anidoodle

Pictures, loops and films drawn entirely in code. One pure function, renderFrame(film, ctx, frame, env), paints every frame; a second pure function writes every audio sample. A still is that function called once. Nothing downloaded, nothing sampled, nothing random, so the source rebuilds the same pixels on any machine, at any size, for as long as the file exists.

The engine is the easy half. Pieces get thrown away because they had no point, because the subject looked like a road-sign icon of itself, because the style was a palette swap, because the music sounded like a ghost crying, or because the client's patience went on approving fragments. This skill carries the craft that prevents each of those.

What are you making?

Ask for the size, the style (or pick one from references/styles.md and say why) and where it will live, if the request leaves them open. Everything else has a default.

The seven laws

1. Every piece has a point. A still: one idea, one focal subject, one light. A film: one transformation, one payoff, one visual token that returns. → references/storytelling.md 2. State the realism. "A butterfly" gets you the road-sign icon of a butterfly. Name the anatomy, the view, and the reference you opened. → references/realism-and-craft.md 3. A style is a way of making marks. Change the medium, the edge and the order of the marks, beyond the palette. → references/styles.md 4. Prove the look on ONE still, then build end to end. One still buys the look. After that, gates cost more than they save. → references/working-method.md 5. The contract is absolute. Pure in (frame, env), rng(seed) only, no clock, no ctx.filter, no assets. Texture is geometry and seeded tiles. → references/determinism-and-contract.md 6. Music gets a recipe, never an adjective. Major key, plucked, I-IV-V-I, no pads, no drones, no long reverb. You cannot hear your output, so you do not improvise. → references/music-recipe.md 7. One directs, one builds, both write everything down. When a session degrades, reset it; the files are the memory. → references/working-method.md

Workflows

Still. (1) Say the idea in one sentence and name the focal subject and the light. (2) Open real reference for anything that exists, and note which. (3) Pick the style and read its plate's module first. (4) Draw: cast shadow, form, line, paper, in that medium's order. (5) Render with still.mjs at full size, critique it in writing against the craft bar. ✋ One approval. (6) Deliver at every size asked for from the same source, and say reproducible was printed.

Loop. As a still, plus: every motion is periodic over the loop (whole cycles only), the subject never stops, something moves in every second. Check the seam (last frame against frame 0). Export GIF, WebM or APNG per references/formats.md. ✋ One approval, on the moving file.

Film. 1. Write the story in three sentences (setup, transformation, payoff) and name the token. If you cannot, stop. Do not open an editor. 2. Put it on the grid. 120 bpm at 30 fps is a 15-frame beat. Cuts on multiples of 15, events on multiples of 5. ONE cue table per film holds every frame number, and a checker runs at load. 3. Open real reference for anything that exists in the world, and write down which images. 4. ONE look still: the hardest frame, hero subject large, in its world, in the final medium and light. Critique it yourself in writing first. ✋ Approval gate. 5. ONE 8-second music sample from the recipe. ✋ Approval gate. The client listens; you can't. 6. Build the whole film. No per-shot approvals. Mechanical checks run continuously and need nobody: types, grid, contract scan, draw budget, determinism, dead air. 7. Review the whole film once, from the rendered file: contact sheet at one tile per beat, each cut as a before/after pair, the dead-air numbers. One ranked fix list. One rebuild. 8. Verify and deliver. ✋ Final approval. Say what you verified and what you cannot: you cannot hear it and you cannot watch it move.

Three approval gates at most. Approval is a budget; spend it where being wrong is expensive.

The craft bar

The test: would a proud human illustrator ship this, or is it mechanical shape-assembly?

No dead air in anything that moves: something visibly changes in every second, from frame 0. Check it with the tool AND by eye: a creeping camera changes every pixel and satisfies the tool while the eye sees a still.

The engine

engine/ is the portable art core plus the tooling. Nothing in engine/src/canvas-core knows about React, Remotion, the DOM, or any backend; that separation is verified, not asserted.

node <skill>/engine/tools/scaffold.mjs ~/art --still hero --film intro   # either or both
cd ~/art && npm install && npx playwright-core install chromium
node tools/still.mjs hero --out out/hero.png --scale 2   # a picture, with its reproducibility hash
node tools/render.mjs intro                               # the MP4; --out x.gif | x.webm | x.apng for loops
node tools/gate.mjs intro --mp4 out/intro.mp4            # determinism + contract + dead air
node tools/emit.mjs intro --out out/intro.html           # one self-contained offline player

Four backends, one art core: playwright, html-player, remotion, hyperframes. Each is roughly 100 lines and none is visible from the core. → references/backends-and-adapters.md

Worked examples

• The nine style plates in engine/src/canvas-core/ (ranunculus, koi, pocketWatch,

balloon, wren, moonPhases, fox, lighthouse, mellan): one still each, the recipe in the header. banner.ts is an ambient loop; mellanUnspool.ts a still that draws itself.

• MECHANICAL LEPIDOPTERA in example/: 1410 frames, 47 s, a clockwork butterfly that is

drawn, comes alive, and leaves its blueprint in the grass. Spec: example/butterfly-film-spec.md. butterfly/alive/anatomy.ts is realism as code; butterfly/surface.ts is a cache key that names everything its pixels depend on. node <skill>/engine/tools/scaffold.mjs ~/study --example

Study them. Do not copy them. Copying gets you somebody else's picture with your title on it, and the craft bar is not satisfied by inheritance.

Honest limits

You cannot hear the score and you cannot watch the film move. Every claim about either must come from a measurement or from a human. Say which. A green checkmark is a claim, not evidence, until you re-run it: on the worked film the dead-air gate passed while a second of near-stillness sat in the cut, and a cache key that was wrong in one frame order survived every eye that read the code. The machine found that one; no human was ever going to.