# Flora Motion Compositor > Animate assets that already exist. Give it a UI screenshot, a logo, a product photo, a Figma export or a FLORA plate, and it returns real motion-graphics shots — 3D-tilted screens, staggered type reveals, camera moves, drop shadows, grade — rendered deterministically from a JSON scene graph, with type staying pin-sharp because it is real type. Use for SaaS and app launch videos, feature announcements, UI demos, product teasers, title cards, endcards, lower thirds, logo animations, or any shot whose subject is a screenshot rather than an invention. Sibling to flora-launch-video: this makes shots, that one cuts them. Nothing is generated and nothing drifts. Do not use when the subject does not exist yet and has to be invented — that is flora-launch-video. Do not use to change an asset's aspect ratio, which is flora-image-resize, or to place a finished creative into a real-world scene, which is flora-mockup-deck. - Skill: `florafauna-ai/flora-motion-compositor` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 4 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add florafauna-ai/flora-motion-compositor` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/florafauna-ai/flora-motion-compositor/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Design & Media - Author: florafauna-ai (https://skillmd.com/u/florafauna-ai) - Updated: 2026-09-21 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/florafauna-ai/flora-motion-compositor --- # flora-motion-compositor Use dedicated tools for this workflow, including batches. `execute` is deprecated; use it only for an SDK operation without a dedicated tool. SDK examples below describe orchestration: use the corresponding dedicated tools, issue independent calls concurrently, retain every run id, and poll in later calls. Do not choose `execute` just to combine calls. ## What it is Not a generator. **A compositor.** > **Nothing is generated. Every pixel comes from a file or a font.** That one sentence buys everything a generative pipeline has to fight for. Type is real type, so it is pin-sharp at any resolution and always spelled right. The product is the actual product, because it is the actual screenshot. There is no seed to lose, no drift, no re-roll, and **two renders of the same scene are byte-identical** — verified, not assumed. ## When this instead of flora-launch-video One question decides it: **does the subject already exist?** | | this skill | `flora-launch-video` | |---|---|---| | the subject | exists — UI, logo, photo, Figma frame, a FLORA plate | has to be made | | use for | SaaS launch, feature announcement, UI demo, endcard, title | brand film, campaign, fashion, physical product | | type | free and perfect | a fight, worked around with stills and f2v pairs | | drift | none, by construction | real — no seed, no undo | | cost per shot | 0 credits, ~12s of CPU | minutes and credits | | cannot | invent a world | hold a wordmark | **They are not alternatives, they are two halves.** For a software launch most beats are a real screen and belong here; the atmosphere beats belong there. Run both and cut them together. ### They meet at cut.json Every shot this renders is an ordinary mp4 that drops straight into a `flora-launch-video` cut: ``` comp.py scenes/ --all -o shots/ # N scenes -> N mp4s cut.py cut.json --check # the same edit list, mixed sources ``` A generated atmosphere beat and a composited UI beat sit side by side in one timeline. `cut.py` does not care which made which — and re-pacing the whole film is still free. ## Requirements `comp.py` is the only skill in this repo that ships executable code. It needs: ``` python3 + Pillow + numpy hard requirement. numpy missing is a crash, not a warning. ffmpeg resolved in order: $FFMPEG, then PATH, then the copy inside imageio_ffmpeg. None of the three and it exits saying so — `brew install ffmpeg` or `pip3 install imageio-ffmpeg`. Chrome only for `--svg`. Everything else runs without it. ``` **It is macOS-only in two places.