Render Absurdist Explainer

render-absurdist-explainer

The free, deterministic renderer for the absurdist-explainer video ad format — an animated spot that explains one problem and how the product fixes it. The format is the mechanics: show the problem in a funny, exaggerated cartoon way, teach the product's ownable mechanism visually, show what the problem costs, bring the product in, land the fix as the climax, pay it off, end on a real-product card. One narrator voice carries the whole spot. How the story is told (problem → fix, how it works, a day in the life, the product as hero, or a villain arc) is the user's choice, made upstream. This capability is the FREE assembly stage only. All generative work (nano-banana keyframes, Seedance i2v clips, ElevenLabs VO + music) happens upstream in the recipe and is handed to this capability as files.

It ports the validated compose recipe from two reference runs (a cortisol/stress supplement and a baby-eczema cream; both happened to use the villain arc). The recipe is deterministic — iterate the cut for free, re-roll only the offending paid beat.

Choices

The creative calls are made upstream by the recipe's choices and arrive here only as files and config values. This renderer is story- and style-agnostic: it never assumes a story shape, a cast, a look, a narrator or a music style.

• story_shape — how the story is told: problem → fix (no villain) / how it works / a day in the life / the product as hero / villain arc (the problem as a cartoon villain who schemes and loses). Reaches this capability as the per-scene caption text and the VO files. Asked of the user; the demo used the villain arc.
• cast — who the cartoon characters are (the customer, the product as a character, a mascot; a personified problem only on the villain arc). Reaches this capability only inside the clips. Asked of the user.
• narrator — who speaks the single VO track. Arrives as the scenes[].vo files. Asked of the user; the demo used the villain (villain arc only).
• visual_style — the art style of the i2v clips (scenes[].clip). Asked of the user; the demo used Pixar-style 3D. Nothing here depends on it.
• narrator_voice — the voice cast for the VO. Asked of the user; the demo used a characterful male villain voice.
• music — the bed at music_bed. Asked of the user; the demo used whimsical pizzicato + woodwinds + xylophone. The mix constants below apply to any style.

What it does (the deterministic recipe)

1. Per-scene retime. Each i2v clip is retimed to its measured VO window (scale=1080:1920:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase,crop=1080:1920,fps=30,setsar=1, then tpad=stop_mode=clone if the VO is longer than the clip, else a trim). Each window is snapped to a whole number of frames first. compose.py and make_captions.py use the same rule, so video cuts, VO windows and caption cues share the same cut times and a caption never outlives its cut.
2. Identical re-encode. Every segment is re-encoded libx264 -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 30 even if already correct — a framerate mismatch makes the concat demuxer silently drop frames.
3. Concat all scene segments + the end card via the concat demuxer (-c copy).
4. Real-product end card. build_endcard.py composites the REAL retail product photo over the brand palette (flat, or sampled from the photo's own edge pixel) with a typeset wordmark + claim rows + CTA pill in PIL ImageDraw.text — never an AI cartoon bottle, never AI-rendered brand text. compose.py holds it static over the dwell. Set end_card.zoom_to above 1.0 (for example 1.04) only if you want a slow zoom. Text that would be hard to read on its background (a dark brand colour on a dark photo) is drawn in white or near-black instead, with a warning. If end_card.vo is set, that spoken line plays from the start of the end-card window, and the dwell is stretched to at least the line's duration + 0.5s.
5. Mix. VO bus loudnorm I=-14 TP=-1.5, music bus loudnorm I=-26 TP=-3 then volume=0.62, amix inputs=2 duration=first normalize=0, so the music is ducked under the VO.
6. Master pass. The mix is measured, gained to -14 LUFS, limited, encoded to AAC and measured again. The pass repeats until the encoded audio is at -14.5..-13.5 LUFS with a true peak <= -1.5 dBFS. compose.py prints the measured loudness and peak.
7. Captions last. make_captions.py emits a libass .ass (one cue per scene, Arial 64 white / 6px outline / MarginV=330, start = scene_start + 0.08s, suppressed on the end card). compose.py burns it as the final filter so captions sit on top.