Cinematic launch films, update videos and motion design from code, directed by your coding agent.

cinetic (cinema + kinetic) is an agent skill that makes your coding agent direct a short film instead of arranging animation components. It is built for the two films a product team makes most: the launch film and the update video ("v2 is out", with the three things that changed).

• Clear copy first. Before any picture, the agent writes a script a stranger understands in 5 seconds: what the product is by 3 s, then one thing it does a line, then the name and what to do, in 2–7 plain words a line. copy-check.py reads it the way a stranger would and fails vague words, slogans and keyword piles.
• One line at a time, each with its own animation. Every line of the script arrives its own way, from twenty-three tested text animations and a book of 466 devices, while the camera keeps the picture moving. A hero line lands solid and leaves at speed, and seams carry the object and the speed into the next shot.
• Templates for the films teams make most. new-film.sh --template lays down a whole film's structure: an update video, a UI walkthrough, a capability reel, a camera teaser, a prompt run, a social ad or a type explainer. For a film whose idea is its own device, the agent is dealt an art direction instead.
• The product, built in code. Its screens come back as live components at film size: dense screens with one readable line, panels tilted in one light, a camera that moves through depth, portraits instead of grey silhouettes, and data that adds up on every frame.
• Real marks of the products it works with. logos.mjs fetches the official colour marks of a product's integrations, sources and models from open collections and records source, licence and trademark owner. The kit sets them as app-icon tiles, chips, marks inside a line, walls and rings. Generic glyphs are Phosphor Icons.
• Type in one step. Inter at its display cut by default, or a free face dealt from a set by look (neutral, tight, geometric, friendly, technical); two measured type families, calm or bold, set with one command; and font-match.mjs picks the free face closest to a brand face that cannot ship.
• Your brand, or one it makes. Hand it a brand kit (logo, colours, fonts, screenshots) and brand.py writes it into the film. Without one, it designs a brand from three personality words. A clip you supply can lend the film its grammar, never its content.
• Music-led sound. Every film is cut to its own licensed, human-made instrumental track, found by mood, tempo and length, with a sound cast for each action from an earshot kit and a library of real effects. No music is generated, nothing copyrighted enters a repository, and credits never appear in the picture.
• Finished and measured. True motion blur, no banding, BT.709 and a sync-checked mux, then gates that fail motion that snaps, freezes or stops dead, floors against a flat picture, checks against filler shapes and unmotivated light, pixel forensics, an audio-sync audit, contact sheets and critic passes against a ship gate.

It builds with Remotion (React) by default, or HyperFrames (HTML and GSAP).

Quick start · Examples · Start a film · Install · Requirements · Use · How it works · Sound · Look · What's inside · Evaluation

npx skills add Leonxlnx/cinetic

Then ask your agent for a film, for example: "Make a 25-second launch film with music for our database branching tool. Invent the brand." It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and the other agents the skills CLI supports.

Before the first film, check your machine with a first test render. It needs Node 22+, ffmpeg 6+, Python 3.11+ and a headless Chromium, plus earshot 0.4 for the sound; see Requirements.

Every film here was made by an agent with cinetic 1.5 from a one-paragraph brief and cut to a licensed music track. The brands are invented unless the brief supplied one. Clicking a GIF downloads its MP4. The films live on the repo's media branch, so installs stay small.

The agent scaffolds the project itself at intake. These are the commands it runs, and you can run them too (<skill> is where the skill is installed, for example ~/.claude/skills/cinetic):

# a launch film from the starter, for an idea that is its own device
bash <skill>/scripts/new-film.sh films/acme --fps 60 --size 1920x1080

# a film template laid over the starter
bash <skill>/scripts/new-film.sh films/acme-walk --template ui-walkthrough

# an update video in a supplied brand, cut to a track found with music.mjs
bash <skill>/scripts/new-film.sh films/acme-2 --template update --brand ./brand \
  --music ./audio/track.mp3 --record ./audio/track.licence.json

new-film.sh copies the starter (and the template), sets the grid, copies every cinetic script into the project so it runs on its own, and installs its dependencies. Other flags: --type calm|bold (the type family), --like <clip> (a clip's grammar), --pace crisp, --engine hyperframes, --font <name> and --link-modules <dir>; --format update is the same as --template update. new-film.sh --help lists them all.

