---
name: launch-video
description: Make a showreel-grade motion-graphics launch video, with music, that introduces a CLI, library, or product from its repo. Use when asked for a launch, promo, sizzle, or showreel video, an animated intro for a project, or a video to post on X/social.
---

# Launch Video

The bar is a **showreel**: the piece a motion designer puts on their résumé to
prove how good they are — dynamic, ambitious, scored to music, a real
professional production and never a demo or prototype. Go all out. The repo
supplies the story; the craft is yours. Nothing here is a template: if the
piece could be re-skinned for any other project, it has failed.

## Workflow

1. **Find the story.** Read the README, docs, benchmarks, and brand art. Done
   when you can state, each with a source: what it is in one line, how it works
   underneath (the audience is technical), and the proof worth landing. Flag
   any claim the repo cannot back instead of inventing its meaning.
2. **Direct before you build.** Choose one visual concept grown from what the
   project *is* (its metaphors, its brand art, its mechanism): a world with its
   own look, camera, and signature move, rather than a sequence of panels. Write
   it as a shot list on a music timeline. Done when every shot names its camera
   move and the one moment in it a motion designer would be proud of. A shot
   whose description is "a card/panel/list appears" gets redesigned.
3. **Build picture and score from one timing source.** Every event time lives
   in one place that both the scenes and the soundtrack read, so hits land on
   hits. Synthesizing the music in code keeps that lock exact.
4. **Review as a director.** Render a draft, tile each shot into contact
   sheets, and get a fresh-eyes critique from a subagent that has not seen your
   plan. Then ask each shot the showreel question. Fix and re-render until
   every shot passes, not a sample.
5. **Ship.** Make the thumbnail (rules below), render the master (1080p60,
   high-quality H.264, 320k AAC), reveal it in Finder, and commit the project
   to the repo as a standalone package, with renders and generated audio
   ignored and a short README covering commands, the timing principle, and the
   claims disclosure to preserve.

## The showreel question

Would a motion designer put this shot on their reel? Tells that it has slid
into explainer or demo:

- **Animated slide deck.** A static layout where elements slide in and hold.
  A reel's camera is always going somewhere, and its composition keeps
  changing.
- **Reading, not watching.** Paragraphs, UI cards, and body copy. A reel speaks
  in few-word hits at dramatic scale, and the visuals carry the mechanism.
- **One trick.** Every element springs in the same way. A reel shows range:
  depth and parallax, scale contrast, match cuts and transitions that carry an
  element into the next shot, speed ramps, lighting and color shifts, particles
  and physics, typography that moves as design.
- **Flat.** Everything sits on one plane at one scale, with no foreground,
  background, or light.
- **Deaf.** Motion ignores the music, or the music sits under the picture
  instead of driving it.
- **Prototype 3D.** Untextured primitives under flat light with no lens: it
  reads as a tech demo. If the piece goes 3D, finish it like a game
  cinematic: physically based materials with surface detail and bevels that
  catch light, reflections and soft shadows, emissives that bloom, and a lens
  (ambient occlusion, depth of field, grain, aberration on impacts).

## Rules

- **Rebuild, never screenshot.** Break any UI down into parts that can move.
- **Judge effects in a rendered frame, never the live preview.** Frame-by-frame
  renderers (Remotion's manual advance, for one) can silently drop a post
  stack or a canvas layer that looks fine live.
- **Claims stay exact.** Restate measured results with their disclosure (sample
  size, exclusions, tradeoffs) in small type; never round or generalize past
  the source.
- **You cannot listen.** Verify the mix by measurement (integrated loudness
  around −11 to −14 LUFS, and a spectrogram showing risers and impacts at their
  cue times), and say in the handoff that the audio was checked by measurement,
  not by ear.
- **Thumbnail.** Feeds (X) pick an early frame and skip a one-frame poster, so
  hold the preview for ~0.3s of pre-roll, then move it into the opening (shift
  the music by the same amount). Match the pre-roll background to the opening
  so playback doesn't flash. The best preview is the product doing its job
  (name, tagline, a completed command and its output); the headline number
  gets its payoff shot and a separate key-art still.