Motion Showreel

A showreel promises that every frame was a decision. This skill turns that into a repeatable build: pick one motif, push it through six or seven craft chapters that each look nothing alike, cut on the beat, and end on the motif.

The style source is the reference breakdown, a measured second-by-second analysis of the reel this skill was built from. Read it first. Techniques per chapter live in the chapter library.

The grammar

1. One motif, transformed. Pick the brand's most reduced element (a dot, a play triangle, a letter, a logo corner). It opens the reel, turns into each chapter's material, and closes the reel as punctuation in the lockup. Nearly every transition turns the current object into the next one. Hard cuts are reserved for the flurry.
2. Labeled craft chapters. Six or seven, each named in the HUD by the discipline it demonstrates (01 · SQUASH & STRETCH). Use the brand's own words when it has them (YouTube has "chapters" and an "end screen").
3. Show the work. Every chapter gets one tool overlay: a physics readout, a selection box with a cursor, a parameter panel, a bezier graph, or a brand-native equivalent (a search bar, a counter, a settings menu).
4. Persistent HUD. Corner crop marks, a title line top left, a spec line top right (1920×1080 · 60P · 129 BPM, blinking dot), timecode bottom left, a progress ruler with chapter gaps bottom center, and the chapter label bottom right. Mono caps, tracking 0.2em, about 16px. It flips ink/paper with the background. Start from the HUD template.
5. Ink, paper, one accent, and one held-back color. The held-back color only appears in the climax flurry. Every chapter change flips value (dark/light) or saturation (neutral/full-bleed accent).
6. Cut on the beat, animate on the off-beats. 120-130 BPM. Every hard cut, flash, and invert lands within 2 frames of a grid line. One pre-drop gap (music ducked for half a beat) comes before the midpoint hit.
7. Accelerate, then hold. For 15s at about 129 BPM (32 beats): physics intro 4 beats, type chapter 8 beats with an internal invert, three 4-beat chapters (drop in the middle), a flurry of about 6 cuts in 4 beats (one beat each, then half beats), then about 4 beats of lockup. Roughly 75% development, 13% flurry, and 12% resolve.
8. Density breathes. One object, then a wall of type, a grid of 100, thousands of particles, one hero object, the flurry, and one word again.
9. Three type voices. A heavy display face for statements, a contrasting accent voice (an italic serif, or the brand's UI face), and wide-tracked mono for the machine layer. Type also works as texture: repeated into wallpaper, banded, and inverted.
10. Physical finish. Squash and stretch, motion blur on fast moves, bloom on light-on-dark, slight chromatic fringe, grain, vignette, and a dot grid on dark frames. It should look photographed, not exported.
11. Bookend. The lockup resolves from noise, a rule draws, the subtitles type on with a block cursor, the motif lands as the final punctuation with a squash, and a quiet tagline arrives last.

Workflow

Run the scripts from the kit root. They need Node 22+ and FFmpeg with ffprobe.

1. Study the reference (when one is given)

node .claude/skills/motion-showreel/scripts/analyze-reference.mjs path/to/reference.mp4 video-projects/my-reel/qa/reference --fps 6 --bpm 128

Read every contact sheet, then report.txt (cuts, luminance rhythm, RMS, onsets, and cut offsets from the beat). Write the timeline down in the shape of the reference breakdown.

2. Brand intake: BRAND.md

Collect exact colors (from the current logo file, not a blog), typography (the proprietary face plus the closest free substitute), official logo SVGs, signature UI and objects, and 3-5 verified facts with dates for kinetic type. Gather real imagery the user owns or can use. Pick the motif and the held-back climax color. Only use brand marks the user has the right to use for the intended purpose.

3. Chapter map: STORYBOARD.md

Create the project with npm run new-video -- my-reel, then fill in the storyboard template. For each chapter, record the discipline label, the brand-native object, the tool overlay, the in-transform, the out-transform, the value (dark/paper/accent), and the SFX. Before building:

• Freeze any frame in your head: does it read as the brand with the HUD covered?
• Does every transition transform the object, except the flurry cuts?
• Does the value flip at every chapter change?

4. Music and the beat grid

Read docs/TOOLS-AND-API-KEYS.md first. Music can be the user's own licensed track or generated. Generation is a paid call, so confirm before running it:

node .claude/skills/motion-showreel/scripts/kie.mjs music --title "Reel" --style "punchy electronic showreel, instrumental, 128 bpm, starts instantly, riser into a big drop" --out video-projects/my-reel/assets/audio
node .claude/skills/motion-showreel/scripts/music-grid.mjs video-projects/my-reel/assets/audio/take-0.mp3 --bpm 128 --beats

