SHIP LOG Screenings

You are an editor and motion designer, working on your own from start to finish with no further input. Read cut-lab/BRIEF.md and cut-lab/runs/<tool>/TOOL.md, then build the piece in cut-lab/runs/<tool>/opus/ and write every deliverable there. Use only the assigned tool for the edit, graphics and mix, as the brief's rules say. Don't read or list anything else under experiments/cut-lab/runs/, and nothing under creative-loom-fx-lab/. Don't use the Creative Loom MCP tools or any paid generation. Make reasonable creative decisions yourself and keep going until out/final.mp4 exists and NOTES.md and SOURCES.md are written. Then reply with a short summary: beats done/approximate/impossible, renders, render time, and the biggest friction.

# SHIP LOG: a 20-second edited promo

You are the editor and motion designer. Cut a 20-second promo about one small software team's two-week sprint, built from real stock footage, a music track, and 2D motion graphics. Build it with the assigned tool (see "Rules"). There is no 3D in this study: it tests cutting footage to music, transitions, kinetic type, a data graphic, lower thirds, and the sound mix.

## Inputs (in `cut-lab/assets/`)

- `commits.csv`: 12 days of real commit counts (`day,commits`). Use these values exactly.
- `Jost.ttf`: a geometric sans you may use (or pick a better free font).

Everything else you source yourself:

- **Footage.** Find 6–12 real stock clips under a free license that allows reuse (for example Pexels, Pixabay, Mixkit, Coverr, Wikimedia Commons, or the Internet Archive). Pick shots that tell the story: late-night screens, hands on keyboards, whiteboards, a city at night, coffee, a launch/celebration moment. No AI-generated footage.
- **Music.** One instrumental track, 100–130 BPM, under a free license (or one you synthesize yourself). Find its beats and cut to them.
- Record every source URL and license in `SOURCES.md`.

## Spec

- 1920×1080, 30 fps, exactly 20.0 s (600 frames), stereo AAC music.
- Palette: near-black `#0b0b0f`, warm white `#f5f1e8`, one accent of your choice. Keep the footage graded consistently.

| Time | Beat |
|---|---|
| 0–2 s | Cold open: a single footage shot with a kinetic title, `SHIP LOG`, built letter by letter on the beat. |
| 2–9 s | Montage: at least 6 cuts, every cut on a beat of the music. At least one cut uses a designed transition (a wipe, a match cut, a whip, or a mask reveal), not only hard cuts. Footage is reframed/scaled to fill 16:9 without letterboxing; at least one shot has a slow push-in. |
| ~4–8 s | A lower third slides in over the footage: `Day 1 → Day 12` with a small subtitle, `creative-loom`. |
| 9–15 s | Data beat: the footage drops behind (blurred, darkened, or split-screen) while a 2D bar chart of `commits.csv` builds, one bar per beat, heights exactly proportional to the data. The tallest bar (34) is in the accent color with its value label. Day labels and a title, `COMMITS / DAY`, appear. |
| 15–18 s | Payoff: a fast run of 3–4 short cuts (the launch/celebration), ending on a held shot with a stat callout, `90 commits · 12 days`, that counts up. |
| 18–20 s | End card on `#0b0b0f`: `creative-loom` wordmark and a closing line of your choice. The music resolves or fades out cleanly by 20.0 s. |

Sound: the music should not clip (true peak ≤ −1 dBTP); aim for about −14 LUFS integrated. One or two sound effects (a whoosh on the transition, a hit on the stat) are welcome but optional.

Every cut and every bar lands on its beat, within one frame.

## Deliverables (in your run directory)

- `out/final.mp4`: H.264 yuv420p plus AAC, 1920×1080, 30 fps, 20 s.
- The source project or script that produced it (re-renderable), plus the downloaded media.
- `SOURCES.md`: every clip and the music, with URLs and licenses.
- `NOTES.md`, covering:
  - every beat, marked done, approximate, or impossible, with why;
  - your cut list (time in → time out, source clip and its in-point);
  - the number of renders, and render time per frame;
  - workarounds;
  - what was precise, and what fought you;
  - start and end times (run `date` at the start and at the end).

## Rules

- The editing (cuts, trims, reframing, transitions, timing), the motion graphics, the grade, and the audio placement must come from the assigned tool. Use `ffmpeg` only to download/transcode source media into a format the tool can read, to analyse audio, to mux audio if the tool cannot carry it, and to extract check frames. Don't pre-cut the edit in ffmpeg.
- Any helper language (Python, Bun, etc.) may be used for beat detection and data prep, not for rendering pixels.
- No paid generation (no AI video, image, music, or voice). Everything is sourced or built.
- Check your own work: extract frames at 1.0, 3.0, 5.5, 8.0, 11.0, 14.0, 16.5, and 19.0 s and look at them before calling it done. Listen-check the mix with numbers (loudness, true peak).
- Budget: about 60–90 minutes and 20 full renders at most. If a beat is impossible in your tool, say so and move on.
- Work only in your run directory. Don't read or list other directories under `runs/`.

# 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).

# 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: 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 the assets folder.