The test is to say the film in one sentence. "You give it X and get Y" is a walkthrough; "it works with everything and returns anything" is a reel; "here is what changed" is an update; "ask it, it does the steps, here is the result" is a prompt run. When none fits, start from the starter.

A template is the floor, never the film. It carries the structure, shot types, timing, transitions and choreography; the product, the words, the brand and the direction are yours. Its pace, tempo and type family become the film's defaults. Every string on screen comes from one content file whose placeholder marker fails the lint until the product's own words and data are in, and a fresh scaffold passes tsc, grid-check and lint-film with only those markers left. Its acts sit on whole bars, so once the track is in, every act line lands on a downbeat. Templates are for Remotion. Details: references/templates.md.

A film from the starter is dealt, not left to the agent's habits.

The direction deck. In Step 1 the agent runs

python3 scripts/deck.py --brief "a docs map for scattered teams" --format launch --pace calm --options 3

and gets three complete directions from 35, each fitted to the format: its space, light, camera language, cut grammar, type behaviour, story shape, lockup, palette proportions and one signature shot, and for an update film its hook, change and payoff beats. Type-led and graphic directions come up most; the 9 imagery-led ones are dealt only when the film has the product's own photographs or footage (--have photos or --have footage). The agent writes an idea sentence for each, keeps the one a competitor could not claim, and deals the full sheet for it, which becomes the art direction in TREATMENT.md.

The device book. references/devices/ holds 466 devices in 25 family files (type arrivals and exits, lines and swaps, marks and markers, icons and glyphs, colour and light, glass, glow and spectral, texture and grids, photos and footage, collage and composition, camera, camera transitions, cuts and seams, morphs and handoffs, wipes, masks and irises, speed and rush, depth and 3D, UI choreography, micro-interactions, cursor, loaders, data and numbers, logo and end card, sound and timing, cadence and grammar), with an index that picks by job: opening hook, reveal, emphasis, transition, proof, product moment, update change, lockup. Each entry gives what it is and when it earns its place, its anatomy, house timing at 60 fps, the sound that goes with it, and how to build it: a tested primitive in the starter's src/fx/ with its props, or a recipe in plain layers.

The draw. pick.py draws the film's devices from 724 entries in 27 families, and one text animation for each line of the script:

python3 scripts/pick.py --format launch --energy high --seconds 25 --lines 6 --json out/qa/picks.json

That is about one device per beat, in the order the format needs them, from many families (a variety rule keeps one family from filling a film), weighted toward the house's workhorses and the film's energy, and a different text animation on every line. The agent builds the picks its direction can carry, retold in the film's own objects, and rerolls or drops the rest with a reason written into the treatment. The seed is printed, so a plan can be reproduced.

Browse the book in references/devices/INDEX.md and the drawable library in references/technique-library.md. The house rules behind them (shot lengths, easing, text timing, transitions, camera, UI in motion, colour over time) are in references/craft-rules.md.

npx skills add Leonxlnx/cinetic

Global install for Claude Code, without prompts:

npx skills add Leonxlnx/cinetic -g -a claude-code -y

Pin a version:

npx skills add Leonxlnx/cinetic#v1.5.1

For Claude Code the skill lands in .claude/skills/cinetic (project) or ~/.claude/skills/cinetic (with -g). The same command installs it for the other agents the skills CLI supports, such as Codex and Cursor; choose them with -a.

