An independent studio building focused tools for design, learning, production and fieldwork. We begin with a specific difficulty, build a useful response and improve it through use with the people affected.
Six tools in two families. Each one answers a difficulty that showed up in real work.
Tools for developing craft, sharing feedback and improving creative workflows.
Docks inside After Effects. Pick a base colour, choose a harmony, apply the palette across selected layers, then export it as .ase or hand it to Figma. It can read the open comp and give feedback on what is actually in it.
Get the extension
Rectangles, ellipses, text and filled frames arrive in After Effects as actual layers, with their names, positions, colours and fonts. Fonts you do not have installed are reported rather than swapped silently, so you find out at import instead of at render.
Get the plugin
Four phases that start with something ordinary, make it fail in a useful way, then offer a better model to test. Phase one asks what a colour means before it becomes a number. Built for students who can recite colour theory and still not see it on screen.
Get the app
Briefs, references, submissions and crit notes for a running studio course, in one place. Set up per course rather than per institution, so it can be in use next week without a procurement cycle.
Open the platformTools for planning, capturing and making sense of work beyond the desk.
Set the lens, framing, screen size, performer position and lighting, and it reports what the shoot will give you: how much screen you are short, how much spill lands on their back, how even the lighting is in stops. It answers with a decision first, then the numbers behind it.
No public listing yet
A field-capture camera for evidence and site work. Its task, audience, capabilities and release stage are not yet verified, so this page describes it no further.
No public listing yetFor Crit Panel and CRIT Bridge. The difference is the AI layer and whose keys it runs on.
open · no licence key
teams and commercial work
Applies to these two products only. Pricing for the other tools is set per product.
Start with a recurring difficulty. Make a response someone can try. Learn from what happens next.
Watch a recent real task. Record the workaround people rely on and what it costs them.
Name the competing causes, then choose the single most important uncertainty.
Run the smallest credible test, with continue, change and stop conditions set in advance.
Continue, narrow, change or stop on the evidence. Publish what was learned, limits included.
Practitioner frustration gives us a hypothesis. Observation with other people tests it. Where information is incomplete or unverified, this site says so rather than rounding it up into a claim.
One studio, run out of a classroom.
Some problems become so familiar that people stop questioning them. CRIT Studio pays attention to those moments. We ask what is getting in the way, make a response people can try, and stay close enough to learn what needs to change.
Our work can become an app, a plugin, a resource, a service or a better workflow. AI helps us explore and build. Observing real use helps us decide what deserves to continue.
The studio is run by Kamalanarayanan Kamalakannan, who spent around eleven years as a VFX compositor on international features before moving into teaching, and now runs the Communication Design programme at Woxsen University's School of Arts & Design in Hyderabad.
If a tool cannot survive thirty students using it badly in week one, it isn't finished. Working principle at CRIT Studio
Tell us about a task you repeat, a workaround you rely on or a problem that deserves a closer look.