Agent skill

Paper Collage Explainer skill

Make paper-collage explainer videos (halftone cut-outs with red marker strokes, data drawn on paper, a camera that never stops, object transitions) in Remotion with the SceneSkills Paper Collage Explainer kit.

The paper-collage explainer look: flat paper with a faint grid, black-and-white halftone cut-outs with an offset red marker stroke that rise from behind foreground objects, a vector top-down map, typewriter text, stamps, counters, and a virtual camera whose transitions are made from objects (a ship wipes the frame, a newspaper drops in, a wave of sand). Built for "how one thing broke the world" stories. Demo: One Ship (44.7 s, 16:9). Built with Remotion (React).

What the skill teaches your agent about the style:

Paper world: off-white paper, faint grid, soft shadows under every cut-out. Only three colours: black/grey halftone, paper, and a red accent (plus one orange progress bar).

Cut-outs: every person or object is a background-removed photo turned to halftone with an offset red marker outline. They rise, drop or slide in on spoken words and float a little.

Camera: never still: keyframed position, zoom and roll, handheld drift, punch-ins on key words, decaying shakes on hits, a motion-blur window on fast moves. A "freeze" beat stops all camera life for effect.

Data on paper: rulers, scale comparisons (a tower falling to true scale), queues piling up, counters, stamps.

Transitions are objects: a giant object wipes the frame, the camera zooms into an object and lands in the next scene, a page flies at the camera, a sand wave or dust storm hands over.

Type: heavy condensed headlines, typewriter body lines with the key word in red.

1. 1

   Plan the film

   Script + scene table (line, scene, transition into it). Show it.

2. 2

   Make the images

   Plain photos or AI images of each subject (any style: prep.py makes them halftone). Put them in raw/ and run python3 prep.py.

3. 3

   Voice and timing

   Voice -> voice_prep.py; put the line timings into the film's timing constants (frame = seconds x 30).

4. 4

   Build in the style

   Copy src/film.tsx scenes; reuse Cam, Cutout, Typewriter, Counter, Stamp. Draw maps and diagrams as vectors.

5. 5

   Check stills

   Stills: node stills.mjs out "0,90,180,..." 0.5 then python3 sheet.py sheet.jpg out.

6. 6

   Render

   Render: npx remotion render src/index.ts <Composition> out/video.mp4 --muted --concurrency=2.