talking-head: one face, to camera, saying a short script

One person, framed chest-up, speaking words the user wrote. The portrait is the opening frame; the script is text in the prompt; the voice is generated.

This skill is a thin, scenario-specific layer over ofox-video-core. It owns the talking-head prompt craft, the brief, the defaults and the pre-generation cost estimate; ofox-video-core owns talking to the Ofox API correctly and safely (the OFOX_API_KEY handling, the no-resubmit rule, error-code mapping, download/verification, and reporting the downloaded file's absolute VIDEO_PATH). Read that skill's safety contract before using this one — it is not restated here.

Shared prose is linked rather than copied: the prompt formula, camera and delivery vocabulary, the word-rate tiers and the negative-list items are in ../ofox-video-core/references/prompt-structure.md; the pre-prompt question rules in ../ofox-video-core/references/creative-brief.md; the spend rule in ../ofox-video-core/references/approval-gate.md.

Three facts to say out loud before anyone pays

They are the whole shape of this scenario, and every one of them surprises someone who has used a lip-sync product before.

1. You cannot upload the voice. You supply words; the model speaks them

The API takes an audio_url reference, validates it, fetches it and bills the job — and the delivered audio is not the audio that was sent. Measured 2026-09-15 on job d8561509-dcc6-4f2c-8864-a193cd239b14, bytedance/seedance-2.5, a real five-second speech clip as a data: URI, billed 55 cents: the input is near-continuous speech, the delivered track is sparse, envelope correlation 0.41. The model generated its own track, exactly as it does with no reference at all. The write-up is api-params.md → "An audio_url reference is accepted, fetched, and does not become the audio".

So: do not offer to sync a voice recording, and do not accept one. If the user has a recording they want heard, this API is the wrong tool and the honest answer is an editor. What this skill does is take the text and let the model produce a voice for it.

The language of that voice follows the language the quoted line is written in. Keep the user's own words in their own language; translating them to match the English examples below buys them an English-dubbed clip they find out about after paying.

2. A thirty-second clip holds about ninety words

The measured word rates and their gallery cases live in the shared file — prompt-structure.md → "Dialogue and sound" → "Density — two tiers, not one" — and are not restated here. The tier that applies here is the one named after this skill: monologue / talking head, one person to camera, at 3.5 words a second in English and 5 characters a second in Chinese. The other tier, dialogue drama at 0.4–1.7 words/s, measures a different shape — two people with silence between their lines — and is a floor here rather than a budget: it only describes a clip whose delivery has long written pauses in it.

Plan a little under the tier, at 3 words a second (4 characters a second for Chinese or Japanese), and treat 3.5 / 5 as the ceiling:

Clip	Plan for about	In Chinese	Which is
10s	30 words	40 characters	two sentences
15s	45 words	60 characters	a short paragraph
20s	60 words	80 characters	a paragraph with a point in it
30s	90 words	120 characters	a claim, its reason, and what to do about it

Why under the ceiling rather than at it. 3.5 words/s is the densest practice the gallery shows, and this skill's template spends clip time on things that are not words — an opening beat of eye contact, a written ending where the lips close and the shot holds — while asking for an unhurried delivery. A script budgeted at the ceiling asks for maximum density, an unhurried register and a silent close in the same prompt. The asymmetry settles which way to round: under-filling costs a pause at the end, and overrunning comes back rushed, garbled or cut off, which costs the whole clip.

What kind of evidence this is — and one number is now this model's own. Both tiers started as counts of gallery prompt text against clip length: real prompts and published clips, but unrecorded platforms and parameters, and no measurement of what this API delivers. That is still what the tiers are. The 3 words a second this file budgets at is no longer one of them: measured 2026-09-16 on this skill's own first paid run, alibaba/wan-3.0-prime delivered 3.16 words a second — 29 scripted words across a 9.17-second speech span, every word spoken, nothing dropped. The budget holds on the model this skill actually uses, and it is slightly conservative, which is the direction the table above was rounded in anyway.

One run, one prompt, English, 480p, 10 seconds, and the upstream is unknown — the bounds are in "What is measured, and what is not" below and they matter. Reading a first clip's delivery is still worth the minute it takes; planning at the other tier still is not.

If the user's script is longer than its clip, say so before quoting anything, and offer the two real options — cut it to one idea, or split it across jobs. "Split it" costs what the section "Splitting a long script" below spells out, and it is more than N times the money.

3. This skill's default model is not this repo's default model

bytedance/seedance-2.5 is the default in every other video scenario here. It is not the default here, and the reason is a measurement rather than a preference: it refuses a real person's photograph as an image-to-video input, at submission, before anything is generated.

HTTP 400  error.code: input_moderation_failed
Upstream message: The request failed because the input image 'content[1]'
may contain real person.

Nothing is billed — but nothing is delivered either, and a portrait is this scenario's defining input. alibaba/wan-3.0-prime accepted the same portrait and completed, so that is the default, and the run in the next section shows the route it picked works end to end.

There is now a second way onto seedance-2.5, and it is not a shortcut. --real-person true lifts that refusal — measured 2026-09-16 — by asserting that the caller holds the rights to the likeness, which is a claim about permission rather than a setting that makes moderation lenient. It does not change this skill's default, and whether it should is an open question written out under "An open question this file does not settle" below rather than quietly answered here.

