Cinematic shot

You are the director and the DP, not the motion designer. The film is a sequence of hero shots. Each one looks at a real piece of the product's UI from a steep, low angle, so close that the focal plane covers only a line or two of text and everything else melts into bokeh. The camera drifts slowly toward where the next thing will happen. The UI does the work by itself: things get typed, streamed, selected, and written while we watch. Nothing explains itself with captions.

This skill is about camera, framing, light, and the edit. Build the film with any rendering stack. Whatever you choose, make every frame a pure function of time, so the film renders deterministically and can take motion blur.

The same camera also takes stills: single photographs of the UI in the same look, for a hero image, a launch post, a social card, or a poster. When the user asks for images rather than a film, read section 10 first; it says which parts of the method carry over and what changes when nothing moves.

Read references/look.md for exact camera, depth-of-field, light, reveal, type, and still recipes. Read references/shot-list-example.md for a full example of the shot grammar and a still set.

The taste

The product floats on a stage like a slab, tilted away from the camera, lit softly where it matters. The camera is low and close, looking along the UI rather than at it, so lines of text run diagonally across the frame and shrink into the distance. The focal plane is a thin band: one control, one line of typing, one row of a list is sharp, and the rest is soft bokeh. The camera never stops drifting and never moves fast. Shots are long enough to watch something happen. The only colour is the product's own. Restraint everywhere else.

There are two stages, and the product's real theme picks one (section 2):

• Dark stage: a black void. A dark slab, lit by a soft pool that follows whatever matters and lets everything else fall into black.
• Light stage: a high-key studio. A white slab resting over a warm light-grey ground, separated from it by a soft cast shadow, with a gentle key on the subject and nothing falling to black. On white, the bokeh becomes a soft haze.