Video

Emulo video

You take a brief and hand back a film. Not a prompt, a film: the prompt that built it, the composition files, and frames somebody can look at.

0. Load the profile before you write a word

1. Locate emulo.py two directories above this skill; fall back to ./emulo.py only for a direct repo checkout.
2. Store the resolved absolute path as EMULO_PY, then run python "$EMULO_PY" plugin profile-path --domain video.
3. If it exits nonzero, give its exact recovery instruction and stop loading personal context. Never substitute a generic creative persona.
4. Read every returned path completely. First is the core working profile, second is the video profile. Both outrank anything below: where the person's own mined rules disagree with a default in this skill, theirs win.
5. If the project has its own video docs or router, read them first and follow them for anything they cover.

1. What you hand back

A folder the person can upload to Claude Design and get a film. That is the deliverable. Not a prompt in a chat message, not a description of a film, not a list of ideas. A folder.

Build it in the project, in a folder named for the brand or the film, in this shape:

Optionally, and only after the five above are finished: build/piece.jsx plus build/frames/, the film built and rendered locally so you can look at it before anyone else does. That is verification, not the deliverable. A kit with no local build still ships. A local build with no kit does not.

The three things that decide whether the folder works

Ship the engine inside ATTACH/. animations-v3.jsx goes in the folder with the assets. Claude Design needs the runtime it is being asked to write against. Leaving it out is a common way a good prompt produces a bad film.

Isolated parts, never a screenshot of a whole screen. One object per file, transparent, 1600px minimum on the long edge, plus large plates at the film's aspect ratio for the ground. A whole screen dropped in is a slab and reads as broken. Films built this way fail on missing assets far more often than on prompt length.

Put the instruction in the filename. REF_03_object-becomes-the-mark.png teaches; ref3.png does not. The person uploading them keeps the names, so every file carries its own lesson into the context.

Name what is missing. Never invent a substitute.

If an asset does not exist, say so in PROMPT.md under its own heading, and say what to do instead. A brief that admits two missing assets is usable. A brief that quietly fakes them produces a film with two broken beats and no way to tell why.

Every prompt contains, in this order and by name

1. the brief in the engine's language: OM_SCENES, CUES, named Easing
2. the transformation chain, as match anchors: what becomes what
3. the asset list, with real filenames, so no beat is blocked on a missing part
4. the failure conditions for this specific film, not generic ones
5. the verification commands, so the claim "it works" has an output behind it

2. The engine

animations-v3.jsx is the Claude Design composition runtime. Read its header once, then work from this table.

Never edit animations-v3.jsx. Its own header says re-running copy_starter_component overwrites it, so every change made there is lost on the next host copy. The leverage is in the brief.

The model in one sentence: the animation is one element tree rendered as a pure function of one authored time axis, so nothing mounts or unmounts at a section boundary and any object can persist, move or morph across the whole film by ordinary interpolation. That makes zero cuts and one object transforming across the film the engine's defaults instead of things a brief has to fight for.

<CompositionStage width={1080} height={1920} bg="#161309"
                  scenes={window.OM_SCENES} playback={window.OM_PLAYBACK}>
  <Piece />          // ONE component, the whole film
</CompositionStage>

useComposition() -> { T, CUES, time, duration, authoredTotal, playing }

OM_SCENES and OM_PLAYBACK are JSON string literals in plain inline <script> tags of the main document, not type="text/babel", passed through untouched. Every entry needs a desc, one plain sentence, because the user reads it in the timeline popover. Never hand-set nat.

<script>window.OM_SCENES = '[{"name":"Strike","dur":2.5,"desc":"The mark lands and throws colour across the ground"}]';</script>
<script>window.OM_PLAYBACK = '{"mode":"loop"}';</script>

Easing, the complete list. linear; easeIn/easeOut/easeInOut for Quad, Cubic, Quart, Expo, Sine; easeInBack, easeOutBack, easeInOutBack; easeOutElastic. Back and elastic overshoot, so they belong nowhere near a logo or an official brand file.

Render from T only. The exporter seeks each frame with a synchronous commit and may serialise the stage the moment the seek returns, so anything painted from an effect or a private animation loop exports stale.

