painted-animation
Painted animation
A method for making short cartoons entirely in code, distilled from JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo (a 156 s music video painted by Claude Opus) and its generalised kit ClaudeAnimationBase (MIT), which is bundled here as template/.
How it works: every frame is a pure function of time t. studio.html loads p5.js + p5.brush and your scene files; each shot paints the whole 1920×1080 frame with watercolour fills and boiling ink lines. render.mjs drives headless Chrome to render contact sheets for review, or every frame in parallel, and ffmpeg encodes the MP4 (with audio if given).
Workflow
0. Scaffold
bash ~/.claude/skills/painted-animation/scripts/new_project.sh <project-dir> # add --keep-demo to keep the example scene hooked up
This copies the template, unhooks the demo scene, runs npm install and checks node / ffmpeg / Chrome. Then read <project-dir>/ANIMATION_GUIDE.md in full before designing anything: it holds the rules, the animation principles and the complete engine / Clawd API. Look at docs/emotions.jpg and docs/views.jpg (the model sheets) with the Read tool.
For a music video or anything longer than ~20 s, also read references/music-video.md. For a lyric video, ask for the song file and an LRC first, and measure the tempo with scripts/beat_grid.py: lines are usually faster than you'd guess.