What is measured, and what is not

This skill has one paid run of its own, and it answered the three questions this file used to hedge. Job 855833b4-0819-4bd5-bc8c-397db009069a, 2026-09-16, alibaba/wan-3.0-prime, 10 seconds at 480p, seed 368003184, 64 cents, 29 words of scripted dialogue built from this file's template — and read afterwards, frame by frame and with the audio, rather than being called done at STATUS completed.

One run settles what one run can. Everything below is stated with the parameters it was measured at, and nothing is carried past them.

The first run — 2026-09-16

Question	Measured	How
Speech rate	3.16 words a second	29 words across a 9.17s speech span (silencedetect at -30dB/0.35s puts speech from 0.46s to 9.63s, with two internal pauses totalling 0.76s; the voiced-only rate is 3.45 w/s). The clip opens with 0.46s before the first word and closes with 0.4s of hold
Truncation	None	A whisper tiny.en transcription returns all 29 words, in order, with nothing added. Only punctuation differs from the script
Lip-sync, gross	Confirmed	At 2.5s the audio is voiced and the mouth is open mid-word; at 9.8s, after speech ends at 9.63s, the lips are closed and the expression holds — which is the closing beat this file's template asks for
Lip-sync, per phoneme	Not measured, and frames cannot measure it	Whether each phoneme's mouth shape is right is not a thing reading frames can answer. It stays open
Face lock	Held for the full 10 seconds	Compared against the input portrait item by item: face structure, eyes, earring, hair parting, black top, gold necklace, grey background — all match

So the route this skill is built on works: the portrait goes in, the person comes out, the words all get said at about the rate this file budgets for, and the mouth moves with the speech at the resolution a viewer notices.

What that run does not establish:

• ⚠️ Which upstream served it is unknown. alibaba/wan-3.0-prime is not upstream-pinned — the script pins byteplus for Seedance only — and Ofox routes by weight across alicloud and aliyun. The sidecar does not record a provider either (checked: its top-level keys are created_at, job_id, model, name, prompt, request, status, updated_at, video_cost, video_file, video_seconds). So this is one observation on wan-3.0-prime, not a statement about both upstreams, and nothing here says the two behave alike. It is also a gap in what the script records: a job's upstream cannot be recovered after the fact.
• One prompt, one script, one take. A second run of the same request would come back a different clip — that is this API's documented behaviour, not a caveat unique to here.
• English only. The Chinese and Japanese character rates in the table above are still gallery-derived. Nothing has been measured on this model in any other language.
• 480p, 10 seconds. Nothing about longer clips, higher tiers, or whether lip detail improves a tier up — which is precisely where a face's detail goes first.
• Phoneme-level sync. See the table. Gross sync is not accuracy.

The portrait comparison — 2026-09-15

One synthetic photoreal portrait — generated for the test, not any real person's likeness — sent as --frame-first-image to three models, same wording, each at its own minimum duration and cheapest tier to keep the check cheap:

Model	Result	Billed
bytedance/seedance-2.5	HTTP 400 input_moderation_failed at submission	nothing
alibaba/wan-3.0-prime	job completed	12.8 cents (2s, 480p)
minimax/hailuo-3	job completed	32 cents (4s, 768p)

The refusal replicates a separate 2026-08-30 verification of the same code on the same model. The two acceptances are first-run results. The spec entry is .trellis/spec/skills/external-api-integration.md → "moderation policy is per-model, not a platform-wide constant".

What that table establishes: without --real-person true, seedance-2.5 will not take this input and two other models will. That settled the default, and the 2026-09-16 run above then showed the route it picked actually works.

What it still does not establish:

• The portraits were synthetic. One generated face is one content class, in both the comparison and the first run. A real photograph of a real person may moderate differently on any of these models.
• Nobody has read a minimax/hailuo-3 clip. The fallback's acceptance is still STATUS completed and nothing more — no frames, no audio. Everything measured above is wan's.
• Moderation on wan is one upstream's verdict at best, for the routing reason in the previous section. A refusal on a later run of the same portrait is not a contradiction; it is the weighting.

Practical consequence, unchanged by having a measurement: run the first clip of any new job short and cheap and look at it. One run on one face is not a promise about the next face, and identity and lip-sync are still the two things worth a draft's price to check before a deliverable is paid for.

An open question this file does not settle: the default model

bytedance/seedance-2.5 plus --real-person true now completes an image-to-video job on a real-person portrait — measured 2026-09-16, the shared write-up is ../ofox-video-core/references/api-params.md → "--real-person true lifts that refusal on 2.5". That makes seedance-2.5 a genuine alternative route for this scenario, where before it was closed.

The default stays alibaba/wan-3.0-prime, and that is a deferral rather than a verdict. What the flag's A/B ran was 4 seconds at 480p with no dialogue — it establishes that the refusal lifts, and nothing about whether seedance-2.5 speaks a script better, locks a face better, or costs less per usable clip than the model measured above. Switching a shipped skill's default needs that comparison and a product call; one blink test is not it.

