Product Film

Product film

A film that looks like the product made it: its colors, type, components, logo and voice, cut to music. Built in Remotion inside (or beside) the product's codebase, so it reuses real components and stays editable.

Non-negotiables

• Their design wins. Every rule comes from the product: its tokens, components, rules files, landing page and copy. Never carry another product's taste in, including anything in this skill that their design contradicts.
• Ask, don't assume. What the film shows and how it is made are the user's call. Interview them before writing the story (reference/interview.md). Offer options drawn from what you found in their code, never generic ones.
• Every frame is a pure function of time. No CSS transitions or keyframes, no timers, no Date.now(), no state carried between frames. A component that runs its own clock gets a frame-driven twin.
• Measure, never guess. Beats come from the audio, positions from the DOM (debug overlay), colors from decoded pixels of the final files.
• Honest claims. Show only what the product really does. Find its claims rules and approved lines before writing a word.
• Ask first before committing, pushing or publishing. Keep every rendered version (out/<film>/v1, v2, ...).

Workflow

1. Quick discovery. Just enough to ask good questions: rules files, tokens, components, the logo (and any mascot or animated mark), the landing page, the main features. See reference/discovery.md.
2. Interview. Two rounds of AskUserQuestion: the brief, then the ingredients. A third round only if needed. See reference/interview.md.
3. Brand kit → videos/BRAND.md. Finish discovery on what they chose and fill templates/BRAND.md.
4. Story → videos/<film>-prompt.md. Read reference/story.md and reference/ingredients.md, then fill templates/film-prompt.md. Checkpoint with the user: beat sheet and 3 style frames.
5. Music. Skip if the film is silent. See reference/music.md: scripts/beats.py, the per-bar stem map, scripts/audio-edit.py, SFX on measured peaks.
6. Engine and scenes. Read reference/engine.md.
   • Copy templates/kit/ into videos/src/kit/.
   • One folder per film: cues.ts (the beat sheet as data), layout.ts, acts/, the composition.
7. Review loop. See reference/review.md.
   • Stills at every handoff (scripts/stills.ts, --debug to measure).
   • Contact and handoff sheets, then a half-res draft.
   • Fix, repeat, and show the user frames as you go.
8. Final render, verify, deliver. See reference/render.md: scripts/render.ts, then scripts/verify.py, then send the files.

Quality floor (always, whatever the ingredients)

• Only the product's own surfaces, colors, borders and shades. Never invent card backgrounds, outlines or tints it does not use.
• Readable at the delivery size. Fewer words beat smaller words. Cut labels that restate the picture.
• Text is never covered by a cursor, a chip or a texture. It never crosses other text in a move. A line never re-centers while it builds: keep every word's slot.
• Loading states keep their width. Use the product's own loading pattern.
• Something happens on every beat. A bar where nothing moves reads as slow.
• Scene boundaries land on bars. A loop's last frame equals its first. A landing loop must read muted.
• No effects the product's language does not use: glows, particles, click rings, bouncy easing, shaders.

Traps that cost real time

• Remotion stills do not forward console logs. Print measurements into the frame (templates/kit/debug.tsx).
• npx remotion still re-bundles on every call. Use scripts/stills.ts: bundle once, render many frames.
• Remotion's bundled ffmpeg has no tmix, select or tile. Use a full ffmpeg (uv run --with imageio-ffmpeg).
• Color range: the Remotion master is limited range, BT.601, untagged. Blending it as full range lifts #0a0a0a to #171717, a gray box on a dark page. Decode frame 0 of every deliverable and check the numbers.
• interpolateColors cannot parse color-mix(). Any color that animates is a hex token.
• Async image components (Radix or base-ui avatars) can render empty in a frame. Twin them with Remotion <Img>.
• Springs that retarget: sum one closed-form step per key, with keys sorted by time.
• CSS dashed borders crawl while a box resizes. Draw dashes as SVG strokes at a fixed pitch.
• WebGL or shader effects on their own clock paint a different picture each run. Prefer textures painted per frame.
• In a monorepo:
  • pin every remotion and @remotion/* to one exact version
  • never let the video workspace re-resolve the app's Tailwind
  • alias the app's path imports in the webpack override
• Stop only the processes you started; other sessions may be waiting on the machine.