Stage 1 — Import: the design in as layers

Motion design animates elements, so the import's whole job is to bring the design in as layers, not flat frames. A frame delivered as one sealed PNG can only ever cross-dissolve; a frame delivered as its layers — panels, headline, buttons, the image, the list — is a thing whose elements can slide, scroll, type on, parallax and smart-animate. Everything downstream is gated on this: if the layers are lost here, no amount of tuning later can recover the ad; it stays a slideshow.

Pull the layer tree, per frame

Before reading Figma, post the one-line progress message the animate-design skill describes ("Reading your layers…").

With the Figma connector present, read structure before pixels: get_metadata / get_design_context to walk each frame's node tree, then export each animatable node as its own asset. For every layer capture: