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:

#	Artefact	Why it is there
1	PROMPT.md	the brief. One page, in the engine's language
2	START-HERE.md	the upload order. Which files, in which order, in one message. Without it the person guesses and the guess is wrong
3	ATTACH/	every asset the film needs, including animations-v3.jsx itself
4	frames/	reference stills whose filenames carry the instruction
5	KIT.md	the manifest: every file, its pixel size, its known defects

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.

Use	Never use
Easing.easeOutExpo and the named curves	cubic-bezier(...), any CSS string
OM_SCENES named sections with dur	absolute frame numbers as the structure
CUES.SectionName to key choreography	wall clock, setTimeout, requestAnimationFrame
animate({from, to, start, end, ease})(T)	useEffect painting anything visible
interpolate([...], [...], ease)(T)	CSS keyframes running on their own
<Shot from to> for a hard cut	conditional mounting per section
one <CompositionStage> as the only exportable root	the exportable attribute anywhere else

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.

Reference	Its one job	Never take
a film the person names for motion	transformation, depth, scale contrast	its palette, its brand
a film the person names for camera	camera and easing: the events, the hold, the settle	its colour, its product
the brand's own material	identity, typography, the exact mark	its interface layouts as a template

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 pi

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