So: the question is open, and it is written here so nobody re-derives it from scratch. What would close it is a run on seedance-2.5 with --real-person true, the same portrait and the same script as job 855833b4, read the same way. Until then, name the alternative to a user who asks — with its precondition, which is the point of the next section and not an optional part of the offer.

Before you attach someone's face

A portrait is a person's likeness, and this skill's whole job is to make it appear to say something it never said.

• Confirm the user has the right to use that face this way, and say what the clip will do with it. A colleague's headshot from a company directory is not consent.
• Do not build a clip of an identifiable public figure, whatever the script says. Moderation aside, this is the category where a generated clip does real damage.
• --real-person true is how the first point above is stated to the API — not a way round it. The flag does lift seedance-2.5's refusal (measured 2026-09-16; the shared write-up, with everything it does not establish, is ../ofox-video-core/references/api-params.md → "--real-person true lifts that refusal on 2.5"). Ofox's own words for what it does are "privacy-preserving preprocessing for authorized real-person references": passing it asserts that the user holds the rights to that likeness. Which means it is only ever offered after the two points above are settled, never as a retry when a job was refused, and never set on a user's behalf to make something go through. A false assertion that generates the clip anyway is a worse outcome than the refusal was. This skill's own route does not need it — wan takes the portrait without it.

Where the core skill lives

Resolve once, before the first call:

for d in ../ofox-video-core \
         ../ofoxai-skills-ofox-video-core \
         ~/.agents/skills/ofox-video-core \
         ~/.agents/skills/ofoxai-skills-ofox-video-core \
         ~/.claude/skills/ofox-video-core; do
  [ -f "$d/references/ofox-video.sh" ] && echo "$d" && break
done

Examples below are written as ../ofox-video-core/... (the skills.sh / ClawHub / npx ofox-skills layout, where a skill's directory is named after the skill). If the probe found a different directory — LobeHub unpacks each skill as ofoxai-skills-<name>, so the sibling there is ofoxai-skills-ofox-video-core — substitute it, in the ofox-video.sh commands and in the references/*.md links alike.

That ../ is relative to this skill's own directory, which is also where the probe has to run. From anywhere else nothing resolves — use the absolute path the probe printed (candidates 3–5 are absolute already), or, in a clone of this repo, skills/ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh from the repo root.

Nothing found → the core skill isn't installed; see "If the script isn't found".

This skill needs ofox-video-core 2.0.0 or newer. From that version the billable subcommands refuse to run without --approved, and every real-run command below passes it. An older core does not know the flag and stops with unknown option '--approved' before any request — nothing is submitted and nothing is billed, so the fix is to update the core, never to drop the flag.

Before generating: the availability check

Run this once per session (not on every request):

bash ../ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh check

If it fails, follow ofox-video-core's guidance (install curl/jq, or get an OFOX_API_KEY at https://app.ofox.ai) — don't dead-end the conversation, and don't re-run this check on every subsequent request once it has passed.

check reports whether the key is present, not whether it is valid, and makes no network call. It reads an ordinary environment variable in the shell that runs the script — nothing is loaded from a .env file.

A failing check is not a stop sign: models, providers and generate --dry-run all run without a key, so the brief, the script and the price can all be settled first.

Two routes, and the model follows the route

The user either has a face or doesn't, and that single fact decides the whole job.

	Portrait route (the default)	Described-presenter route
Input	a photo of the person, as the first frame	no photo; the presenter is written in text
Model	alibaba/wan-3.0-prime — the measured default, because seedance-2.5 refuses the photo unless --real-person true asserts the rights to it	the script's own default, bytedance/seedance-2.5
Identity	follows the attached frame — measured, once: held for 10s on job 855833b4	generated fresh; a second job is a different person, and no flag changes that
Across jobs	re-attach the same portrait to each job — untested; what was measured is one 10s clip, not two clips matching	nothing carries a photoreal person between jobs; only the words route, and it does not hold a face
Aspect ratio	follows the attached image — crop the portrait first, see below	--aspect-ratio is yours
Evidence	one paid run read end to end: rate, no truncation, gross lip-sync, face lock (2026-09-16)	five Ofox text-to-video jobs of 20–30s built around photoreal people, all completed — but none of them read for lip-sync

The default is wan because the defining input is a photograph. Drop the photograph and the reason for the default drops with it — a described-presenter clip is ordinary text-to-video, seedance-2.5 takes it, and this repo has actually run that shape. Say which route you are on in the recap, and say which model it puts you on.

If the user names a model, that wins on either route. minimax/hailuo-3 also accepted the portrait; it caps shorter than wan, which is why it is not the default — check the current ranges with ofox-video.sh models rather than trusting a number written here.

Before writing the prompt: the brief

The shared rules — the three tiers, one round of at most four questions, the shape of a question, the "Let the AI decide" discipline, the order with the approval gate, the fallback without AskUserQuestion — are in ../ofox-video-core/references/creative-brief.md. This section adds only this scenario's question set.

