How We Made the Ethena Pay Launch Film
A 30-second stablecoin neobank film shaped from Ethena Pay's landing page, custom music, five finance-film references, and six rounds of feedback.
From brief to final cut.
Keep the brief on the phone app
We linked Ethena Pay's website and X account and asked Ghostmotion for a kinetic film of about 30 seconds. The instruction was specific: show the mobile app on a 3D iPhone, draw its logo, type, colors, phone screens, and clips from the landing page, and leave unrelated topics out. We also asked Ghostmotion to generate the music.
Capture the site for source material
The app runs on a phone, so there was no mobile app session to record in Ghostmotion's browser. We instead scrolled through pay.ethena.fi from top to bottom in under a minute. That capture gave Ghostmotion the site's visual language, app imagery, and animations to work from without treating the marketing page as an app walkthrough.
Set the musical direction before rebuilding
We did not upload a track. Ghostmotion wrote the first one, but it sounded too cheerful and pushed the phone into too much beat-by-beat motion. We asked for a more serious song and a new edit built around it. Once the visual style felt right, we requested a faster, harder track and restructured the film to match its pace.
Show the quality bar with five references
After the first version missed the premium feel, we added five launch films from finance and mobile apps. We asked Ghostmotion to study their restrained motion and sound, alongside Ethena Pay's own site and X account. The references explained the look more precisely than a word such as ‘premium’ could, while the film stayed focused on Ethena Pay's product.
Work through six focused feedback rounds
Each message produced a new version. We started with broad readability and music problems, then narrowed the notes to specific scenes and frames as the film improved.
- Round 1: fix colliding text and phone screens, weak contrast, rough crops, and the opening background.
- Round 2: rebuild around a more serious song and the five reference films.
- Round 3: center and clean up the type, improve its entrances, and add a little more impact.
- Round 4: move to a faster song and make fuller use of the globe, 3D phone, and glass effects.
- Round 5: clarify the borders sequence, simplify the notification, align the copy with the phone imagery, and end with Ethena's logo.
- Round 6: smooth the line crossing the globe and fix the cropped, misaligned balance number.
Three frames. One story.
Make the next cut better.
- If a mobile app cannot be recorded in a browser, say so and capture the public site for its real phone imagery and brand cues.
- Get the soundtrack right early: a major music change can call for a new cut, not just a new audio layer.
- Use reference films to show the quality bar, then review exact seconds for legibility, coherent copy, and small numerical details.
