Mass withdrawals, an impossible vault, and a snowy night escape

i killed the infographics show with 1 claude opus prompt

now i made a full 10 minute story video in full code

this cost me $0 in ai video generations btw

turned it into a prompt you can use for free and make any topic u want, enjoy ↓

<inputs>
Ask me for my topic and my script. If I have no script, write one from my topic.
Ask which image model I have: GPT Image 2, or any model that takes reference images at 2K-4K, at about $0.03-0.05 an image.
Ask which voice I have: ElevenLabs, or Kokoro for free.
Before generating everything, show me a look test: one plate, one character sheet cut out and rigged, and a 10 s shot with typing, a tag and a character who talks and points. Wait for my OK.
</inputs>

<look>
A 1920x1080 animated explainer in the style of the big flat-vector infographic channels.
- Every line of narration is acted out by cartoon people inside a full illustrated place.
- All motion is code. There are no AI video generations, just a few still images that code cuts up, rigs and animates.

Art:
- Flat colour shapes with NO outlines, at most one slightly darker flat shade for form, simple geometric shapes and crisp edges.
- Muted palette: dusty blue-grey, slate teal, warm beige, navy, soft purple. Salmon-pink skin, big round heads, dot eyes, small bodies.
- Mood comes from the plate's own light: daylight, a cold blue night, warm indoor lamps.

Code colours:
- ink #2b2d42, red #d62828, orange #f4a261, gold #f6b93b, green #2fb37a, navy #1f2a48
- headline tomato #e2552f and purple #5b3fa6
- grey labels #8a8c9c, white cards #ffffff
- Font: Montserrat 800-900 (Google Fonts), all caps on cards and signs.

Pace:
- A new place every 3-4 s, about 10 places a minute.
- Something new arrives every 2 s: a tag, a stamp, a person walking in, a number.
- Never hold a still over 1 s. Never have a character who doesn't move.

Banned:
- outlines, glossy UI panels floating over the art, emoji, burned-in subtitles
- any channel's logo or name, photos of real people
- facts written on a plain colour card when the place could hold them
</look>

<art>
About 60 images in all ($2-3).

Every prompt starts with this style core, word for word:
"Flat vector illustration in exactly the same art style as the reference images: NO outlines or line art anywhere, every shape is a flat solid colour fill with at most one slightly darker flat shade for form, simple geometric shapes, crisp clean edges, no gradients, no texture, no painterly lighting. Muted modern palette: dusty blue-grey, slate teal, warm beige, navy, soft purple, salmon-pink skin. No text, no letters, no numbers, no logos."

Then add one line that locks the setting ("The setting is [time, place]: [materials, light sources], nothing from other eras unless asked"). Feed 3-5 frames of a reference channel in as style references, with their logo cropped off.

1. Hero plates, about 24, one full 16:9 image each, for places you zoom into or come back to.
   - EMPTY: "no people, no characters, no animals".
   - Straight-on, with an open floor in the middle where characters will stand.
   - Blank signs, boards, screens and pages that code writes on later.
2. Quad plates, about 19, giving 76 more places. Pack 4 places into one image:
   "The image is a 2x2 grid of FOUR completely separate scenes, each filling exactly one quarter of the image (each quarter is itself a 16:9 picture), divided by perfectly straight thin pure-white gutters, one vertical down the exact centre and one horizontal across the exact centre."
   - Then describe the TOP-LEFT, TOP-RIGHT, BOTTOM-LEFT and BOTTOM-RIGHT scenes.
   - Split each quad on the brightest white row and column near the centre, walk out while the line stays over 60% white, and trim 6 px more.
   - Crop each tile to 16:9 at 1920x1080.
   - Object close-ups make great tiles: a desk, a screen, a document, a plate of food, a vault.
3. Main characters, 2-3 of them. Write one fixed description per character (age, hair, face, every piece of clothing with colours) and paste it word for word into every sheet.
   - Base sheet: 6 views. (1) front, neutral, drawn WITHOUT ARMS, only round smooth shoulder sockets where the arms would join; (2) the same armless front with a second emotion; (3) side view walking right; (4) seen from behind; (5) and (6) two poses the script needs.
   - Expression sheet: 6 armless fronts (hopeful, disgusted, terrified, exhausted, sick, shocked, or whatever the script needs), with the base sheet as a reference.
   - Pose sheet: 6 full poses with their props (sitting at a desk typing, sleeping, eating, running, signing, falling), with the base sheet as a reference.
4. Everyone else: role sheets of 4-6 people, each drawn in the exact pose their shot needs; crowd sheets of 8-10 small figures; prop sheets.
   - Every sheet: "on a solid flat chroma green background (#00B140) with lots of empty green space between figures; nothing touches, nothing on any character or object is green, full bodies, nothing cut off by the edges".
5. Thumbnail art: the same characters with richer saturated cartoon lighting and extreme emotions, the top quarter left free, no text, with the base sheets as references.
</art>

<rig>
Cutouts:
- The background is every border-connected pixel with G - max(R,B) over 40 and within 110 of the median green. Key only from the border, or dark clothes leak.
- Add a 2 px soft alpha band and clamp G to max(R,B) + 6 inside it, which kills the green fringe.
- Group the pieces by figure and drop specks. Name every sprite, and show me a named contact sheet.