/plugin marketplace add Leonxlnx/cinetic
/plugin install cinetic@cinetic

Claude Code can then load the skill on its own when you ask for a video, because the request matches the skill's description, or you can call it directly as /cinetic:cinetic. To update, run /plugin marketplace update cinetic, then open /plugin > Installed > cinetic > Update now (details in docs/setup.md).

Download cinetic.skill from the latest release. It is a zip whose top folder is cinetic/:

curl -L -o cinetic.skill https://github.com/Leonxlnx/cinetic/releases/latest/download/cinetic.skill
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
unzip cinetic.skill -d ~/.claude/skills/

Or copy the folder from a clone (use <project>/.claude/skills/ instead for a single project):

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Leonxlnx/cinetic
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -R cinetic/skills/cinetic ~/.claude/skills/

To update a manual install, remove ~/.claude/skills/cinetic first, then repeat.

• macOS, Linux, or Windows with Git Bash. The scripts are bash (3.2 or newer, so macOS's built-in bash works); they were developed on Linux, and macOS is less tested. On Windows they run in Git Bash, with PYTHON set to the interpreter of an environment that has the packages below; WSL2 with the Ubuntu steps is another route, not yet tested.
• Node 22+ (Remotion 4; music.mjs, logos.mjs, assets.mjs, font-match.mjs and the checks)
• ffmpeg 6+ with libx264, and ffprobe
• Python 3.11+ with numpy, scipy, soundfile, pyloudnorm, opencv-python and librosa; fonttools, brotli and uharfbuzz for outlined SVG logos and supplied fonts; pillow for banding-free gradient PNGs
• earshot 0.4+ in its own virtual environment, with EARSHOT_PYTHON pointing at its interpreter: it renders the film's sound kit (the launch preset, levelled over the music), ranks the sounds cast for each action and listens to the soundtrack. A film keeps its rendered takes in audio/kit/, so it rebuilds where earshot is not installed. Details: Sound from earshot.
• A licensed music track per film. The agent finds one with music.mjs in free catalogs whose licence needs no credit, or you choose it; it stays in the film's git-ignored audio/music/ beside its licence record. Details: Music.
• Chromium or a Chrome headless shell. Remotion downloads its own if allowed; set REMOTION_BROWSER or CHROMIUM_PATH to use a local one.
• A Remotion licence if you need one. cinetic is MIT, but Remotion, the default engine, has its own licence: free for individuals and companies of up to 3 people, a company licence from 4. HyperFrames is Apache-2.0.

Install the Python packages in a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/cinetic
source ~/.venvs/cinetic/bin/activate
pip install numpy scipy soundfile pyloudnorm opencv-python librosa fonttools brotli uharfbuzz pillow

Every script finds Python through scripts/py.mjs: $PYTHON when it is set, else the first of python3, python and py -3 that runs Python 3.10 or newer and imports numpy, so the Microsoft Store alias is never run (node scripts/py.mjs --which prints the one it uses). Set PYTHON to the environment's interpreter, activate the environment before you start the agent, or put ~/.venvs/cinetic/bin first on your PATH. A virtual environment also avoids the externally-managed-environment error that recent Debian, Ubuntu and Homebrew Pythons raise on a global pip install. Details: Python packages.

You don't need a Remotion project first: the agent scaffolds one with scripts/new-film.sh and installs its dependencies. Renders are CPU-heavy. Motion blur multiplies render time by the number of sub-frames (typically 3–8x a sharp render); render.sh --blur prints an estimate before the sub-frame render, and --budget caps it. Renders run in parts, so a render stopped by a time limit or a crash resumes where it stopped. Full setup steps: docs/setup.md.

Describe the film in a sentence or two. Paste one of these and swap in your product:

Make a 25-second launch film with music for our database branching tool, for the announcement on X. Invent the brand.

Branchly 2.0 is out. Make a 15-second update video with music: offline mode, a command palette and shared branches. Use our brand kit in ./brand.

