REEL Screenings

You are a senior motion designer, working on your own from start to finish with no further input. Read cut-lab/reel/BRIEF.md and cut-lab/reel/runs/<tool>/TOOL.md, then make the reel in cut-lab/reel/runs/<tool>/opus/ and write every deliverable there. Spend real time exploring what the tool can do before you design: the goal is to show its best. Use only the assigned tool for visuals, motion and mix, as the brief's rules say. Don't read or list anything else under experiments/cut-lab/ (other than the brief, your TOOL.md, the assets folder and the tool paths it names), and nothing under creative-loom-fx-lab/. Don't use the Creative Loom MCP tools or any paid generation. Make your own creative decisions and keep going until out/reel.mp4 exists and NOTES.md and SOURCES.md are written. Then reply with a short summary: the concept, the techniques shown, renders and render time, the strongest and weakest moments, and the biggest friction.

# REEL: show what this tool can really do

You've just been handed a motion-graphics tool, and a studio wants to know whether to adopt it. Make a **30–45 second professional motion-graphics reel** that shows off the best this tool can do. It should be the kind of piece a motion designer would put at the top of their portfolio, and it should make the studio say "I didn't know it could do that."

## What we want

- **Explore before you design.** Read the tool's docs, skills, examples, effect lists and registries properly. Find out what it is unusually good at: its native effects, shaders, text engine, particles, masks, expressions, compositing, audio and so on. Then build the reel around those strengths. A reel any tool could make is a failure.
- **Range and craft.** Aim for at least 6 distinct, clearly different techniques (for example kinetic type, shape morphs, masks and mattes, shader or generative work, particles, data viz, footage compositing, transitions, glitch and other textures, audio reactivity). Every section should look art-directed: a real palette, real typography, deliberate easing and spacing. Nothing should look like a template default.
- **It's one piece, not a slideshow.** Give it a concept or a through-line (a theme, a title, a visual idea) so the sections flow into one another with designed transitions, and cut it to music.
- **Music.** Use a track under a free license (Mixkit, Pixabay, Free Music Archive, incompetech and so on) or synthesize one yourself. Hit the music: the big moments should land on its beats and accents. Optional SFX are welcome.
- Stock footage is optional (free licenses only). You choose your own subject, title, palette and fonts. Free fonts are fine, and `Jost.ttf` is in this folder's `assets/` if you want it.

## Spec

- 1920×1080, 30 fps (or 60 if the tool shines there), 30–45 s, H.264 yuv420p + AAC.
- The mix must not clip: true peak ≤ −1 dBTP, around −14 LUFS.

## Deliverables (in your run directory)

- `out/reel.mp4`.
- The re-renderable source project or script, plus any media it uses.
- `SOURCES.md`: every outside asset, with its URL and license.
- `NOTES.md`, covering:
  - what you discovered about the tool while exploring, and which strengths you chose to showcase and why;
  - a section-by-section breakdown (time range, technique, how it was built in the tool);
  - things you wanted to do that the tool couldn't, or that fought you, and your workarounds;
  - your self-critique: what's strongest and what's weakest;
  - the number of full renders, render time per frame, and start and end times (run `date` at the start and at the end).

## Rules

- All visuals, motion, compositing and the audio mix come from the assigned tool. Use `ffmpeg` only to transcode inputs, analyse audio, mux if the tool can't carry audio, and extract frames. Helper scripts (Python, Bun and so on) may generate data or drive the tool, but they must not render pixels.
- No paid or AI generation (video, image, music or voice).
- **Review like a director.** Before calling it done, extract a contact sheet (a frame every 1.5 s) and look at it. Write down the three weakest moments, fix them, and render again. Do at least one full review-and-revise pass on taste, not only on correctness.
- Budget: up to about 2 hours and 25 full renders.
- Work only in your run directory. Don't read or list the other `runs/` directories or anything outside the paths you were given.

# Tool: fframes (Rust video framework: SVG scenes rendered on the GPU via Skia/Metal, ffmpeg encoding)
Read the skill first: cut-lab/.tools/fframes/skills/fframes-video/SKILL.md and its references (design.md, api.md, audio.md). The repo with examples is at cut-lab/.tools/fframes (see examples/ such as marketing, tiktok, motion-graphics). `cargo-fframes` is installed (`cargo fframes new <name> --format landscape --fps 30 --yes`); Rust is installed. Footage plays through `frame.get_synced_video_frame(...)`; music and SFX go in the audio map. Use the project CLI (`cargo run --release -- inspect | strip | frame | onion | audio analyze | render`) to check your work.

# Tool: HyperFrames (HTML compositions rendered to video)
CLI: `bunx hyperframes` (v0.8.140). Read the skills first: ~/.agents/skills/hyperframes/SKILL.md, then hyperframes-core, hyperframes-animation, hyperframes-keyframes (punch-ins, Ken Burns, transitions) and hyperframes-audio (mix). media-use covers footage cutting/reframing helpers; its HeyGen-backed `resolve` for music/SFX may not be signed in, so source music yourself if it fails. Footage and music go in the composition as `<video>`/`<audio>` elements (see hyperframes-core references).
The registry (hyperframes-registry skill, `bunx hyperframes catalog`) has ~400 blocks, components and effects; shader and runtime adapters (GSAP, Lottie, Three.js, TypeGPU, Canvas) are in hyperframes-animation.

# Tool: EffectCraft 0.3.1 (open-source After Effects clone in Rust)
CLI: cut-lab/.tools/effectcraft/effectcraft-cli (run with no args for usage; read cut-lab/.tools/effectcraft/README.md). The fastest path is `effectcraft-cli script build.jsx --save-as study.ecproj` with the After Effects-style object model (footage layers, precomps, masks, text animators, expressions, effects like Lumetri and Gaussian Blur), plus `render-frame` for checks and `render` for the movie. Known quirks: no function hoisting or String.substr in scripts; gradient colors must be set through `effectcraft-cli set ... colors '{"colors":[[0,"#hex"],...]}'`; keyframes snap to whole frames; footage passthrough is not bit-exact (slight softening), so don't fight it.

# Tool: Tesseract 0.3.1 by Mirage (native layer/composition engine, "the creative suite built for agents")
CLI: cut-lab/.tools/tesseract/bin/tesseract-0.3.1-darwin-arm64/bin/tsrct (run `--help`; telemetry is disabled; don't re-enable it).
Skills: read cut-lab/.tools/tesseract/skills/tesseract/skills/tesseract-motion/SKILL.md first and follow its references (installation, local-operation, native-authoring, motion-design, fx-authoring, motion, custom-shader). Pull exact fields from `tsrct project schema` and `tsrct project schema --document`. When the skill mentions an attribution variable, use TESSERACT_HOST=claude-code-lab.
Fonts must be imported from a TTF/OTF file; Jost is in cut-lab/reel/assets.