Tokyo-based design house Zeppelin was one of many Japanese companies that made the trip to SXSW in Austin, Texas last month. The company has previously done UI/UX work for many large clients in Japan and around Asia, but recently it is venturing to create some products of its own.

The most notable of these is perhaps its VideoShader iOS app, which lets you apply photo filters on top of your mobile videos. What’s fun about this is that when you pick a filter, your viewfinder video is previewed in realtime, along with the option to increase or decrease the intensity with a slider tool.

I particularly enjoyed the ‘red detector’ filter, which enables you to do some really creative stuff, as you can see in the rough test clip below. Note that I’m adjusting the effects slider as I record, which is making the effect do different things during video capture.

There are a number of other attractive filters like ‘motion blur’ and ‘tilt shift’, although those are available as premium add-ons. There is also a VideoShader pro version available, which the company says enables users to create their custom filters without knowing any code, but I’ve not tested that particular feature myself yet.

Zeppelin is planning to expand to the US soon, in an effort to increase their reach among global consumers with projects like VideoShader. CEO and founder Kohei Torigoe explained the rationale behind driving for such an expansion:

If VideoShader can reach one million or five million users in Japan for example, it would be difficult to expand beyond that. But if we can reach that same total from the US, then would be easier to reach out to the world.

I understand that an updated version of VideoShader is coming very soon, so we can look forward to a more simplified interface coming pretty soon.

The company has a few other fun projects in the works as well, including its voice-assistant app ‘Jarvis’ (think Iron Man), and I’m looking forward to seeing how that develops.

For more on Zeppelin check out their website, or watch founder Torigoe below as he gives a brief introduction to his company.