Armless front figures become puppets:
- Split the head at the neck: the narrowest alpha row under the head.
- Find both shoulder sockets and the eye boxes.
- Inpaint the hole under the head from the body's own colours, so a nod never shows a gap.
- Write everything to rig.js: size, neck, sockets, eye boxes, skin RGB, sleeve RGB.
- Arms: upper L1 about 0.13 of the figure's height, lower L2 about 0.12, thickness about 0.04. Use sleeve colour to the elbow and skin for the forearm, a 0.82x darker sleeve when the arm is behind the body, and round caps and joins.
- Hands: mittens in three shapes (mitt, open, fist), plus a point with one finger out.
- Arm poses: each is a hand target relative to its shoulder, in units of L = L1 + L2, solved by two-bone IK (where there are two signs, the first is the left arm).
  - down: (∓0.04, 0.97)
  - rest: (±0.1, 0.9)
  - hips: (∓0.42, 0.55) with fists
  - point: right hand to (0.86, -0.32)
  - present: right hand to (0.75, 0.25), open
  - shrug: (∓0.62, 0.12), open
  - up: (∓0.32, -0.9)
  - hands on head
  - chin: a fist at the neck
  - hold: (±0.42, 0.45)
  - wave: (0.5, -0.75)
  - stop: (0.55, -0.1)
  - cheer: (∓0.55, -0.75) with fists
  - A pose change blends the two targets over 0.3-0.5 s with ease-in-out.
- Side, back and pose sprites stay whole images. Only the head turns, and a drawing or typing hand jitters ±6 px.
</rig>

<animation>
One HTML canvas where every frame is a pure function of time t: window .seek(t), READY, END, and EV, a list of sound events by name.
- Hang every shot on the narration: S('exact words', fn) starts a shot 0.08 s before that phrase. Repeated words are looked up by occurrence number.
- One function per shot, one shots file per chapter.

Motion primitives (Δ = t - start):
- pop: 0.3 s back-ease overshoot, 1 + 2.9(p-1)^3 + 1.9(p-1)^2.
- spring in: 1 - e^(-6.5Δ) cos(13Δ).
- kick on impact: 1 + 0.1 e^(-10Δ) cos(22Δ).
- shake: x = A e^(-8Δ) sin(61Δ), y = A e^(-8Δ) cos(47Δ).
- Exits shrink with ease-in over 0.25 s. Things arrive with a spring, a squash or a white puff, never a plain fade.

Camera:
- camP(plate, zoom, fx, fy) keeps the view inside the plate's edges.
- Every shot moves from one [zoom, fx, fy] to another with ease-in-out, a 2-4% push or a slow pan, so nothing holds still.
- Draw the plate and everything on it inside the same camera transform.
- Keep zoom under 1.33x on quad tiles. Zoom deeper only on hero plates.

Transitions:
- Push: the old shot slides out left while the new one slides in from the right, 0.24 s ease-in-out, with a whoosh 0.02 s before.
- Chapter splat: a #f4f1fb blob covers the screen in 0.2 s and clears in 0.2 s. It's a 1,250 px circle, 12 big satellite blobs at golden-angle spacing and 10 small droplets further out, shifted 120 px left on the way in and 140 px right on the way out.

Characters, alive in every frame:
- Breathing: scale 1 + 0.009 sin(2.3t).
- Head nod: 0.025 sin(2.1t) rad, or 0.025 sin(7t) + 0.02 sin(11.3t) while that character's line is spoken.
- Blink: every 2.7-4.2 s, seeded per figure. For 0.14 s, paint each eye box over in skin colour with a curved lash line.
- Walk:
  - Bob |sin| at 2.2% of the figure's height, with a body rock of ±0.035 rad.
  - Side-view walk sprites slide 1.5 leg lengths per step cycle, so the feet don't skate.
- Enter on the spring, sometimes with a hop. Fear is a fast shake (sin 70t). Surprise is a jump and an orange "!".
- A soft contact shadow ellipse under every figure. Night shots darken them with brightness(1 - k), so they match the plate.
- Every character on screen acts on its line: points at the thing being named, presents it, shrugs, cheers, holds its head.
</animation>

<graphics>
Text only lives on things in the world, typed letter by letter: 28 letters a second (34 for short tags). Each letter starts 1.45x big and 0.7 em to the right and settles in 0.18 s with ease-out.

