effect first for Instagram. Kuzlin thinks someone in-house at TikTok saw the filter’s wide use and created the Pixie Shades filter for their platform. After discovering the similar filter, he felt spurred to submit his iteration to TikTok. Kuzlin’s ANNA effect is currently in over 110,000 videos; TikTok’s Pixie Shades effect is currently in over 180,000 videos. (Full disclosure: Anna Wintour is the global editorial director of Condé Nast, WIRED’s parent company.)
Who has the right to represent real people and physical objects in AR? It makes sense to allow anyone to add a 3D model of a cardboard box to their unique effect on social media, but what if the box is made to look like it contains the elusive PS5? As our synthetic realities continue to dissolve the boundary between physical and digital, more complicated questions arise about our relationship to AR. A simple filter you create for TikTok has the potential to alter people’s perception of the real.
Concerning makeup and other beauty filters, Katirai believes that a positive future for social effects may allow more detailed personalization on the user end. “I think the future could be giving people the flexibility to decide what they want the filter to do,” she says.
Although a push to learn AR skills is not yet as ubiquitous as the tech industry’s learn to code mantra, the worthwhile ability can be a great creative outlet for beginners and a moneymaking endeavor for the more seasoned. Bend reality to your vision, then see who decides to follow and the tweaks they contribute along the way.
