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.
5. If the repo has videos/README.md, it routes short-form work. This skill owns long-form and commercial film only. A vertical Reel that is a designed film, not a screen recording, is this skill.

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 at videos/_kits/<brand>/ in this exact shape, because the shape is what makes it work:

#	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 four 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 the most 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 4K plates at the film's aspect ratio. A whole screen dropped in is a slab and reads as broken. Claude Design films fail on missing assets, never on prompt length.

Put the instruction in the filename. REF-VERCEL_03_object-became-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

A worked example of the whole shape is videos/_kits/claude/: brief, upload order, 31 assets with the official mark split into stackable layers, twelve instruction-named frames, and two missing assets named rather than faked.

2. The engine

animations-v3.jsx is the Claude Design runtime. Read videos/_kits/_engine/README.md once, then work from this table.

Never edit animations-v3.jsx. Its own header says re-running copy_starter_component overwrites it. Every improvement made there is destroyed 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 is why this engine suits the work. Zero cuts, one object transforming across the entire film, and the collision law are its 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 green 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 are the game-feel curves and 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.

Never render <Captions>. Ohad films the export off his phone and adds his own Hebrew and English. 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 three styles into mush. This is the single cheapest fix in the whole system.

Reference	Its one job	Never take
videos/vercel-spec/vercel-spec_1920x1080_60fps.mp4	transformation, depth, scale contrast, the zero-cut continuous composition	its palette, and never its grey placeholder chrome, which is what the no-kit build produced
Spotify, videos/refnces/motion/Video-53319.mp4	camera and easing: three events, the hold, the settle	its green, its product
Claude, videos/refnces/motion/oFSdbD1WKeB9fUJJ.mp4	monochrome identity, typography, restraint	its brand, its interface
videos/_kits/duolingo/	the logo built by assembly, and the one-object-huge-on-dark grammar	its colour, its mascot

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.

Read the source. Five films, one engine.

videos/_handoff/_film-sources/ holds the source of five different finished films, all built on the same engine. Read across them. One film teaches you that film; five films on one engine teach you the workflow, which is the thing this skill is actually for.

File	The film
vercel-film.jsx (49 KB)	the spec commercial that got 321 upvotes on r/ClaudeAI
claude-master.jsx (68 KB)	the Claude cinematic master, 1920x1080 60fps 20.0s
claude-film.jsx (41 KB)	an earlier Claude cut, so you can diff a film against its own revision
film.jsx (62 KB)	a third long film
reel.jsx (16 KB) and clip.jsx (5 KB)	the same grammar at reel and clip length

Supporting them:

File	What it gives you
animations-v3.jsx (55,474 bytes)	the engine. Byte-identical in every one of the three source archives, verified by hash. It is a fixed substrate, not a per-film thing. Never edit it
PROMPT-1.md and PROMPT-2.md	the real prompt pair that produced one of these films. The storyboard-gate prompt, then the build prompt
camera_keyframes.json	real camera data from a finished film, instead of invented easing
ui.jsx, tweaks-panel.jsx, support.js	the host scaffold the films run inside

How to read them, and this is the point. Do not copy one film. Open at least three and ask what is the same in all of them: how a scene list is declar

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