motion-assets

An animation is only as good as what is in it. Three shapes and a font is a template no matter how well it is eased.

The rule that governs this whole skill: nothing enters the edit at the color, scale, or texture it arrived in. Every asset gets conformed. An un-conformed stock asset is the fastest way to make a frame read as assembled rather than designed.

1. Sample the palette before sourcing anything

Do this first. Every later decision depends on it.

1. Pull 3–5 stills from the A-roll (ffmpeg -ss <t> -i in.mp4 -frames:v 1 out.png).
2. Find the strongest non-skin, non-neutral hue — practical light, wall wash, jacket, product, set dressing.
3. That hue is the accent. Build ground / surface / accent from it per motion-design.
4. Write 04-design/tokens.css and palette.json. Everything downstream reads these files.

If there is no footage (pure motion piece), take the palette from the brand kit, or from the single strongest reference image — still sampled, never invented.

2. Collect references before generating anything

References are the highest-leverage input in the entire pipeline. Two or three images beat any amount of prose.

Ask the user for them. If they have none, go and find them: search the look by name ("Apple-style product animation", "editorial data documentary", "retro terminal UI"), pull frames from videos whose look matches, screenshot competitor sites.

Save each into 03-assets/refs/ named for what it teaches:

refs/
  glass-transparency.png      ← how transparent the panels should be
  type-pairing.png            ← the display/body relationship
  grain-and-vignette.png      ← the texture treatment
  camera-move.mp4             ← the pacing of the push

Naming them this way matters: at design time you attach the one that answers the current question, instead of dumping five images and hoping.

When a generated result is wrong, attach a reference and say what specifically differs. "Make it nicer" produces drift. "The glass in ref-1 is more transparent and has a visible edge highlight; match that" produces a fix.

3. Source the concrete assets

Per shot, the assets[] list in plan.json must resolve to real files. Categories and where they come from — full link catalogue in Appendix A.

Generating stills that do not look generated

• Attach a style reference and keep the prompt short. A long prompt with no reference produces the model's average taste; a short prompt with a strong reference produces yours.
• Generate the whole set from one anchor image rather than prompting each independently — independent prompts are why palettes drift between shots.
• For any subject that recurs, build a reference sheet (multiple angles from one identity) and generate from that.
• Upscale before compositing, not after.
• Check every generated image for text. Garbled type is the single most recognizable artifact. Crop it out, cover it with real type, or regenerate.

Generating b-roll that does not look generated

• Prefer one longer continuous shot over chaining short clips. Chained first-frame/last-frame joins produce a visible stutter at every seam.
• If you must chain, use the true last frame as the next first frame, then delete one duplicated frame at the seam.
• Match the camera language of your real footage — if the A-roll is locked off, do not hand back a drifting orbit.
• Keep generated clips short and cutaway-sized. The longer a generated shot holds, the more the viewer inspects it.

4. Conform — the pass nobody does

Every asset, without exception, before it enters a scene:

• Re-grade into the palette. Hue-shift, duotone, or overlay-tint stock and generated images toward tokens.css. A stock photo at its original color temperature is visible from across the room.
• Match black level and contrast to the plate.
• Add the same grain/texture the rest of the edit carries.
• Normalize scale — icons on one optical size, logos on one clear-space rule.
• Cut out the background where it should sit in the scene (u2net / hyperframes remove-background / Runway), then give it a contact shadow.
• Clean the edges — no white halo from a bad key, no JPEG mush on a logo.
• 3D: render with the scene's light direction, matching the shadow direction used everywhere else.
• Audio: normalize, trim the head, and duck under dialogue.

Log the conform in NOTES.md for anything non-obvious, so a re-render reproduces it.

5. Store it so the next agent can find it

03-assets/
  brand/     logo.svg, fonts/, brand.json (hexes, clear-space, don'ts)
  refs/      named-for-what-they-teach.png
  gen/       image.png + prompt.txt beside it (model, seed, style ref)
  3d/        model.glb + renders/
  lottie/    name.json
  sfx/       impact-01.wav

prompt.txt beside every generated file is not optional. Without it you cannot regenerate a matching variant three weeks later, and the whole set drifts.

6. Licensing

Before anything reaches a client deliverable, confirm: fonts licensed for video, music licensed for the platform and territory, stock licensed for commercial use, 3D model license permits redistribution in a render, and no real person's likeness is generated without permission. Record it in NOTES.md. This is a client-facing risk, not a technicality.

When assets are the actual problem

If a frame is well designed and well animated and still looks generated, it is almost always one of these:

1. Flat solid background — no gradient, no texture, no depth layer.
2. Icons from a different family than the type.
3. A stock or generated image left at its original color.
4. A logo the model drew instead of the real SVG.
5. Every asset centered at the same scale on a symmetric grid.

Fix the assets before touching the animation.

Appendix A · Asset source catalogue

Verify pricing and licensing at the source — both change. Links are canonical homepages; anything marked ~ is a search target rather than a URL to trust blindly.

3D models and scenes

Multi-view trick: a single front image produces a wrong back. Generate 90°/180° turns of the subject first, then feed the model 3–4 views. This is the difference between a usable asset and one you can only shoot from one angle.

Textures, HDRIs, backgrounds

• Poly Haven — https://polyhaven.com (CC0 HDRIs + PBR)
• ambientCG — https://ambientcg.com (CC0 materials)
• Unsplash / Pexels — https://unsplash.com , https://pexels.com (free photos; still re-grade them)

Vector animation

• LottieFiles — https://lottiefiles.com (browse), https://app.lottiefiles.com (editor)
• Remotion Lottie support: npx remotion lottie / @remotion/lottie
• HyperFrames: the lottie adapter skill covers deterministic seeking

Lotties are tiny, resolution-independent, and re-colorable — recolor them to tokens.css rather than using them as shipped.

Icons and fonts

Use one icon family per project, matched to the type weight. For real company logos use the company's own brand kit — never a model's redraw.

AI images

AI video

Always prefer one long take over stitched clips. Every stitch is a visible hitch.

Audio

Data and web capture

Utilities

Consistent subjects: train a LoRA

When a face, product, or style must be identical across dozens of shots, reference images are not enough — they drift the moment the angle or lighting changes. Train a small LoRA instead.

Shape of the job:

1. Collect 15–35 varied, high-quality images of the subject (angles, lighting, distances). Quality and variety beat count.
2. Pick a rare trigger word — never a common word like face or style, or the model will fire on ordinary prompts. Use something like mkxr_person.
3. Train against a base model (Flux, SDXL, Qwen-Image and similar). Roughly 1000 steps for a subject is a normal starting point.
4. Train on rented GPU (fal.ai, Replicate) rather than locally unless you have the hardware — minutes and a couple of dollars versus hours.
5. Output is a .safetensors file. Drop it in ComfyUI's models/loras/, load it in the workflow, set strength ~0.8–1.0, and include the trigger word in the prompt.

Where it pays off: thumbnails with your own face, a client's product across a campaign, one illustration style across a series, a recurring character in a short-form series.