cinetic

cinetic (cinema + kinetic) is an agent skill that makes your coding agent direct a short film instead of arranging animation components.

• Idea first. Before any code, the agent writes three concepts through different lenses, tests them, and picks one story device the film owns.
• 273 techniques, drawn at random. A library of measured moves in 14 categories, each with a build recipe and timing at 60 fps. pick.py draws the film's plan, weighted for its format and energy, so two films don't share the same fade-up, push-in and end card.
• Its own brand. The look comes from three personality words, so a calm notes app and a fast CI tool don't end up looking alike.
• One beat grid, measured sound. timeline.ts drives the picture, a synthesized score and the QA scripts, so every hit lands on its frame. Typing, clicks and ticks follow measured norms of top-tier launch films: soft, short and mostly left to the music.
• Finished and measured. True motion blur, no banding, BT.709 and a sync-checked mux, then pixel forensics, an audio-sync audit, contact sheets and critic passes against a ship gate.
• No generated look. Hard bans, enforced by a linter and the critics, keep out the looks that mark a video as generated. A brand you supply always wins.

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

Quick start · Gallery · Technique library · Install · Requirements · Use · How it works · Hard bans · What's inside · Evaluation

Quick start

npx skills add Leonxlnx/cinetic

Then ask your agent for a film, for example: "Make a 20-second launch teaser with sound 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; see Requirements.

Gallery

Quire Streaks. A 12 s vertical video for Reels and TikTok, in the brand the brief supplied. A blue thread stitches each day's pages into the Streaks screen, one rising note per stitch. On Sunday at 11:41 pm the thread hangs loose until one tap on Log pulls it tight, and the week gathers into a quire, the bookbinding word behind the name. Download MP4 (1080x1920, sound, 1.4 MB)

Ledgerly Auto-Split. A 10 s silent loop for a landing page. The bill starts split evenly at 53.55 each; Auto-Split tags each line with who ate it, fans the receipt out into four and trims each copy to that friend's dishes, shared ones divided only among the people who shared them. "Jonas only had salad." Download MP4 (1920x1080, loop, 2 MB)

Halden. A 6 s logo sting for a calm note-taking app, mixed at −16 LUFS, plus four ProRes 4444 alpha versions (held and cleared, for light and dark footage). The app's text cursor settles into a dot, and the h draws its arch over it like a fermata, the musical sign for "hold". Download MP4 (1920x1080, sound, 0.3 MB)

All four films were made by an agent with development snapshots of cinetic 1.0.0, in evaluation rounds 6 (Kiln) and 7 (the others), from the one-paragraph briefs below, the same briefs used in the evaluation. The brands are invented, except where the brief supplied one. Clicking a GIF downloads its MP4. The films live on the repo's media branch, so installs stay small.

Kiln launch teaser

Invent the brand for Kiln (a build cache that makes CI runs finish in seconds) and make a 25-second launch teaser with sound for our announcement on X. It should feel like a well-funded company shipped it, not a template.

Quire Streaks vertical video

Our reading-tracker app Quire is shipping Streaks next week. Make a 12-second vertical product video (1080x1920, for Instagram Reels and TikTok, with sound) showing how a reading streak builds over a week. Use our brand: ink #1B1B1F, paper #FBF7F0, accent #3E7BFA, typeface Manrope.

Ledgerly feature loop

Make a 10-second looping feature animation for the landing page of Ledgerly, a shared-expenses app. It should show the new Auto-Split feature splitting a dinner bill between four friends. 1920x1080, it has to loop seamlessly and work without sound (it autoplays muted on the site).

Halden logo sting

We're launching Halden, a calm note-taking app. Design the logo and make a 6-second logo sting with sound that we can put at the start of our videos, plus a transparent version for our editors.

The technique library

An agent left to choose picks the familiar option every time. cinetic's agent draws instead. In Step 1, after it has chosen a concept, it runs:

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

and gets about one technique per 2.5 s of film (10 for a 25 s launch, 5 for a 12 s vertical video, 4 for a loop or a sting), drawn in the order the format needs them and weighted toward proven workhorses and the film's energy. Each pick prints its build recipe and default timing. The agent builds the picks its concept can carry, retold in the film's own objects, and rerolls or drops the rest with a reason written into the treatment; it never adds a move the draw didn't give it. The seed is printed, so a plan can be reproduced.

Velocity handoff cut (tr-velocity-handoff-cut) transition · workhorse · energy any · formats any

The outgoing shot speeds up in one direction and is cut on its fastest frame. The next shot opens already moving the same way and brakes to rest, so momentum runs straight through the edit.

Build: Make the cut an act boundary in timeline.ts so motion-blur samples never straddle it, and place it on a beat with b(). In the outgoing act, drive the camera (src/lib/camera.ts) or the hero's translate on E.exit (E.contact, or E.in for a harder snap) over its last 16-24 f, so it ends at peak speed on the final frame; for a zoom, apply the same ramp to k through lmix. In the incoming act, start the key element moving on frame 0 in the same screen direction at 1.0-1.5x that speed and slow it on E.out over 45-90 f. Size the two sides with exitSpeed(D, T, ease) and entryDistance(v, T) from references/transitions.md; for a flicked list, use y = v0·(1 − k^f)/(1 − k) with k = 0.92-0.94