Captions only when asked. Render <Captions> only when the brief or the person's video profile asks for burned-in captions. Many people add their own afterwards, and a burned caption ruins that. Locked on-screen copy is a normal element placed where the composition wants it.

Set bg to the film's ground, never the #0b0b0e default, and never #000000. A designed world needs somewhere for light to fall off to.

Define exactly three or four motion helpers up front and use no easing or transform outside them:

MOTION.slam    Easing.easeOutExpo     arrivals and impacts
MOTION.snap    Easing.easeOutBack     chips landing, overshoot capped at 6%
MOTION.drive   Easing.easeInOutQuart  travel, light, drift
MOTION.settle  Easing.easeOutQuart    the final resolve

3. Assign the references. Never average them.

Every reference gets one job and an explicit do-not-copy list. Without the line "do not average the references" the model blends the styles into mush.

Write it into the prompt in this shape:

Use X as the PRIMARY authority for: pacing, restraint, match anchors, scale
contrast, camera push and pull, depth, the final hold.
Use Y only for: monochrome identity, typography, exact logo, clarity.

Do not copy X's design. Do not introduce X's colour. Do not average the
references.

If the person has several finished films on the same engine, read at least three and ask what is the same in all of them: how a scene list is declared, where the transformation chain is expressed, how an entrance is timed against the thing it hits, how the last three seconds are built. The constants are the workflow. Anything present in only one is that film's costume.

Build in stages, and gate between them. Build the first five to eight seconds. Render. Look at a contact sheet. Only then continue. A twenty second film built before anyone looked is a twenty second film nobody can fix, because the defect is in the concept and the concept is now load-bearing.

4. Build the kit before you write the prompt

A long, detailed prompt with no real assets still comes back as grey rectangles standing in for text and a hand-drawn shape in place of the real mark, because placeholders are the only thing a model can draw with nothing real to place.

Claude Code builds the kit. Claude Design animates it. That split is the pipeline.

1. Measure the reference at 1:1, one file, never a contact sheet. Write down beats, ground colour, mean luminance, mean saturation, and what physically occupies the frame.
2. Brand intake. Official marks usually live on the brand's own guidelines or press page, mixed in with their "don't do this" examples. Render a light and dark contact sheet and look before naming anything.
3. Rebuild the product UI as live DOM carrying real strings, then shoot it at 3x to 5x into flat plates with a headless browser. Interfaces are rebuilt. World art is rendered and composited. Nothing is faked.
4. Cut parts, not screens. A whole screen is a slab, and a slab cannot be animated, only slid. Ship a parts/ folder of isolated transparent objects at 1600px and up: every button, chip, node, bar, tile, badge, icon.
5. Split the mark into its own layers. An official SVG splits into layers that stack back pixel perfect. Verify it: stacked against the original, the maximum difference on any pixel should be about 1 of 255, which is antialiasing. Then the film assembles the mark instead of cutting to it.
6. Optimise. Keep each file small (a few hundred KB) and the whole kit a few MB, so it survives being carried into a Claude Design project.
7. Open every file and log its defects in KIT.md. Clipped buttons, missing alpha, wrong aspect, white emblems that vanish on a white card. Every defect you found goes in the prompt under KNOWN KIT DEFECTS with what the film must do about it. If you found none, say you opened every file and found none.

Aspect is a real defect class. Rendering 1200x800 chips into a 224x160 box stretches every one horizontally by 7%, which is subtle enough to survive review and wrong in every frame.

Published artifacts may run under a strict CSP that blocks external hosts, so nothing in a kit should point at a CDN. Everything is a project file or a data URI.

5. Write OM_SCENES first

It is the outline, and the section names become the cue vocabulary the rest of the brief speaks in. Six sections is a good film. Ten is a slideshow.

Each desc is one sentence naming a physical event, not a mood. "The triangle becomes an aperture, the camera pushes through it and pulls back into a full product preview" is a desc. "A sense of speed and possibility" is not.

6. The transformation chain, as match anchors

Name the one object that carries the film and forbid breaking it.

Every scene inherits one visible object, shape, line or motion vector from the previous scene. Never: scene fades out, empty background, next scene fades in. The incoming beat is visible while the outgoing is still 25 to 50% visible.