The full kit:
- Board: a white rounded board (radius 20) that drops 420 px on the spring and swings 0.25 rad into place, or stands on a wooden post and swings up from -1 rad.
  - Soft drop shadow (blur 22, y 8, 22%) and a faint darker strip along its bottom edge.
  - Lines typed 0.3 s apart.
- Date card: top left at (70, 70), white, 120 px tall, at least 330 px wide, radius 18. An orange calendar icon, a grey "DATE:" at 26 px, the date typed at 44 px weight 900. Pops in over 0.32 s.
- Place card: the same card with a red map pin and "PLACE:".
- Tag: a 6 px line with a dot at the thing, drawn in 0.2 s, then a rounded pill (the text at 40 px weight 900) pops on its end. Ink, red, gold or orange pills.
- Number card: a white card with a small grey label and a big red number. Long numbers roll up like a counter with ease-out.
- Red X: two round 30 px strokes, 0.11 s each, 0.01 s apart, with a soft shadow. One goes over every wrong idea.
- Stamp: red text in a double rounded border, tilted -0.12 rad. It slams from 2.1x to 1x in 0.14 s, then kicks.
- Banner: a full-width headline band, 92 px white caps on tomato or purple, rotated -0.02 rad, sliding in from the left over 0.22 s.
- Speech bubble: white, radius 36, with a tail. Thought cloud: a pill with two small circles.
- Orange "?" that bobs and sways over a puzzled head, and an orange "!" pop.
- White puff and poof clouds, speed lines, light blue sweat drops, coins and bills, a soft vignette, and a colour tint for mood.
- Write on the plate's own blank boards, screens and pages whenever the place has them. Measure the blank's rectangle on a grid overlay of the plate first.
</graphics>

<voice>
- ElevenLabs: a deep, warm US documentary narrator, eleven_v4, stability 0.5, similarity 0.75, style 0, speaker boost, with the timestamps endpoint.
- About 170-180 words a minute, using the voice's own speed setting (1.0-1.1). Never speed it up with atempo: it sounds chipmunked.
- Long scripts go in 3 chunks split at chapter breaks, passing the previous and next text so the read stays continuous.
- Cut pauses over 0.24 s to 0.16 s, leave 0.5 s at chapter breaks, and add a 0.3 s lead-in.
- Rebuild word times from the alignment into words.js.
- Run faster-whisper over the result and diff it against the script before building the picture.
- Free route: Kokoro, then faster-whisper for the word times.
</voice>

<sound>
- Music: 2-3 free documentary beds from Pixabay, crossfaded over 3 s at big beats.
- Duck the music under the voice (30 ms attack, 0.3 s hold, 0.45 s release) and let it swell back up between chapters.
- SFX from Mixkit, one per event, aligned by their peaks, 6 dB quieter on speech: a typewriter tick on typing, a whoosh on pushes and splats, a pop on tags and cards, a thud on stamps, a hit on every red X, a ding on ticks, plus sounds that fit the scene.
- Gate: during speech the voice sits 15+ dB over music plus SFX (median of 100 ms frames), and the background is louder than the voice in under 1% of frames.
- Two-pass loudnorm to -14 LUFS, true peak -1 dB.
</sound>

<build>
1. Tools: Python, Playwright with Chromium or Edge, FFmpeg, faster-whisper, OpenCV, Pillow, numpy. Install what's missing and tell me what you installed.
2. Order:
   - the look test
   - the art in batches, with a contact sheet after each
   - cutouts and rig
   - voice and word times
   - shots, chapter by chapter
3. Check before any full render: a contact sheet per chapter, one frame every 2 s. Fix:
   - empty or overflowing signs
   - text over a face
   - black plate edges
   - feet floating off the floor
   - two shots in a row in the same place
   - any 4 s where nothing new arrives
4. Render at 30 fps, 4 motion-blur subframes over half a frame, frames piped to libx264 CRF 16-18.
   - Split long videos across 4-6 parallel browser pages and join the parts.
   - Scan the result for single-frame jumps and check that each one is a planned cut.
</build>

<gotchas>
- Too few places reads as lazy. One plate held for 30 s with cards over it looks cheap. Budget about 10 new places a minute.
- Some image models ignore "no arms". GPT Image 2 follows it.
- Paste the same character description into every sheet and feed the base sheet back in, or faces and clothes drift.
- Quad tiles are only about 1920 px wide. Pushing past 1.33x looks soft.
- Plates with people already drawn in can't be animated. Ask for EMPTY and check before cutting.
- Text on a card floating over the art looks like a slideshow. Write on the world.
- Long renders crash. Render in parts you can rerun, and back up the shot files before every big patch.
</gotchas>

<start>
Ask me for my topic, my script, my image model and my voice, then make the look test.
</start>