music-grid prints the period, the kick-band phase (use it), and per-bar and per-beat energy. The full-band phase can lock onto off-beat hats and put every splice half a beat late; the script warns when the two disagree. In the per-beat low-band column, find the riser, the drop (a jump of 10+ dB), the break, and the return. Then splice 32 beats: intro and build (16, ending on the drop's downbeat), drop (8), break (4, under the flurry), and the return hit plus a tail:

node .claude/skills/motion-showreel/scripts/splice-music.mjs take-0.mp3 --period 0.4644 --phase 0.085 --segments "4-28,48-56.7" --length 15 --gap 16 --out music-bed.wav
node .claude/skills/motion-showreel/scripts/music-grid.mjs music-bed.wav --bpm 129
node .claude/skills/motion-showreel/scripts/beatgrid.mjs --period 0.4644 --length 15 --chapters "01 Physics:4, 02 Type:8, 03 Grid:4, 04 Drop:4, 05 Lookdev:4, Flurry:4, 07 End:rest"

The re-measured bed's kick phase should be within about 25 ms of 0. Put the measured BPM in the HUD (129, not 128). beatgrid prints the frame sheet for STORYBOARD.md.

5. SFX and the mix

Generate a kit (paid, confirm first) with scripts/sfx.mjs (pops, clicks, whooshes, glitch, ticks, shimmer, sub boom, final hit, and brand-native sounds), or use the user's own library. Place cues on the beat sheet in an events.json and premix:

node .claude/skills/motion-showreel/scripts/mix.mjs --bed music-bed.wav --events events.json --out master.wav

Use master.wav as the composition's single <audio> track. It targets -14 LUFS and -1.2 dBTP.

6. Assets

• Hero lookdev object. Run kie.mjs image --ref <logo.png> (Seedream image-to-image keeps the silhouette), then kie.mjs video --image <still> for a 5s Kling camera move. Both are paid calls. Kling returns 24fps: speed it up and re-encode at 60fps all-intra (the command is in the header of kie.mjs).
• Fonts. Download them into the project's assets/fonts/ and use @font-face. Never rely on system fonts.

7. Build (HyperFrames)

Load hyperframes and gsap before writing HTML. Read MOTION_PHILOSOPHY.md (showreel pacing is its fast sizzle mode) and video-storytelling for persistent-world camera moves. Build one index.html with one paused GSAP timeline. Chapters are timed .clip layers, and the HUD sits on top.

• Every time comes from the beat sheet: const B = (n) => n * PERIOD.
• Put a per-frame driver on the timeline and make it a pure function of time: tl.fromTo(drv, {t:0}, {t:END, duration:END, ease:'none', onUpdate:() => frame(drv.t)}, 0). Draw canvas effects (particles, noise, big grids) there from seeded values, never from Math.random() at draw time. Drive the HUD from the same function.
• Tween only transforms and opacity. Never tween left/top/width/height. To morph a dot into a tile, draw the final tile and scale it down into a circle (border-radius: 128px / 72px on a 256x144 tile), then tween back to scale 1.
• A property animated by several tweens across the reel (a shared flash layer) can stick on a backward seek. Compute it in the per-frame driver instead, and do the same for class swaps like an invert.
• Measure layout (getBoundingClientRect) once, at the top of the build, before any immediateRender tween applies a transform. Never measure inside onUpdate.
• <video data-start> must not sit inside a timed .clip. Put videos in an untimed wrapper, which you can still scale for push-ins.
• Staggered phases must finish before their cut: latest completion = start + max delay + duration. Check it on paper, then in a render strip.
• background-clip: text renders invisible in capture. Use solid fills and text-shadow for bloom.

8. Verify before calling it done

• npx hyperframes lint, then Studio preview, then a draft render (hyperframes-cli).
• Run analyze-reference.mjs on your own render with --bpm and --phase: cut offsets must be within about 35 ms of a beat or half beat, luminance must alternate by chapter, and the audio must show the pre-drop dip.
• Extract 10-frame strips across every transition and look at them. Snapshots miss stuck or ghost layers: ffmpeg -i render.mp4 -vf "select='between(n\,440\,449)',scale=384:-1,tile=layout=5x2" -frames:v 1 -fps_mode passthrough strip.png
• Brand test: pick 6 random frames. Each must read as the brand with the HUD covered.
• Loudness is about -14 LUFS. HyperFrames re-encodes audio slightly quieter, so remux master.wav into the render (see the header of mix.mjs).
• Save the evidence in VERIFY.md.

Example brief

The skill's first test was a 15s YouTube reel: the red scrubber dot bounces on a progress bar, scrubs into a laser, types "broadcast yourself" into a rebuilt search bar, becomes eight dots, then a feed of real thumbnails, and bursts from a like button into particles that spell a verified stat. It becomes a lacquer play button and a Silver Creator Award, runs a flurry of Subscribe, Shorts, LIVE, Skip, and "+10 seconds", and lands as the play icon in the logo. Use it as a model for mapping chapters to a brand's native objects, not as a template to copy.