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Novoads Pixar Ad

One product in. A 30 to 60 second stylized 3D animated ad out, cut from four to six separately rendered beats, with narration, music and captions.

Every animated ask lands here, including the short ones. There is no one-call 15-second tier in this repo. A request for "a quick animated ad" is a request for a four-beat board rendered beat by beat and assembled locally: longer to make, more calls, more credits, and it needs ffmpeg. Say that in one clause before you start, then start. If the story genuinely fits in a single shot, make it a four-beat board with short beats rather than pretending there is a cheaper door.

The beat formulas live in references/formulas.md. That file is the craft: the four genre roles, the variable tables, and a worked still prompt and a worked clip prompt for each. This file is the pipeline. Read the formulas before you write the board, because the board is where the roles are assigned and it is the last cheap place to get them wrong.

Every HTTP mechanic here belongs to the pack, not to this skill. Auth, strict bodies, status codes, the poll loop, rate limits and error envelopes are written out once in skills/novoads-api/SKILL.md and its reference.md. Read those for mechanics; this file names the endpoint and the fields that matter to a beat.

Before anything: this runs on a Novoads account

1. A Novoads account with credits. https://novoads.ai. There is no free tier and no trial: every plan is a paid monthly subscription, published at novoads.ai/pricing. Never call it free.
2. An API key in .env at the repo root, as NOVOADS_API_KEY=novo_…. Check it with ./scripts/check-novoads-env.sh; if it is missing, run ./scripts/setup.sh. That is the whole setup: curl and jq, one key, no connector to add and no session to restart.
3. ffmpeg on your machine. This is the one hard local dependency: the assembly happens here, not on the server. ffmpeg -version before you start.

REST key required. A Novoads MCP connector is not a substitute. If NOVOADS_API_KEY is missing or still the placeholder, stop before any generation work and tell the user: "Before continuing, create an API key at https://novoads.ai/dashboard/settings?tab=api and paste it into .env." That holds even when mcp__novoads__* tools are connected and authenticated in the session. Never call mcp__novoads__* tools from this repo's workflows: they are a different surface with different behavior, including the units they quote costs in. Repo installs verify with ./scripts/check-novoads-env.sh; a solo install checks NOVOADS_API_KEY in the environment.

Pack version. Every /v1 response carries X-Novoads-Pack-Version; mention a newer pack at https://github.com/novoads/agent-skills only when that header names a version NEWER than this file's metadata.packVersion — equal or older is nothing to say, and it is never a reason to stop.

A 401 is a bad or revoked key. A 403 carrying error.details.reason of plan_required or subscription_inactive is a good key on an account with no live subscription. Say which one it is rather than "auth failed".

What one run costs

There is no rate table here, on purpose. Every credit number this run shows a user comes from POST /v1/estimates, in this session, before anything is charged: a price written into a skill file goes on being quoted long after it has moved.

What Gate 2 prices, for a five-beat board: 1 cast sheet image · 1 still per beat · 1 clip per beat · 1 voice-over line per VO beat · 1 music bed · 1 transcript of the master · 1 caption pass. Four calls cover all of it, because the arms repeat — price each KIND once (image, video, voiceover, music), multiply by those counts, and quote what came back. The one shape worth holding is an ordering rather than a number: the clips are most of the bill, and a still is a small fraction of the clip it seeds. That is the whole economic argument for the still gate, and for never re-rendering a beat you have not first tried to fix in its still.

Hard constraints

• Four to six beats. Fewer than four and there is no arc to assemble; more than six and the seams outnumber the story. A 15-second ask is four short beats, not one long call.
• Each beat is its own POST /v1/videos call from its own start frame. Never ask one call for multiple scenes.
• 4 to 15 seconds per beat, and in practice 4 to 6. A beat is one action.
• 9:16 unless the operator says otherwise.
• audioEnabled: true on every beat. The clip's own audio is the SFX bed and the in-scene voices; there is no SFX endpoint and none is needed.
• A narrator line goes in the PROMPT or in the VO track. Never both. Getting this wrong is silent: Seedance renders any NARRATOR: "…" line in the prompt into the clip's own audio, so laying a POST /v1/voiceovers take of the same words on top plays every line twice. Measured — a raw beat clip transcribed on its own came back saying the narrator's line, and the finished mix said it twice. Decide per beat:
  • Narration from the VO track (the default here, because it is the only way to get ONE voice across five separate renders): the prompt carries in-scene dialogue only, or states that the shot has no speech. Keep audioEnabled: true for ambience.
  • Narration native to the clip: put NARRATOR: "…" in the prompt and generate NO voice-over for that beat. Its voice will not match the others.
• At least one beat must be SYNC. The rule above is a warning against doubling a line, and it is easy to over-obey: make every beat a VO beat and the ad becomes a slideshow with a voice talking over it. Measured — T12 shipped three beats, all VO, no character ever spoke, and it lost to the reference ad on exactly that. The genre's opening move is a problem character saying its own complaint out loud, and it only lands when the voice comes out of the face.
• The product appears in its own beats and on the end card. Nowhere else. A product held in every shot reads as a catalogue. Roles B and D show it; the hook and the mechanism scene do not. See references/formulas.md.
• One continuous voice. Pick the narrator voice ONCE, from GET /v1/voices, and use that same voiceId for every line. A voice that changes between beats reads as a different ad — which is also why native per-beat narration does not work across a storyboard: each render casts its own.
• There is no styleFamily field. It was deleted from the whole API, and the /v1 request bodies are strict, so sending it is a 400 Unrecognized key. Nothing on the generation path refuses a prompt on style grounds any more; the only prompt refusal left is content moderation.

