saas-motion-kit

Promo and motion videos for software products, made with HyperFrames and Claude Code.

The one rule: no two films should feel like the same film. Don't repeat effects, transitions or components. Invent a new component for every film. Decide the message and the tone before you pick a single effect.

This kit trains that creative muscle. It combines a staged process, a component strategy, 101 visual themes, a 24-transition atlas and a variety audit that catches repetition in your storyboard before you build it.

Türkçe README → · Theme gallery → · Transition atlas → · Creative muscle → · Six films → · Example →

New: start from a real prompt. The exact prompt behind a finished 35 s mascot promo, plus a fill-in template and what happened at each gate.

What's new in v1.4: learn from real films, credit the people who made them

• References. Bring real videos you love as references: the launch film everyone shared, the ad you watched three times. Learn from them in the open. The rule: credit every reference by name and link, and borrow only grammar (rhythm, structure, transition types, camera ideas). Never take assets: their footage, music, characters, logos or copy.
• tools/breakdown.py breaks a reference into shots. It finds the hard cuts, measures the rhythm (cuts per 10 s, shot lengths, how fast the first 3 s go), writes a contact sheet with one frame per shot, and drafts a ledger in the storyboard format. Every breakdown opens with a credit header. Its output goes to the git-ignored .references/, so other people's work never lands in your repo.

  python tools/breakdown.py launch.mp4 --id 01 --creator "@handle" --title "v2 launch" --url https://x.com/handle/status/…
  

• Credit you can't forget. Write ref:01 in the notes of a shot that borrows from a reference, and add the reference to REFERENCES.md next to the storyboard. variety_audit.py, and the GitHub Action with it, now fails when a ref: has no credited row with a creator and a link. The /saas-motion-video skill asks for reference videos at the brief.
• Fixes: theme sheets no longer say "all 100 themes". history_report.py accepts theme ids written as numbers, variety_audit.py reports an unreadable time instead of crashing, and loop_check.py and deliver.sh print their usage instead of a traceback.

• A new theme family: hardware-ad grammar. It takes the minimal hardware ad (the kind Apple made famous) and translates it into films for software. The first theme is 101 Noise Cancelling: 38 dashboards hum as hairline waveforms, the product opens a quiet zone, and exactly one signal breaks the silence. The film hangs on one sound-design hit, a cut to true silence on the drop.
• The human layer: people in the film, without leaving the triangle. Generated, fictional people now appear in films, but every shot with a person still has a 3D move and a product beat. The kit has five formats (over-the-shoulder dive, portal cards, hand to interface, diorama presenter, metric on the face), truth rules (generated people are actors, never customers or testimonials), and a fal pipeline: a Nano Banana 2 cast card, Seedance 2.0 and Kling O3 clips, and Bria mattes. The pilot is Over-the-Shoulder Dive: the real Pulse UI is pinned onto a generated plate's green screen frame by frame, the camera dives into a 3D three-step tutorial, a real finger taps Roll back, and we pull back to the face. Two new tools: tools/fal_shots.py runs a film's shots.json on fal, and tools/screen_track.py tracks a green screen for UI replacement. Footage stays out of git, and placeholders.py lets the cut preview without it.
• Smaller fixes: the gallery counts its own themes instead of hardcoding 100, and tools/make_thumbs.py --only 101 renders just the thumbnails you changed.

• Same story, six films. One 12-second Acme Pulse script, six themes from the gallery, and six films that share the story and nothing else. Every storyboard passed the variety audit, and every film invented its own component: a metric stave (⌘K Keyboard Symphony), a rollback rolling pin (Clay Studio), a fineliner seismograph (Hand-Drawn Marker), a spot cue (Dark Keynote), a P1 gamepad (8-Bit Sidekick) and a halftone chart (Pop-Art Ben-Day). The shared brief is included, so you can give it to your agent with a seventh theme. Watch the films on the v1.2 release.
• tools/pick_themes.py shortlists gallery themes for a tone and an audience, and skips the ones you used in your last five films:

  python tools/pick_themes.py --tone playful --audience "developers" --history ~/.motion-ledger.json
  

• tools/history_report.py turns your motion history into a one-page report: the transitions, entrances and eases you keep reaching for, and the atlas transitions and themes you have never tried. variety_audit.py --append now also takes --theme NNN, so the history knows which theme each film used.
• A GitHub Action (variety-audit.yml) audits every STORYBOARD.md on each push and pull request. A storyboard that repeats itself fails the check.
• Template repository. Click Use this template to start your own film repo with the tools, the creative rules and the audit Action already in place.
• Before and after, side by side: the Acme Suite loop's v1 and v2 play next to each other on the v1.2 release.

• creative/ is the new heart of the kit: seven questions to ask at every storyboard, a tone matrix ("I want to say ___ in a ___ tone") that maps tone to speed, eases, camera, colour, type, transitions and sound, the variety rules, and a component forge for inventing a new component in 15 minutes.
• Transition atlas: 24 narrative transitions (match cuts, carries, camera moves, masks, materials, time), each with a live demo, the tone it fits and what not to pair it with.
• tools/variety_audit.py reads the storyboard ledger and flags repeated transitions, entrances, eases, directions, uniform shot lengths, missing surprises, accent overuse, tone mismatches and missing new components. With --history it remembers your previous films, so you don't repeat your last three.
• The Acme example, rebuilt as a lesson. We ran the audit on our own first draft. It caught 11 repetitions: the same turntable turn five times, the same title entrance, one ease everywhere, equal shot lengths and no surprise. v2 gives every product its own entrance (letters out of blur, mask wipe, a word carried between shots, drop from above), varies the turns (whip with motion blur, slow sine), uneven shot lengths, and one surprise where Forecast floods teal while the camera dollies in. Before and after are in examples/acme-suite-loop, and the new render is on the v1.1 release.
• The storyboard template now opens with a Message & tone sentence and a one-row-per-shot ledger, and the /saas-motion-video skill runs a creative pass gate before any build.

Every example in this repo uses Acme, a fictional company, and its fictional products. All numbers are invented.

What's inside