For example, one coloured circle that is the brand mark, then a lesson node, then the thing every name collapses into, then the mark again. Or one track title printed on every product surface, so the same song moves from bar to desktop to phone.

The colour rule that comes with this. An object that will become an official layer corrects to that layer's colour, never to the brand's published one. Brand files and brand guideline pages often disagree by a few values, and correcting to the guideline value steps the colour on exactly the frame that must be invisible. The file wins over the guidelines page.

7. The prompt

Fill this. Delete nothing structural. A brief that is long and contains no filenames is the wrong brief.

You are directing a <N> second <vertical|landscape> spec commercial for <BRAND>,
built on the animations-v3 composition engine. Cinematic. Few objects, large, lit.

FORMAT. WRITE IT LITERALLY.

  <CompositionStage width={<W>} height={<H>} bg="<ground hex>"
                    scenes={window.OM_SCENES} playback={window.OM_PLAYBACK}>

<W> wide by <H> tall. If your composition is <wider than it is tall | not
<W>x<H>> you have failed before anything else is judged.

THE ONE LAW

Every object on screen is a file from the list below. The timeline never draws a
<BRAND> screen, never draws the mark, never stands text in with a grey
rectangle, never approximates imagery with a gradient. It places, masks, crops,
lights and moves those files.

If a beat needs an object the kit does not contain, say so and stop. Do not
substitute a div. If you cannot resolve the paths, tell me before building
anything rather than drawing replacements.

REFERENCES

<one job per reference, with a do-not-copy list. Then: do not average them.>

THE ASSETS

  <every file, its pixel size, and one line on what it is for. Name which
   element level parts exist and what they are meant to do on their own.>

THE BAR, AND WHAT IT RULES OUT

<the genre exclusions, not craft notes. Genre exclusions are what the model
already understands: six disconnected slides, a SaaS product tour, a dashboard
montage, a conference presentation, a developer tutorial, a browser screen
recording, a wall of technology logos, a generic futuristic AI advertisement.>

- no paragraphs, no terminal dumps, no reports, no lists of findings. If a frame
  needs more than about eight words to be understood, the frame is wrong
- no charts, no graphs, no dashboards, no code editors
- no neon, no glow, no gradient meshes, no particle fields

At most ONE object carries text in any frame, and that object is a real thing
with edges, not a caption floating in space.

GROUND AND LIGHT

Measured off the reference film, not chosen:

  frame average sits between <hex> and <hex>, <channel> dominant
  mean luminance <n> of 255
  mean saturation <n>

The base is <hex> and never pure black. One warm key light, <position>, fixed.
Every object carries a contact shadow and a cast shadow. Depth is blur and
scale. Bloom on <named elements> only. One grain pass at low opacity.

LOCKED COPY

  <three or four lines, nothing else>

No feature list, no metric, no URL, no invented tagline, no subtitle under the
logo. Set in <typeface, and say plainly if it stands in for a licensed brand
font>. Revealed through a horizontal mask, never typed letter by letter.

THE ENGINE

<script>window.OM_SCENES = '[
 {"name":"<Name>","dur":<s>,"desc":"<one plain sentence>"},
 ...
]';</script>
<script>window.OM_PLAYBACK = '{"mode":"loop"}';</script>

Key everything to T from useComposition() against those cues. One continuous
composition, zero cuts.

  MOTION.slam    Easing.easeOutExpo     arrivals and impacts
  MOTION.snap    Easing.easeOutBack     landings, overshoot capped at 6%
  MOTION.drive   Easing.easeInOutQuart  travel, light, drift
  MOTION.settle  Easing.easeOutQuart    the final resolve

Nothing eases outside those four. No elastic, no Back curve on an official brand
file, no setTimeout, no requestAnimationFrame, no useEffect painting, no wall
clock, no random, no CSS keyframes running on their own. Render everything from
T so any seek reproduces its frame. Never edit animations-v3.jsx.

THE ANCHOR

<the one object physically present across beats that carries the film. Name it
and forbid breaking it.>

THE SECTIONS

<one block per OM_SCENES entry. Each block carries:
   what is on screen and which file
   coverage as a percentage of frame width for every hero object
   what causes the next thing to happen
   a "Do not:" line specific to this beat>

CAMERA

<N> events and nothing else moving the frame:

  1. <cue range>   <what>
  2. <cue range>   <what>

Between them the camera holds and the objects do the work. No drifting, no
breathing zoom, no shake, no orbit, no continuous parallax.