Tier	Talking-head axes
must-ask	is there a portrait, and is it of someone the user may use this way; what the script actually is, word for word; what to do when the script overruns its clip
ask-if-open	aspect ratio, delivery register
never-ask	resolution, provider, audio on/off, the spoken language (it follows the script), duration once the word count has fixed it. Model is never-ask too — but it is reported, because this scenario's default is unusual

The question set

#	Tier	header	Question	Options — first is recommended; "Let the AI decide" comes last where it appears, and never on a must-ask row	Ask when
1	must-ask	Portrait	Do you have a photo of the person who should be on screen?	Yes — a local path (recommended): the clip opens on that face. Confirm in the same breath that the user may use this likeness. / No — describe them instead: a presenter generated from text; a different person every job. No AI option — a photo either exists or it doesn't.	No image attached and the user didn't say there isn't one.
2	must-ask	Script	These are the exact words to be spoken — confirm them?	The user's own text, quoted back verbatim and untranslated, with its word (or character) count and the clip length it implies. No AI option — inventing someone's words is the one thing this skill must never do.	Always, unless the user pasted the script and named the duration in the same message.
3	must-ask	Overrun	The script is <N> words, which needs about <T> seconds. What should give?	Cut to <T_max> seconds of it (recommended) — show the exact cut text before the cost table / Run the clip to <T> seconds — only if <T> is inside the model's range, and it bills per second / Split across <k> jobs — <k> bills, a visible join, and the face is only as stable as re-attaching the portrait makes it. No AI option.	Only when the word count overruns the duration the user asked for.
4	ask-if-open	Aspect	Where will it be watched?	9:16 vertical (recommended) — one face, mobile feeds / 16:9 landscape — web, slides, YouTube / 1:1 / Let the AI decide. On the portrait route this decides how to crop the photo, not a flag.	No platform word and no ratio in the input.
5	ask-if-open	Delivery	How should it be said?	Warm and conversational (recommended) — unhurried, small gestures, reads as a person / Brisk and professional — an announcement, minimal movement / Quiet and serious — slow, low, few gestures / Let the AI decide	The script carries no tone word and the user gave no direction.

Four slots, five questions. Portrait and Script always come first when both are open; Overrun is a follow-up that only exists once the count is known, so it never competes for a slot in round one.

Skip rows specific to this scenario

On top of the generic rows in creative-brief.md:

Input says…	Axis	Value
an image is attached, or a path is given	Portrait	have one — open it, check it is one person, chest-up, front-facing
the language the script is written in	spoken language	that language, never asked
"for LinkedIn", "for the website", "for a slide"	Aspect	16:9
"for TikTok", "Reels", "Shorts", "vertical"	Aspect	9:16
a tone word in the request ("friendly", "serious", "excited")	Delivery	as stated
"read this out", "have her say", "narrate this"	—	already this skill
"and then he replies…", two speakers, a scene	—	that is seedance-short-drama, not this
"summarise this article into a video"	—	that is explainer — the labour there is choosing the idea, not reading a finished script

Every answer lands somewhere

Answer	Where it goes
Portrait	--frame-first-image PATH, the model, and the IDENTITY line of the prompt
Script	the quoted LINE, verbatim, and the word count that sets --duration
Overrun	--duration, the cut text shown in the recap, or the number of rows in the cost table
Aspect	the crop applied to the portrait (portrait route) or --aspect-ratio (text route)
Delivery	the DELIVERY note and the micro-beats on the timeline

The recap for this scenario

Brief
- Portrait: /Users/me/pics/anna-headshot.jpg — cropped to 9:16 first (you gave it;
  you confirmed you may use this likeness)
- Script: "We shipped the new dashboard this morning. It is faster, it is quieter,
  and it finally remembers where you were. If you had it pinned to a workaround,
  you can drop that now." — 33 words, your words, unchanged
- Duration: 12s (33 words at about 3 words/s — measured at 3.16 w/s on this model)
- Delivery: warm and conversational (AI's pick)
- Model: alibaba/wan-3.0-prime — not this repo's usual seedance-2.5, which refuses
  a real person's photo at submission unless the rights to it are asserted (measured)
- 9:16, 480p draft, audio on
- Note: one 10s English clip has been measured on this model — the words all landed,
  the mouth moved with them and the face held. Yours is a different face and a
  different script, so the draft still gets watched before anything is delivered.

Then the full prompt, then the cost table approval-gate.md specifies, all in one message.

The portrait itself

Three things to do before it is attached, none of which costs anything.

1. Look at it. One person, chest-up or head-and-shoulders, facing roughly camera, eyes open, mouth closed or neutral, nothing crossing the face. A full-length shot leaves the head a few pixels wide and the mouth has nowhere to move.
2. Crop it to the delivery ratio — crop, never pad. With a frame attached the script sets aspect_ratio: adaptive on models that offer it (it prints a NOTE: saying so), and the clip then takes the image's shape. Padding bakes the bars into the video. If the portrait was generated with ofox-image-core, --target-aspect W:H does the crop for you and measures the file rather than trusting the response.
3. Read the real pixels (sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight <file>, or identify <file>). This repo has measured a requested size, a reported size and a file's real size being three different numbers.

A local path beats a URL: ofox-video.sh base64-encodes local files, and a valid public URL has been rejected upstream with a download error while the same file inline went through.

The prompt template

Vocabulary is not repeated here — delivery notes, camera and focus terms, negative-list rows and asset role sentences are in ../ofox-video-core/references/prompt-structure.md. A talking head is a single shot with performance beats inside it, so the shared file's "Short prompts (10 seconds or less)" shape applies even above 10 seconds: no shot manifest, no cut list.

