Video recipes

The genres below come from studying hundreds of shared code-made videos and the prompts behind them. The viral ones sit on short prompts and a strong renderer; the reproducible ones come from structured briefs. Each recipe gives you the structure, the look, the hard technical part, its gotchas, the stills to check, an example brief, and a demo page that passes helios verify.

All of them are one window.renderAt(t) page under the make-video contract.

Pick a recipe

Genre	The viewer experiences	Length	Recipe
Scale dive	One continuous zoom through 5–7 nested levels, from a room to an atom or a street to a galaxy	20–45 s	scale-dive
Process / recipe	An empty glass, plate or box becomes the finished thing, step by step, with live measurements	20–60 s	process-recipe
Era timeline	Centuries pass in a drawn medium; a year counter rolls; one motif changes per era	30–90 s	era-timeline
Mechanism / proof	A machine or diagram whose every motion is one logical step, ending in the general statement	30–90 s	mechanism-proof
Kinetic type	A short text where words become objects, paced to the phrase, with real stillness	15–25 s, loop	kinetic-type
UI morph loop	One shape never cuts: it becomes a button, a loader, a player, a slider, a chart, and back	14–20 s, loop	ui-morph-loop
Pixel sprite	A pixel-art character loop or scene, on a fixed palette at integer scale	4–20 s, loop	pixel-sprite

Other genres already have Helios skills:

• Lyric and karaoke music videos: music-video.
• Character cartoons: cartoon-short.
• Promo, explainer, product demo, testimonial, launch and social clip: the other guided skills.
• Animated charts: visualize-data.

Shorter than the table says? Keep the beat proportions and cut content, not reading time: fewer levels or steps (a 10 s scale dive is 3 levels, not 6 rushed ones), and every text hold still at letters / 15 + 1.5 s.

A recipe says what happens; it doesn't say what it looks like. Design the look from the user's subject and the seed. The "best styles" named in each recipe point to the opt-in motion-styles library: use one only if the user asks for it or accepts your one-line offer.

Workflow

1. Seed. Draw a random seed before deciding anything creative. If an apply-randomness skill is available, use it; otherwise run LC_ALL=C tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9' < /dev/urandom | head -c 256; echo. Find a few verifiable patterns in it (digit runs, repeats, letter clusters) and let them choose between three concept directions you write, and between options for the central visual rule, the hero object and the look. Keep the seed and a one-line pattern → choice map in the brief.
2. Brief. Fill in the brief template: inputs (asked once, with defaults), concept with one central visual rule and one hero object, locked copy, look, motion, a banned list, structure, build rules, gates. If the user gave one line, write the brief yourself and make the calls.
3. Structure. A storyboard or a beat map with timestamps, using the recipe's beat proportions. With music, run helios analyze first and put structure on its downbeats.
4. Read the demo for its technique, not its composition. The demo shows how the hard part is built (the log zoom, the volume function, the summed springs). Your subject, look, structure and ending come from the brief.
5. Stills gate. Before the full render, render the recipe's named stills and a strip over the hardest 2–4 seconds. Each still should work as a poster.

   npx -y @helios-project/cli@latest still video.html --at 0.4,6.2,13.8,19.5
   npx -y @helios-project/cli@latest sheet video.html --strip 12.8:14.6 --fps 30
   npx -y @helios-project/cli@latest verify video.html --duration 20
   

6. Render and check.

   npx -y @helios-project/cli@latest render video.html -o video.mp4 --duration 20 --preset medium
   npx -y @helios-project/cli@latest check video.mp4
   

   A page that draws everything on one <canvas> (all the demos do) renders faster with --mode canvas; keep the default dom mode when text or elements sit outside the canvas.
7. Self-score and revise on the seven axes in brief.md. Fix the lowest first. If you can, have a fresh reviewer (a second agent) look at a contact sheet every 0.2–0.5 s and return ranked, timestamped problems.

Rules that apply to every recipe

• Every scene is made from the previous one. Morph, carry, flood or match-cut; don't slideshow.
• Facts come from a facts list. Numbers, dates and claims are real or clearly invented. A mechanism computes its answer by its own motion.
• Reading time. Text holds for at least letters / 15 + 1.5 seconds; text being read doesn't move decoratively.
• Frame 1 is a finished picture, and the last frame either holds a composed end card for about a second or equals frame 1 for a loop.
• Works muted. The story reads with the sound off.

techniques.md covers the failure modes that recur across genres: summed springs, two-edge springs, floods and irises, handoffs between scenes, text inside morphing containers, loop seams, preserve-3d flattening, motion blur that keeps counters sharp, footage as image sequences, glass and goo, baked simulations, and automatic checks for pops and frozen stretches.

Credits

Genres, directives and gotchas were distilled from three public collections of code-made videos and their prompts: awesome-opus5-5-videos (MIT list; prompts belong to their creators), awesome-claude-5-5-videos (CC BY 4.0 writing and analysis) and opus-video-prompts. Everything here is written in our own words; no prompt text is reproduced. See THIRD_PARTY.md.