Make a 30-second walkthrough of our app: you paste a meeting link and get a finished brief. It works with Zoom, Google Meet and Slack, so show their marks.

Make our launch film feel like this clip (./ref/launch.mp4), but with our product and our own idea.

Make a 15-second ad for Reels from the product photos in ./photos.

Animate our new export feature as a 10-second loop for the landing page. It autoplays muted, so it has to read without sound.

Design a logo for our budgeting app and make a 6-second sting with music, plus a transparent version for our editors.

Make 9:16 and 1:1 versions of the launch film for Reels and LinkedIn.

Review this Remotion film: find the weakest three seconds, check the sync and fix what fails.

What the agent does. If the brief names the product, the message and the length, it starts; otherwise it asks at most three questions, and it asks for the products yours works with, whose marks it can show. It works in files you can read and edit: BRIEF.md (the spec line, the hard bans and any brand exceptions), a film project scaffolded from the starter or a template at intake, then TREATMENT.md (the dealt direction, the script with its word count, the beat sheet with a device and a text animation per line, the music and any pictures). It runs copy-check.py on the script before any picture work, chooses and records the music before it writes the timeline, renders style stills and checks them before it animates, critiques previews on contact sheets, and renders the motion-blurred master once, after the last review round. Stings, loops and short clips take a scaled-down path: a one-page treatment, one or two acts and one review round.

Plan for a long run. A full launch film takes the agent one to two hours and several hundred thousand tokens: dealing the direction, writing and checking the script, finding the music, building the brand and the product's screens, rendering motion blur and running review rounds.

What you get, by format:

Social versions are re-laid out from the same timeline, never cropped from the master. The brand kit for an invented brand holds the mark and lockups as SVG and transparent PNG for light and dark grounds, favicon sizes, a 400x400 avatar and, on request, a 1500x500 header for X. The delivery folder keeps the deliverables at the top level, CREDITS.md and a paste-ready description when a licence asks for a credit, and the QA material (sheets, reports, a manifest with probe facts) in qa/. The film stays source code: change a line of copy, the accent or the track, and render again.

Every step writes a file and ends at a gate the agent actually runs. It starts from BRIEF.md, the brief plus a spec line such as 1920x1080@60, 25s, pace: calm, format: launch, audio: licensed track + launch kit.

Everything hangs off one grid. With a track, track.py grid writes src/music.ts from the edit, and every frame number in the film comes from one helper on the music's own bars, so the picture, the cue export and the audits can't drift apart:

export const b = (n: number, beat = 0, sub = 0) =>   // bar, beat, 16ths
  MUSIC ? Math.round(bar(n, beat, sub))               // the track's measured bars
        : Math.round(((n - 1) * 4 + beat) * BEAT + sub * (BEAT / 4));

Sounds are never placed by hand. export-cues.ts runs the project's src/sync.ts, which computes the contact frames of springs, the settle frames of arrivals and the velocity peaks of launches from the same constants the acts animate with, and score.py places the effects on those frames.

The music. Every film plays its own licensed, human-made, instrumental track. music.mjs search looks through free catalogs whose licence needs no credit (Mixkit, and CC0 recordings on Wikimedia Commons, ccMixter and Openverse) and ranks them by the brief's mood words, tempo, length and energy curve; sheet --measure lists three to audition; get reads the licence page again and downloads the file with its licence record. music.mjs pick ranks a curated library of analysed tracks instead. No film reuses a track an earlier film used. track.py then analyses tempo, bars, phrases, entries, stops, the ending and the key, edits the track at bar lines to the film's length with the reveal on a strong bar, writes the film-time grid the timeline uses and measures every join. The track and anything mixed from it are git-ignored; the record, the analysis and the edit are committed (JSON, no audio). A licence that asks for a credit gets it in the delivery folder and the post description, never in the picture.