If several images should supply identity or wardrobe without locking the opening frame, follow the shared Identity-reference recipe — the authoritative copy. Do not restate its payload, evidence or limits here; this skill owns only the speaker-specific role assigned to each image.

Slots in <angle brackets>; optional lines in [square brackets].

One continuous shot, <T> seconds, fixed camera, no cuts.
IDENTITY: @image1 supplies the speaker's face, hair and clothing — keep them unchanged for the whole clip. [Ignore its background.]
[SPEAKER: <only when no portrait is attached: age range, build, hair, top with colour and material, one bearing word>.]
SCENE: <where they are — a plain wall, a home study, an office with the room softly out of focus behind>. <One light source and its direction: soft window light from front-left.>
FRAMING: chest-up medium close-up, <fixed camera | a faint breathing handheld>, <background softness>; <capture medium: real mirrorless texture, slight sensor noise>, real skin texture, no smoothing.

<Speaker> faces the camera and says, <delivery: conversational and unhurried | brisk, no theatricality | quiet and level>: "<the script, verbatim, in the language to be spoken>"
0–<a>s: <eye contact, one natural blink>. <a>–<b>s: on "<word>", <one gesture — a small head shake, a single open-palm beat>. <b>–<c>s: <second gesture, or stillness>. <c>–<T>s: after "<last word>", <the ending: the lips close and a half-second pause | the smallest nod>.

SOUND: <room tone>, no music. Speech in <language>, mouth shape matched to it.
CONSISTENCY: face, hair, <clothing items>, background and light direction identical from the first frame to the last.
AVOID: subtitles, captions, on-screen text, watermarks, logos; a second person, an off-screen voice, a cutaway; music, score, soundtrack, instrumental, humming, singing; presenter cadence, theatrical over-acting, wild gesturing; skin smoothing, beauty filter, plastic skin, CGI look; camera movement, zooms, cuts.

Seven notes on that shape:

• The words are quoted verbatim and never paraphrased. A line silently rewritten or translated is the most expensive thing that can go wrong here, because it looks fine until the clip plays. Put the full script inside the prompt shown at the approval gate so the user can read it.
• mouth shape matched to <language> is gallery practice (case 20 writes it explicitly). It is a request, not a guarantee. On this model a prompt carrying it produced a mouth that opens on voiced audio and closes in the trailing silence — gross sync, measured once, in English. Whether each phoneme's shape is right is not something frames can show, so keep the line in and keep the claim modest.
• One gesture per beat, at most. The shared file's short-drama evidence caps visible signals at one to three per beat; a talking head sitting still and blinking reads far better than one conducting.
• Give the ending its own beat. The shared "Endings" section and this repo's "Hold one second" buys about two note both apply: without a written close, the last second is a coin flip.
• No music, ever. Not taste: a prompt asking this model for a scored cue came back output_moderation_failed on audio copyright in this repo, unbilled. Name the music words in AVOID as well as writing no music — that is the pair of blocks the two clean runs used.
• No on-screen text, ever. The model invents lettering, and this is the genre where a user most wants a name card. Captions, lower thirds and titles go on in an editor afterwards. The one route that works is a prepared still attached as a frame — text approved on an image and then preserved is a different and measured task — and on this route the frame slot is already spent on the portrait.
• --generate-audio stays at the server default (true). A talking head with audio off is a silent film of someone's mouth moving.

Worked example — 12 seconds, 33 words, portrait attached

This has not been generated as written. It is the template filled in.

One continuous shot, 12 seconds, fixed camera, no cuts.
IDENTITY: @image1 supplies the speaker's face, hair and clothing — keep them unchanged for the whole clip.
SCENE: a home study; a bookshelf softly out of focus behind her. The only light is a window to the front-left, soft and slightly cool, with a gentle falloff across the far cheek.
FRAMING: chest-up medium close-up, fixed camera, background softly blurred; real mirrorless texture with slight sensor noise, real skin texture, no smoothing.

She faces the camera and says, conversational and unhurried, with a small smile at the start: "We shipped the new dashboard this morning. It is faster, it is quieter, and it finally remembers where you were. If you had it pinned to a workaround, you can drop that now."
0-2s: she looks straight into the lens, one natural blink, the smile settles. 2-5s: on "faster" one small open-palm beat, low in frame, and the hand leaves again. 5-8s: stillness; the head tilts a few degrees on "quieter". 8-11s: on "workaround" the hand opens once and drops. 11-12s: after "now" the lips close, one slow blink, the smallest nod, and the shot holds.

SOUND: quiet room tone, a little distant street. No music. Speech in English, mouth shape matched to it.
CONSISTENCY: face, hair, the grey knit top, the bookshelf and the light direction identical from the first frame to the last.
AVOID: subtitles, captions, on-screen text, watermarks, logos; a second person, an off-screen voice, a cutaway; music, score, soundtrack, instrumental, humming, singing; presenter cadence, theatrical over-acting, wild gesturing; skin smoothing, beauty filter, plastic skin, CGI look; camera movement, zooms, cuts.