Motion budget:
  60% local object and geometric transformation
  20% surface, lighting, parallax, environment
  20% camera scale and reframing

WHERE THE COLOUR COMES FROM

<name the objects allowed to be saturated, and say the ground picks up their
colour. Forbid coloured light with no object making it.>

MOTION SHAPE, MEASURED

<the numbers from section 8, measured off the reference. State them and the floor
this film must clear.>

KNOWN KIT DEFECTS

  <every defect you found opening the files, and what the film must do about it>

FAILURE CONDITIONS

<15 to 25 lines, each a specific observable defect for THIS film. Section 11.>

BEFORE YOU BUILD, RETURN AND STOP

1. the CompositionStage line, so I can see the dimensions
2. the OM_SCENES literal
3. a <N> frame storyboard, and per frame: which asset, its coverage as a
   percentage of frame width, how many elements are moving, and the WORD COUNT
   on screen. Any frame over eight words is a defect, tell me and fix it
4. your impact list with times
5. confirmation the anchor object is on screen in every section
6. anything you cannot verify

Do not animate until I approve.

Then PROMPT-2.md, the approval:

Approved. Before you build, confirm these four:

  <four checks specific to this film, each one a thing that was measured off the
   reference and could quietly go missing>

Now build it from the approved storyboard. Deterministic, keyed to T, kit files
only. When it is running, show me <the cue boundaries> at full size before
anything else.

8. The motion floor, measured

Zero cuts alone reads dead. Cut rate and motion energy are two separate specifications and a brief has to carry both.

Measure frame to frame motion energy on the reference, sampled at a fixed rate (15fps is enough): the mean, the peak, the share of frames above a threshold, and the share of near-still frames. Then measure your own build the same way.

A mean that looks fine can hide a slideshow: a handful of enormous transitions drags the mean up while half the film is frozen. That shape, a peak far above the reference and a large near-still share, is static cards with big transitions between them. A motion designer produces the opposite: a lower peak and far less stillness, because something is always moving.

Floors to write into a prompt, set against the reference's own numbers:

• near-still frames no higher than the reference's share
• no single frame far above the reference's peak
• frames above the threshold at least the reference's share
• at least two elements mid-transformation at every moment that is not a hold
• a growing hero gains a large share of frame width per half second
• holds are named and counted. Two or three in a film, plus the final lockup

The freeze test. If a frame's motion would survive freezing every gradient in it, the motion is real. A continuously drifting pool or breathing gradient lowers the near-still number without adding one frame of real motion. That is the metric moving, not the film.

Luminance is one film or two. A build that goes from a very dark section to a nearly white one and back is not a grade change, it is a different film glued between two designed worlds. Name one ground for the whole piece and a ceiling for the brightest section.

Coverage stops things coming out tiny. Hero object 25% to 45% of frame width as a floor, and higher on payoff beats. Nodes at a few percent of the frame do not read and do not feel like they move.

The source material never leaves the middle. A film that opens on the real product, spends the middle on coloured rectangles, and returns for a closing beat is a template reel with a product bookend. State a floor for how much of the running time the product is on screen, as a percentage of frame area, and put "any beat takes place on a bare ground" in the failure conditions.

The rule is about chrome, not content. Name the product's own components off the screenshot, the sidebar, the tab strip, the chip row, the player bar, and require them present by name. The strongest form: let the product's own controls cause the film. A chip being struck is what recolours the page.

9. What physically happens in the beat

Everything in section 8 can be green on a film that is still boring: a sequence of phrases arriving over a lit ground clears structure, coverage and energy floors and still reads as words with animation.

The per-beat test

For every OM_SCENES entry, write three lines before anything is built. If line 2 is empty, the beat is a card, and a card reads as boring however it eases in.

1. the phrase on screen
2. a body doing something, named with a verb: dives, hammers, hops, is pulled off its feet
3. the surface it does it to, named as a kit file or a rebuilt UI part

A body is a character or an object with mass. A word is not a body. Letters that hammer, shatter or fly are still kinetic typography. If line 2 names the phrase itself, the test fails.