** The SVG rasteriser is a hardcoded `/Applications/Google Chrome.app` path, and fonts resolve across the macOS font directories. Both fail with a message rather than silently, and neither is reached by a scene that uses PNG assets and a font that exists. Ported elsewhere, those are the two functions to change. ## The shape ``` STEP 1 assets screenshots at 2x, logos as SVG, plates from FLORA STEP 2 scenes one scene.json per shot -- check at t=0 and t=dur, free -- STEP 3 render comp.py -> one mp4 per shot STEP 4 cut cut.json -> the film ``` Nothing in that costs a credit except a FLORA plate, if you use one. ## Step 1 — assets ``` SCREENSHOTS capture at 2x device pixel ratio, minimum. The tilt magnifies the near edge, and a 1x capture goes soft exactly where the eye lands. LOGOS SVG. `comp.py --svg logo.svg 2048` rasterises it through headless Chrome to a trimmed transparent PNG - macOS ships no SVG rasteriser, but Chrome is one. PLATES a FLORA generation used as a background. This is the one place the two skills overlap inside a single shot: generated ground, composited foreground. FONTS resolved by human name from the system font directories. A missing font falls back to Helvetica and SAYS SO - it never silently swaps a typeface and changes the design. ``` **Never screenshot a screenshot.** Re-capturing a scaled UI puts a second resampling grid over the first and it moirés under the tilt. ## Step 2 — the scene graph One JSON file per shot. Layers, each with keyframed properties: ```json { "id": "hero", "size": [1920,1080], "fps": 30, "dur": 3.0, "bg": {"from": "#0b0b0f", "to": "#191a24"}, "grade": {"vignette": 0.45, "grain": 0.006, "saturation": 0.95}, "camera": [{"prop":"zoom","from":1.0,"to":1.05,"t":[0,3.0],"ease":"inOutSine"}], "layers": [ { "type":"image", "src":"ui.png", "w":1180, "radius":18, "at":[1180,520], "tilt": {"y": -22, "x": 7, "persp": 1900}, "shadow": {"blur": 70, "opacity": 0.55, "dy": 46}, "anim":[ {"prop":"x","from":1330,"to":1180,"t":[0,1.3],"ease":"snap"}, {"prop":"scale","from":0.93,"to":1.0,"t":[0,1.4],"ease":"outExpo"}, {"prop":"tiltY","from":-30,"to":-16,"t":[0,3.0],"ease":"inOutSine"} ] }, { "type":"text", "text":"Ship the launch film, not the deck", "font":"Helvetica","weight":"bold","size":80,"width":470,"track":-2, "at":[150,300],"anchor":"topleft", "reveal":{"mode":"words","stagger":0.055,"t":0.25,"rise":46,"ease":"snap"} } ] } ``` Full field reference: `reference/scene-schema.md`. The move vocabulary and which easing to use: `reference/motion-vocabulary.md`. ### The tilt is the shot `"tilt": {"y": -22, "x": 7, "persp": 1900}` is what stops a UI screenshot looking like a UI screenshot. It is a **real 3D projection** — corners rotated in space and divided through by depth — not a shear, so the near edge genuinely grows and the far edge genuinely shrinks. A shear looks wrong and you cannot say why. Defaults that work: `y` between −25 and −12, `x` between 4 and 10, `persp` 1600–2200. Lower `persp` is a wider lens and a more aggressive convergence. **Animate `tiltY` toward zero across the shot.** Starting at −30 and settling at −16 makes the screen appear to turn to face you. That single keyframe does more than any other line in the file. ### Type is set, not generated Real fonts, real tracking, real leading, wrapped to a `width`. `reveal` staggers the words in on a delay, each with its own rise and easing, so a headline *arrives* rather than appearing. Three things worth knowing: - **Each word composites as its own tile.** Drawing everything onto one canvas and re-alphaing regions double-dims wherever two words overlap — which, on a negatively-tracked headline, is most of them. - **Canvas width comes from where the tiles end**, not from re-measuring the joined string. Re-measuring under-reports once tracking is negative and slices the last word of the longest line — visible on that one word only. - **`anchor: "topleft"` means the top of the type**, not the top of the reserved rise headroom. Otherwise every headline sits low by the rise amount. ## Step 3 — check before you encode ```bash comp.py scene.json --frame 0 # 0.5s. the free check. comp.py scene.json --frame 3.0 comp.py scene.json --strip 6 # 1.0s. six frames across the shot. comp.py scene.json # 12s for a 3s 1080p shot comp.py scenes/ --all -o shots/ # batch ``` **Check t=0 and t=dur, never only the middle.** Measured on the first live scene here: a rule that animates its own width starts at zero, a zero-width rounded rect raises, and the shot rendered perfectly at t=1.4 and t=1.6 while being completely unrenderable. Frame zero is where scenes break. Then `--strip 6` for the eye pass. The strip shows the *arc* — whether the type lands before the plate settles, whether anything is still moving at the end — which no single frame can. Measured on this machine: **single frame 0.5s, six-frame strip 1.0s, full 3s 1080p shot 12s** (~7.5 rendered fps). Re-rendering a whole 12-shot film after a design change is about two minutes and costs nothing. ## Grade `vignette`, `grain`, `saturation`, `brightness`. Keep it restrained — this aesthetic is defined by clean ground and a soft vignette, not by filters. **Grain is seeded on the frame index, never on wall-clock.