33 words over 12 seconds is 2.75 words a second overall — about three a second across the eleven seconds that carry speech, with the last second given to the closing hold. The duration was chosen from the word count rather than the other way round.

Splitting a long script

When the script will not fit one clip and the user will not cut it, splitting is the remaining option. Say what it costs before they choose it:

• Each part is a separately billed job. Two 15-second clips cost two 15-second clips; there is no discount and no shared context.
• There is a visible join. This skill produces individual jobs. Putting them end to end is an editing step outside it.
• Continuity is only as good as the portrait. Re-attach the same photo, cropped the same way, to every part, and repeat the SCENE, FRAMING and CONSISTENCY lines word for word. That is the best instrument available. What has been measured is that the face holds within one 10-second clip; whether two separate jobs from the same portrait match each other has not, so a two-part clip may still come back as two slightly different people in two slightly different rooms. Draft part 1 and part 2 cheaply and look at them side by side before paying for the finals.
• Sentence boundaries, never mid-sentence. A line split across a job boundary is the one thing this API has no mechanism for.
• The cost table gets a row per part plus a total, per approval-gate.md → "Batches get an itemised table, not one total".

Cutting to one idea is usually the better product, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than quoting a five-part job with a straight face.

Recommended defaults

Parameter	Default	Why
--model	alibaba/wan-3.0-prime on the portrait route; the script's own default on the described-presenter route; whatever the user named, always	seedance-2.5 refuses a real person's photo at submission unless --real-person true asserts the rights to it (measured, nothing billed on the refusal); wan takes the portrait with no such assertion needed, and is the one model this scenario has a read-through-the-frames run on. See "Two routes" and "An open question this file does not settle"
--frame-first-image	the portrait, cropped to the delivery ratio, as a local path	it is the scenario's defining input; local files beat URLs on this field
--duration	derived from the word count at about 3 words a second (4 characters a second in Chinese or Japanese), then clamped to the model's range — which ofox-video.sh models prints	the script decides the length; a default that ignores it produces rushed speech. The English figure is measured on this model at 3.16 w/s (one 10s run), so 3 leaves a little room; the CJK one is still gallery-derived
--resolution	draft at the model's cheapest tier, deliver one tier up	a face at the cheapest tier is where lip and eye detail goes first, so read the draft's frames rather than shipping it
--aspect-ratio	not passed when a portrait is attached — the crop decides it, and the script prints a NOTE: about adaptive; 9:16 on the text-only route unless the user said otherwise	one face is a vertical composition by default
--generate-audio	leave at the server default (true)	the speech is the deliverable
--provider	leave unset	the script pins an upstream for Seedance only; wan routes by weight across two, which is worth relaying rather than hiding. Nothing records which one served a job — not the sidecar either — so pin it yourself if a run is meant to be comparable to another
--seed	let the script roll one and keep it	printed as SEED and written to the .json sidecar. It does not reproduce a take — measured, an identical request on a fixed seed came back a visibly different clip — so a re-render is another roll aimed at the same shot. Say that before the user pays for one
--real-person	leave unset	this route does not need it — wan takes the portrait as it is. It matters only on seedance-2.5, where it asserts that the user holds the rights to the likeness (measured 2026-09-16). It is a statement about authorization, never a switch to flip when a job is refused: see "Before you attach someone's face"

Model ids, prices, resolutions, durations and aspect ratios are deliberately not tabulated in this file. They are catalog facts, they change, and this repo has recorded defects that trace to a hardcoded copy of somebody else's value table. Read them live, free, with no API key:

bash ../ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh models
bash ../ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh providers alibaba/wan-3.0-prime

providers with no model argument prints the flagship's matrix, not the catalog — pass the id you actually mean. The rate models shows is the one at each model's own default resolution, which differs between models, so it ranks rather than quotes.

Before you spend: the approval gate

Never submit a paid job until the user has seen a cost table and said yes. The rule, the required columns and where the numbers must come from are written down once for every Ofox skill in this repo: ../ofox-video-core/references/approval-gate.md.

Get the numbers from --dry-run, which validates everything and prints the estimate without sending a request:

bash ../ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh generate --dry-run \
  --model alibaba/wan-3.0-prime \
  --prompt "..." --duration 12 --resolution 480p \
  --frame-first-image /absolute/path/to/portrait-9x16.jpg \
  --out-dir /absolute/path/to/out

Relay the Estimated cost: line it prints — never a number of your own — then wait for a yes, then re-run the identical command with --dry-run swapped for --approved. The estimate a real run prints comes microseconds before the request goes out, too late to relay. Pass the same --out-dir to both.

--approved is where that yes gets typed out. Since ofox-video-core 2.0.0 the four billable subcommands — generate, create, batch, chain — refuse to run without it, while --dry-run never needs it, so the quote above is still free and still works with no API key. Be exact about what the flag does: it records a stance, it cannot prove one. Nothing in a shell script can observe the conversation you had, and it can be typed without showing anyone a price. What it changes is that spending without quoting is no longer the default — it has to be written into the command, where a transcript shows it. The rule above is still the rule, and it is still yours to follow.

Two things belong in that message beyond the table:

• the script, quoted in full, so the user can see their own words unaltered;
• one line on what this scenario's evidence actually is — one paid run on this model, 10 seconds of English at 480p, in which the words all landed at 3.16 a second, the mouth moved with them and the face held. A user paying for a different face and a different script should know how thin that is, and that the draft is still there to be watched.

