no-slop-motion skill

---
name: no-slop-motion
description: Make a launch film, brand film, product announcement or promo video for a company that looks directed, not AI-generated. Use when someone asks for a launch video, brand video, sizzle, promo, product film or "a video for our brand/X/LinkedIn launch", or when an AI-made video "feels vibe coded", "looks like a slideshow", or keeps getting rejected. Covers the whole path: customer pain research, script, voiceover, world and style frames, optional mascot or hero object, animatic, HTML motion build (HyperFrames + GSAP), music, sound, QA and platform export.
---

# No-slop motion

A process for making a brand or launch film with an agent that people actually want to watch.

**The core idea: the agent's defaults are the slop.** When an agent picks something on its own (a track, a transition, a shadow, a font, a place to cut the voice), the result looks like every other AI video. What makes a film feel directed is that every choice comes from something real: the customer's own pain, the brand's own assets, the structure of the music, the narrator's breathing, or a named reference. So this skill is mostly about *where each decision comes from*, and the tooling is there to enforce it.

## What makes a film work

1. **Knowing the customer.** Who buys (the ICP), what hurts them in their own words, and the one thing only this product does (the USP). The film sells one before and after, not a feature list.
2. **One story thread.** Effect, then cause, then fix. For an invoicing tool: "why is the bank balance empty again?" → rewind → one invoice sat unsent for three weeks → the product arrives → it sends that invoice the moment work is done → what else you get → the balance fills up. A small mystery pulls people through a film. A feature tour doesn't.
3. **A world with its own rules.** A visual concept that comes from the story's feeling (for example a flickering 1970s office of paper forms and rubber stamps for the problem half, then clean brand colour when the product arrives). Every texture, colour and transition then has a reason.
4. **Brand motifs used freely.** Three to five things only this brand owns (a mascot, the logo mark, a signature button, a success animation, a sound). No mascot is fine: see [references/05-hero.md](references/05-hero.md).
5. **The voice sets the clock.** The narration is recorded first, in one continuous take per act. Picture is timed to the voice. Music comes last and is edited so it still sounds like one performance.
6. **Gates, not versions.** Each layer is locked before the next one is built, and each lock uses whatever the decision maker (the person who approves the film) can judge fastest: a page of text, five still frames, a rough animatic. Building story, style, voice and motion all at once is the slowest way to get there.

## Before you start

Check the tools in the first five minutes, not on day two:

| Need | Default | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Motion and render | [HyperFrames](https://hyperframes.heygen.com) (HTML + GSAP to MP4) | `npx hyperframes skills` installs its agent skills. Read `/hyperframes-core` before writing composition HTML. |
| Voice | [Cartesia](https://cartesia.ai) Sonic (`scripts/audio/tts-cartesia.ts`) | ElevenLabs works too. The key goes in an env var. Record a scratch voice in the first pass. |
| Music | [Suno](https://suno.com) or a licensed track | Once a track is liked, ask for continuations of it, not a fresh batch. |
| Transcription | faster-whisper or `npx hyperframes transcribe` | Word timestamps feed captions and voice splitting. |
| Audio and video tools | ffmpeg, Python 3 with numpy, librosa, soundfile | `pip install -r scripts/audio/requirements.txt` |
| Real UI | Access to the live product, marketing site and brand files | UI gets rebuilt as HTML from the product's real CSS and copy. |

Start the project from [starter/](starter/): a HyperFrames project with a film engine (one timeline, a timing table, actors, cameras, captions, sound cues). Copy it, then read `starter/README.md`.

## The gates

Work through them in order. A gate opens only when the decision maker has signed off the lock before it. Details and checklists are in the reference for each gate.

| Gate | What you make | Lock | Reference |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 0. Inputs | Input pack: brand truth from production, product surfaces, claims list, platform and length, 2 to 4 references with what to take from each | Pack exists, `LOVES-HATES.md` started | [01-inputs.md](references/01-inputs.md) |
| 1. Pain and positioning | Pain bank from real customer words, one villain, 2 or 3 felt numbers, one-page brief | Brief approved | [02-story.md](references/02-story.md) |
| 2. Script | The film as spoken paragraphs per act | Words approved when read aloud | [02-story.md](references/02-story.md) |
| 3. Voice | Cast, record one take per act in 2 or 3 readings, score, split in silences | VO timeline. From here the voice sets the clock | [03-voice.md](references/03-voice.md) |