The effects. Every effect plays an action: a card landing, a toggle, typing, a swipe, a logo lock, a transition through a shape. kit.py cast gives each action in the film its own sound from the bank of earshot, a separate tool that designs sounds in code and checks them by measurement, ranked by earshot's ears and checked for masking against the track. Where the bank sounds an action weakly, a real effect that needs no credit comes in (music.mjs search --kind sfx, kit.py real) and joins a sound library (library.py) that the cast draws from beside the bank, so no two films share one set. With a track, each role sits at its level over the bed. plan.py lays the effects out; score.py renders the bed and the effects, applies the stop-downs (a few before the hit, the drop or the swell that matter, never a duck under every effect) and masters to −14 LUFS. Tuned effects never become a melody: at most two pitched effects in any 4 s.

The house style is restraint: one soft sound per line of text, near-silence while it is read, a big hit only for the one reveal, and a lockup that is a stop-down and one clean element. scripts/audio/listen.py gives the review loop ears: earshot's per-cue sync, an annotated sound sheet and a critique, in one process.

Without earshot or a rendered kit the soundtrack fails its gate; score.py --draft plays placeholder voices for a timing check, and a draft build is never delivered.

Neutral grounds and surfaces (cool greys, a mid slate for dark stages), ink, and one accent with a meaning, on what matters, at its share of the frame, with an optional support hue beside it in 10–30 % of the film. Type reads large and frontal on clean fields; the product's own UI and graphic effects carry the picture, and pictures are an accent. The picture is never flat or frozen: look-audit.py fails a render under the floors (the camera or the ground moving through most of the body, two planes at different rates, carried seams, a designed moment every 3 s, a light event in every act, scale changes across cuts, clean flat ground and colour mass in the frame), forensics.py fails motion that snaps, freezes, settles too fast or stops dead, and grammar-score.mjs scores the film against the house grammar or a clip's. Every element in frame has a job, and light is motivated and subtle: a ground is flat or keyed gently from one side, and look-audit.py fails faint shapes that carry no text, icon or mark and a pool or haze of light over the ground, which lint-film.mjs also flags in the source.

When the agent invents the look, none of these appear:

• Words: a film that does not say what the product is by 3 s; vague, fancy or metaphor copy and slogan shapes ("X, reimagined"); keyword piles; two lines on screen at once; a line over 7 words; eyebrow or kicker labels, stacked taglines, "Introducing…", text walls and filler (decorative mono captions, fake metrics, lorem ipsum)
• Type: serif typefaces; italic or oblique styles, including a skew that fakes one; overshoot on copy; letters moving one by one outside a line's own text animation
• Colour: orange, amber, beige, cream, tan or sand; purple, violet or indigo; neon; a monochrome wash of the accent; glassmorphism as a UI style
• Decoration: emoji and stock icons; sparkles standing for "AI", confetti and code rain; bouncy overshoot on anything that isn't landing
• Filler: faint plates and blank cards that carry nothing, floating at depth or round a line; a light pool, white haze or fog vignette with no source in the picture; a veil over the product
• Pictures: stock as the base of a film; low-resolution or mixed-grade pictures

Light, glow, glass, spectral and iridescent colour and multi-hue gradients are allowed as part of a device with a job (every gradient baked and dithered, no banding), never as a look laid over everything. Other products' marks keep their own colours. lint-film.mjs checks tokens and styles (colours by OKLCH region, declared device palettes), palette.py refuses a banned accent or ground, and the critics check the rendered frames.

A brand you supply always wins. If your identity includes a serif wordmark or an orange, it is used as given, recorded in BRIEF.md and brand/brand.json so the critics don't flag it, and marked in code with // cinetic:brand-supplied <what> so the lint accepts it; supplied colours are checked only for contrast and the one-accent rule.

