Animation Lab

Use this skill as the front door for Kosta's animation/motion-design workflow. It is intentionally broader than ascii-video: ASCII/data can be one accent layer, but the output should be readable, designed, and cinematic.

Load these skills first

For most jobs, load:

• creative__ascii-video — production pipeline for MP4/GIF/image-sequence generation
• creative__claude-design — design taste, layout, typography, anti-slop rules
• agentic__claude-code-subagent-lane — how to launch Claude Code correctly from another agent
• creative__touchdesigner-hermes-ops if the prompt mentions TouchDesigner/twozero/port 40404

If using Claude Code, point it explicitly at the installed Claude skills:

/Users/Kosta/.claude/skills/creative__ascii-video/SKILL.md
/Users/Kosta/.claude/skills/creative__claude-design/SKILL.md
/Users/Kosta/.claude/skills/creative__touchdesigner-hermes-ops/SKILL.md

Preferred slash invocation

This skill is meant to be invoked as:

/animation_lab <brief>

Hermes internally resolves underscores and hyphens interchangeably, so /animation-lab <brief> also works in text surfaces that allow hyphens. Telegram's command menu displays underscores because Telegram bot commands cannot contain hyphens.

Taste rules

Do not default to dense hacker wallpaper. Avoid full-frame Matrix rain unless explicitly requested. Treat ASCII/data as an accent layer, not the whole visual language.

Default strongest direction:

cinematic clean + audio-reactive orb + kinetic captions

That means: dark premium background, large readable type, one central responsive form, subtle data particles, sparse captions, and restrained glow.

Good directions to explore:

1. Clean cinematic title card — huge readable type, dark glass, subtle particle/data motion.
2. Swiss tech editorial — grid typography, thin rules, off-white/navy, restrained data blocks.
3. Audio-reactive orb/waveform — one breathing central form with readable labels/captions.
4. Liquid hologram — translucent blobs, refractive gradients, chromatic edges.
5. Blueprint/lab notebook — cyan lines, annotations, scanning reveals, equations/data fragments.
6. Retro terminal but readable — sparse scanlines, large labels, chunky CRT bloom.
7. Kinetic typography — words slide, snap, underline, type-on, explode/reassemble.
8. 3D particle sculpture — orb/DNA/network in a clean product-style frame.

Claude Code production pattern

For multi-variant animation work, use Claude Code as the design/production lane. Always pass the prompt through stdin, not "$(cat prompt.md)":

cat > /tmp/animation-lab-prompt.md <<'PROMPT'
<full brief here>
PROMPT

mkdir -p /tmp/animation-lab
cd /tmp/animation-lab
claude --print --input-format text --output-format json \
  --permission-mode acceptEdits \
  < /tmp/animation-lab-prompt.md

If running from Hermes, start that command with terminal(background=true, notify_on_complete=true), then use process.wait/process.log and verify outputs yourself.

Output standard

For explorations:

• Make separate MP4s, 4-6 seconds each.
• Make one contact sheet PNG with labeled stills.
• Prefer /tmp/claude-ascii-directions/out/ or /tmp/animation-lab/out/ unless the user gives a project path.
• Verify each MP4 with ffprobe.
• Return the best pick, why, and attach the strongest clips.

For final pieces:

• Combine the best directions into a single coherent film.
• Use actual script/audio timings if available.
• Re-encode for the target surface: landscape, square, or portrait.

Verification

Before saying it is done, run:

find <outdir> -maxdepth 1 -type f | sort
for f in <outdir>/*.mp4; do ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration,size -of csv=p=0 "$f"; done
file <outdir>/contact_sheet.png

Report any limitation plainly, especially if TouchDesigner/twozero is not live because the GUI session is owned by another macOS user.