This skill has exactly one billed job behind it — 64 cents for 10s at 480p — which is a sense of scale, not a quote. The --dry-run figure at the parameters you are about to send is still the only number to put in front of anyone.

Afterwards the actual bill is VIDEO_COST from the finished job. Report it as money, not as the raw ten-decimal string.

Several takes

A face is a roll like any other, and this one has two things to judge that a single take cannot settle — does it look like them, and does the mouth match the words. batch prices the whole set up front, waits concurrently, and tiles a contact sheet:

bash ../ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh batch --dry-run \
  --model alibaba/wan-3.0-prime \
  --prompt "..." --takes 3 --duration 6 --resolution 480p \
  --frame-first-image /absolute/path/to/portrait-9x16.jpg \
  --out-dir /absolute/path/to/out

Quote BATCH_COST_TOTAL, not BATCH_COST_PER_TAKE, and give the takes a row each. Hand over the CONTACT_SHEET path on its own line, then the take paths beneath it. A contact sheet cannot tell you whether the mouth matches the speech — it is frames, and lip-sync is a relationship between frames and audio. Watch one take before promoting it.

A cheap early draft is worth more here than in most scenarios: run a short clip carrying only the first sentence, at the cheapest tier, to find out whether this route works for this face at all before the full script is priced.

Pricing a job with no API key

models, providers and generate --dry-run all work with OFOX_API_KEY unset. So when a user hasn't signed up yet, quote the job first and let them decide whether it's worth registering — don't open by sending them to a signup form.

If the script isn't found

bash: ../ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh: No such file or directory

Nothing is broken — this skill delegates all execution to ofox-video-core and reaches it by relative path, and that path just missed. Two different situations wear this message, so run the probe in "Where the core skill lives" before deciding which:

• The probe printed a directory — the core is installed and only the directory name was wrong, which is the normal LobeHub case (ofoxai-skills-ofox-video-core). Re-run against what the probe printed.
• The probe printed nothing — ofox-video-core really is absent, and installing it is the user's call to make, not yours: an install writes outside this working directory, so hand over the command and let them run it rather than running it for them. Which command depends on the installer they already have — skills.sh is npx skills add ofoxai/skills --skill ofox-video-core, which asks for that one skill and answers none of the agent, scope or confirmation questions on the user's behalf; this repo's own wrapper is npx ofox-skills ofox-video-core, the same install with all three answered in advance (every agent, user-level, no prompts); on LobeHub or ClawHub, install ofox-video-core from the same publisher. Ask for the one skill that is missing rather than the whole repo, and give all three routes — pointing a LobeHub user at the skills.sh line alone reads as "abandon your installer", which isn't the advice.

Either way, name the missing skill and where it was expected rather than relaying the raw path error, which names neither.

A broken link to a shared reference has the same two causes. This skill degrades gracefully: the question set, the template, the word budget and the defaults are all written out here. What is out of reach is the detail behind them — the full delivery and camera vocabulary, the gallery cases behind the word rates, and the exact wording of the spend gate, which stays mandatory either way.

Exit codes worth knowing

Full table in ../ofox-video-core/SKILL.md. The ones that come up:

Code	Meaning	What to do
1	Parameter rejected locally, no network call, nothing billed	Fix the flag and retry freely
2	Environment problem — curl/jq missing, or no OFOX_API_KEY	Ask the user to fix it; check reports the same
3	API rejected it, or the job ended failed/cancelled/expired	Read the mapped message; a rejected create was not billed
4	Timed out waiting — the job is still running and billable	poll JOB_ID, never re-run generate
5	Ambiguous network failure on create	Do not retry blindly; check https://app.ofox.ai first
6	--out-dir unusable	Fix the path; if it happened after a create, poll JOB_ID

How long to tell the user it will take

generate blocks while it polls, up to --max-wait (default 540s). A short low-resolution clip is usually one to three minutes. Say so before starting, so the wait isn't silent.

If your tool call can't stay open that long, use create (submits and returns a job id in seconds) followed by poll. That way a timeout can never strand a job whose id you never saw.

Where the file lands

Always pass --out-dir, and make it an absolute path. Without it the script writes to the current working directory — which, given that the examples here run from this skill's own directory, would drop the user's video inside an installed skill. Relay the absolute VIDEO_PATH the script prints, on its own line.

Pass --name too, named after the clip rather than left for the script to guess from the prompt's opening words, which here describe a shot length. The clip lands as <name>-<short job id>.mp4 with a .json sidecar holding the full job id, the prompt, the seed and the real cost.

Generating

bash ../ofox-video-core/references/ofox-video.sh generate --approved \
  --model alibaba/wan-3.0-prime \
  --prompt "<the talking-head prompt built above>" \
  --name "<short clip name, e.g. anna dashboard intro>" \
  --duration 12 \
  --resolution 480p \
  --frame-first-image /absolute/path/to/portrait-9x16.jpg \
  --out-dir /absolute/path/to/out

Drop --frame-first-image and add --aspect-ratio 9:16 on the described-presenter route, and drop --model with it — that route goes to the script's own default.