The Remotion starter's demo is a 15-second film in seven bars, every act opening on a bar line, built to be replaced: "plinth cuts" and "to music." build around an accent dot that lands as the line's full stop, the line launches left into a picture slot (a stand-in drawn in code until the film's own picture goes in, or the shot is rebuilt without one), the picture contracts into the gap of "Cuts land.", and the mark lands as a relief under a turning key before the name rises whole through its slot. Its audio/score.json plays the track you add (audio/music/README.md).

Each round ran the briefs with cinetic and with the same agent without it but with the official Remotion agent skills. A grader checked each brief's written expectations (size, frame rate, duration, loudness and true peak measured by script; sync and the visual checks judged from frames and audio), and blind judging agents compared each pair with the labels randomized: a neutral senior creative director in every round, a second judge applying a house style guide equal to the hard bans from round 3, and from round 6 the neutral judge again, comparing each new film with the one 0.5.0 made for the same brief.

Round 2 was invalidated by a harness problem and is not reported.

cinetic met more of the written expectations in every round and won every house-style comparison. The neutral judge was split, and its craft notes became rules: in round 7 it credited the baselines' warmer, richer pictures while preferring cinetic's ideas and product story. Version 1.5 answers that note with a plain script shown one line at a time, film templates, the product's screens built in code in a lit place with depth, music on every film, and gates that fail a flat or frozen film; 1.1.0 and 1.5.0 have not had a judged round of their own yet. A cinetic run costs about three times the time and tokens of the baseline (round 7 average: 95 vs 33 minutes, 626k vs 231k tokens). The method and the full results are in docs/evaluation.md.

The process was first worked out while making Tessel, a 33-second launch film built in code (source and film). Its worked example ships with the skill.

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Before you open a PR, run the regression tests (they need Node 22.18+ and Python 3 with numpy, scipy, soundfile, pyloudnorm and librosa; the tests that load the starter's TypeScript, such as grid-check, the primitives and the type and kit tests, need npm install in skills/cinetic/assets/remotion-starter):

node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/tokens.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/mirror.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/lint-film.test.mjs --part static
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/grid-check.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/scripts-docs.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/add-font.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/provenance.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/assets.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/logos.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/logo-kit.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/music.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/primitives.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/continuity.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/handoff.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/transitions.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/depth-light.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/kit-dense.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/moment.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/wordmark.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/type-presets.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/type-moves.test.mjs
node skills/cinetic/scripts/test/type-family.test.mjs
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/copy-check.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/pick.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/deck.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/brand.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/like.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/track.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/score.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/cast.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/library.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/render-parts.test.py
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/encode-tags.test.py   # runs its encodes when ffmpeg is on PATH
python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/test/bash32.test.py

CI runs all of these but the slow cast.test.py (provenance in release mode; lint-film, pick, deck, brand, like, assets, logos, music, copy-check, library and track; tokens, mirror and grid-check; the starter's primitive, continuity, handoff, transitions, depth and light, kit, moment, wordmark, logo-kit and type tests; type-family, score, scripts-docs, add-font, render-parts, bash32 and encode-tags), plus the forensics self-test, with the Remotion starter installed and type-checked, and also checks the SKILL.md frontmatter, the JSON and plugin manifests, that the skills CLI discovers the skill, Python, Node and shell syntax, and that no audio or video with sound is tracked by git. The shell scripts are also parsed with bash 3.2 (macOS's /bin/bash), in a container and on a macOS runner, which also runs the encode-tags test on a current ffmpeg. Bash 3.2 cannot parse a heredoc inside $( ): put such a heredoc in a shell function (bash32.test.py finds them). A change to a lint or text-flow rule needs a fixture in skills/cinetic/scripts/test/lint-fixtures/, and a change to a timeline check one in grid-fixtures/, that declares what it must produce. A change to the library goes into techniques.json; regenerate the readable pages with python3 skills/cinetic/scripts/pick.py --write-docs skills/cinetic/references (the index and each family's file in references/library/; --markdown, with --family <name> for one family, prints them); pick.test.py checks that they match.

MIT, copyright (c) 2026 Leonxlnx.