** That is what makes two renders byte-identical, and it is the reason "re-render is free" stays true rather than quietly becoming "re-render is nearly the same". ## Gotchas ``` RENDERING frame 0 check it. Animated width/height start at zero and a zero-size rounded rect raises. Mid-shot frames hide it. determinism grain RNG is seeded per frame index. Never use wall-clock, never np.random without a seed - it breaks byte-identity. numpy on Apple an (H,W,3)@(3,) float32 matmul emits spurious divide/overflow warnings through Accelerate. Use an explicit weighted sum. Pillow 13 Image.fromarray(arr, "RGB") - the mode argument is deprecated. Pass the array alone. resampling LANCZOS for scaling plates, BICUBIC for the perspective transform. NEAREST anywhere near a screenshot moirés. speed frames pipe to ffmpeg as rawvideo over stdin. Never write PNG sequences - it is several times slower and fills a disk. ASSETS SVG no rsvg, no inkscape, no cairosvg on this machine. Chrome headless is the rasteriser: --svg file.svg 2048. screenshots 2x minimum. The tilt magnifies the near edge. fonts resolved by name across /System/Library/Fonts{,/Supplemental}, /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts. A miss falls back to Helvetica and prints a warning - read the output. ffmpeg not on PATH here. comp.py falls back to the static build inside imageio_ffmpeg automatically. LAYOUT white on white type over a light screenshot vanishes. It is not clipping - it is the same colour. Narrow the wrap width, or put the plate where the type is not. anchors center (default) / left / right / top / bottom / topleft / topright / bottomleft / bottomright. Only topleft-family anchors compensate for a text block's rise headroom. ``` ## Where it lands ``` /Deliverables/-launch/ assets/ the screenshots, logos, plates. the inputs. scenes/ one scene.json per shot. THE SOURCE OF TRUTH. shots/ the rendered mp4s cut.json the edit list (flora-launch-video) <Title>.mp4 the film ``` **`scenes/` is the deliverable, not `shots/`.** A shot is a build artefact; the scene is what a revision edits. Keep both, and keep `assets/` — a scene without its assets is not re-renderable. Never leave output in a scratch directory or `~/Downloads`. Say the full path in the final message. ## The client surface `client-task` applies if someone will open this without you, with one difference worth stating: **this skill has no prompts to hide.** There is no model to route around and nothing to phrase carefully — a scene is numbers and text. The thing to teach is that changing a headline means editing one string in one file, and that re-rendering costs nothing but a minute. ## Failure atlas | symptom | cause | fix | |---|---|---| | crash on encode, fine on `--frame 1.5` | an animated width starts at 0 | already guarded; always check t=0 | | a word missing from the headline | white type over a white screenshot | narrow `width`, or move the plate | | the last word of one line is sliced | canvas measured from the joined string | already fixed — width comes from tile extents | | headline sits low | `anchor` not a topleft-family value | `"anchor": "topleft"` | | the screen looks like a sticker | shear instead of projection, or no shadow | use `tilt`, add `shadow` | | the screen looks flat and dead | `tiltY` is static | animate it toward zero across the shot | | soft, crawling UI detail | 1x screenshot, or a screenshot of a screenshot | recapture at 2x from source | | two renders differ | an unseeded RNG crept in | grain seeds on frame index only | | a typeface changed | font not found, fell back | read the warning; install it or name it exactly | | type reads as "arriving twice" | reveal stagger too long for the shot | stagger ≤ 0.07s; the whole reveal under 0.8s | ## Reporting back The strip, the shot list with durations, and the render time. Name which shots are composited and which are generated if the film mixes both — a reviewer should know which frames can be re-typed for free and which cannot.