--approved is not decoration: without it the script refuses, submits nothing, and prints the quote-first steps instead. Add it only once the cost table has actually gone in front of the user and come back with a yes — the flag cannot check that for you.

This one call validates the parameters, submits the job, polls to completion, downloads the mp4, and prints STATUS, JOB_ID, VIDEO_PATH, VIDEO_SECONDS, SEED and VIDEO_COST. Report the actual values from that output — never the estimate, and never a path or cost you didn't see the script print. Do not re-implement any of the request, poll or download logic here.

After it lands: what to actually check

Three things, in this order, before calling it done. None of them is STATUS completed.

1. Is it the right person? Open the first frame and compare it against the portrait, item by item — face structure, eyes, hair parting, what they are wearing, the background. That comparison has been made once on this model and it held for 10 seconds; it has been made once, on one face.
2. Do the mouth and the words agree? Watch it once with sound. A contact sheet cannot answer this. Gross sync is what a viewer notices and what has been measured; per-phoneme accuracy is neither measured nor watchable at this level, so judge it the way a viewer would.
3. Were all the words said? Count them against the script. One measured run delivered all 29 of its words in order, which is the expected case rather than a guarantee — rushed, clipped or dropped endings mean the clip was over budget, and the fix is a longer clip or fewer words, never a faster delivery.

Report what you checked, not just that it finished.

Common failure modes and fixes

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Exit 3, input_moderation_failed on create	A real person's photo was sent to a model that refuses it — bytedance/seedance-2.5 does, measured	Re-run on alibaba/wan-3.0-prime, this skill's default. Nothing was billed. Do not reach for --real-person true as the fix: it does lift that refusal, but it is an assertion that the user holds the rights to the likeness, not a retry flag — never set it to clear an error
input_moderation_failed on wan-3.0-prime, after an earlier portrait went through	Wan is not upstream-pinned and Ofox routes by weight across two upstreams that moderate differently	Re-run; if it repeats, try minimax/hailuo-3, which also accepted a portrait in the same comparison. Nothing was billed either way
The speech is rushed, garbled, or the last words are missing	More words than the clip holds	Longer clip (inside the model's range) or fewer words. Never compress the delivery. New prompt, new cost table
The clip ends mid-sentence	Same cause, and a missing ending beat	Re-budget at about 3 words a second and write the final beat explicitly — "after <last word> the lips close and the shot holds"
The voice speaks the wrong language	The quoted line was translated on the way into the prompt	Put the user's own words in, untouched. The line's language decides the voice's language
The person in the clip is not the person in the photo	The frame lock held for 10s on one measured run, on one face — a different face, a longer clip or a different upstream is not covered by it, and no flag fixes a miss	Re-roll cheaply; try a tighter, better-lit, more frontal portrait; try minimax/hailuo-3. If it will not hold, say so rather than spending again — and tell the user what was tried
The mouth moves without matching the words	Gross sync was measured once, in English; anything finer, and any other language, is not	Same as above, plus keep mouth shape matched to <language> in the prompt. Judge it on a cheap draft, not on the deliverable
Garbled lettering, a name card nobody asked for	The model invents text	Keep the text items in AVOID, and compose lettered surfaces out of the background. Real captions go on in an editor
A music bed nobody asked for	--generate-audio true and a prompt that didn't exclude music	Keep no music in SOUND and the music words in AVOID
Exit 3, output_moderation_failed mentioning audio copyright	The prompt asked for music	Rewrite SOUND as room tone only and re-run — a new request, safe immediately, nothing was billed
The clip is not the ratio that was asked for	A frame is attached, so the ratio follows the image	Crop the portrait to the target ratio and re-run. Crop, never pad
A second person, or a cutaway, appears	A talking head is one shot; anything suggesting a scene invites one	Declare one continuous shot, fixed camera, no cuts in the first sentence and keep the cutaway items in AVOID
Exit 4, timed out waiting	Still running upstream, not failed	poll JOB_ID with the id printed before the timeout; never re-run generate
Exit 5, ambiguous network failure on create	No HTTP response at all — can't tell whether a job exists	Don't guess or retry; tell the user to check https://app.ofox.ai

When NOT to use

• Two or more people talking to each other — seedance-short-drama. The boundary is not "is there dialogue", it is who is being addressed: a scene between characters is that skill, one person addressing the viewer is this one. Short drama also owns shot lists, cuts and stage direction, none of which belongs in a talking head.
• The words still have to be found — explainer. If the user has an article, a doc or a changelog and no script, the work is choosing one idea and compressing it, which is that skill's entire subject. Come back here when there is a face and a finished sentence.
• A polished brand or product ad — seedance-ad-creative. A spokesperson in an ad is an ad.
• A handheld, phone-shot creator clip — ugc-ads, even when the creator talks to camera. That skill inverts the polish this one defaults to.
• The user has a voice recording they want heard. Nothing here can be made to speak supplied audio — measured. An editor over a generated or filmed picture is the answer, and saying so early is cheaper than a job.
• A long script. Past about ninety words there is no single clip for it, and past two or three parts the honest advice is to film it or use a dedicated avatar product. Say so before quoting a five-part job.
• Someone whose likeness the user cannot use. Not a routing note; a stop.