The gates run in order. Do not skip to the render.

Gate 0 — is this product right for this style?

Stylized 3D animation is good at exactly one thing, and it is not explaining features.

What it can do: interiority (large expressive eyes playing a private state — shame, worry, relief); anthropomorphised objects that hold intent without a face; warm aspirational realism that reads premium rather than novelty; caricatured physics (squash, stretch, anticipation).

What it is bad at: technical explanation, spec comparison, cutaway logic, and any pitch whose core is a number.

The filter. All four must pass:

• Is the pain emotional or relational rather than technical? A styled character can act "I can't read to my grandson." It cannot act "the field of view is 110 degrees."
• Is the pain visible on a face (or on a mechanism, under Doctrine D)?
• Is there a relationship? Two characters beat one. The strongest ads here are about someone else, not about the buyer alone.
• Is it impulse-priced? Warm animation converts at 15 dollars. At 900 it creates trust dissonance.

If the product fails, say so plainly and name what would suit it instead. Do not build a charming ad for a product that needs a demo.

One addition at this length: an arc needs a turn. If the product read produces one feeling and one feature, say so — the honest answer is four short beats and a tight script, not a padded 60 seconds.

Gate 1 — product read, then summarise in under 200 words

A product photo alone is not a sufficient input. Price, specs, rating, rating count and buyer language are what this gate asks for, and a photograph carries none of them. If you have only an image, ask once for a URL or the listing text and say why in one clause. That is the single question this skill opens with, and it costs nothing. If the operator says there is no listing, proceed on the photo and state plainly that price and reviews were unavailable rather than implying they were checked.

Source from the product URL or listing text, with the photo as corroboration. Then state:

1. Verified facts: name, price, key specs, rating and rating count. Quote only what the source says.
2. Buyer language: recurring phrases from real reviews, in the buyer's words.
3. Who actually buys. Reviews often reveal the purchaser is not the user — an adult child buying for a parent, a spouse for a partner. If so, put the product into the purchaser's hand on screen. This is usually worth more than any feature beat.
4. What you will NOT claim, and why. Check negative reviews and the fine print. If reviews contradict durability, the ad does not say "built to last."
5. Anything unbuyable. No buy box, out of stock, region-locked, or a newer model at the same price. A perfect ad pointed at a dead listing converts at zero.

Gate 2 — price the whole board, then announce it

Price each KIND once and multiply. POST /v1/estimates is discriminated on kind and takes one at a time, so four calls describe the whole run:

E=https://api.novoads.ai/v1/estimates
H="Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY"
J='Content-Type: application/json'

curl -sS -X POST $E -H "$H" -H "$J" \
  -d '{"kind":"image","model":"gpt-image-2","prompt":"<a beat still prompt>"}'
curl -sS -X POST $E -H "$H" -H "$J" \
  -d '{"kind":"video","model":"seedance-2.0","durationSeconds":5,"prompt":"<a beat prompt>"}'
curl -sS -X POST $E -H "$H" -H "$J" \
  -d '{"kind":"voiceover","script":"<the longest VO line>"}'
curl -sS -X POST $E -H "$H" -H "$J" \
  -d '{"kind":"music"}'

Each arm is strict and takes only what moves the price. The music arm takes kind and nothing else — sending it a prompt is a 400. The video arm never sees aspectRatio, startImageAssetId, referenceAssetIds or audioEnabled, and rejects all four. Send the model you will actually render, or you are pricing a different ad.

Then announce in one line and proceed:

Cast sheet + 5 stills + 5 clips + 5 VO lines + music + captions ≈ <the total the estimates returned> credits (balance: <what they reported>). Starting.

This is an announcement, not a question. Two cases change it:

• sufficient: false on any kind — stop. Name what is short and give the topUpUrl. That is a blocker.
• The balance covers the run and no retry. Say so in one clause before firing: "this covers one pass, not a re-render." At this length a re-render is a beat, not the whole ad — which is worth saying too, because it is the good news: a bad beat is one still and one clip to redo, not the whole board.

The warnings array is advice. POST /v1/estimates is the only call that lints a prompt — POST /v1/videos and POST /v1/images return no such field — and it lints against the UGC talking-head rules; nothing here refuses anything. A prompt written the way this file says comes back clean; a warning usually means you drifted, not that the lint is confused.

Two clauses are what make it come back clean, and both are in the style lock and the worked prompt for this reason. Measured on a beat prompt without them: the VOICE STYLE casting line answers missing_actor_descriptor (the rule looks for an age or gender token anywhere in the prompt), and the labelHold clause answers label_without_hold, which fires on the word "bottle" alone. Drop either and the same beat comes back with a warning that is telling you the truth.

The one warning to ignore: missing_actor_descriptor on a beat with no human in it. The lint reads prompts as talking-head UGC, where a shot without an age or gender token gets a randomly cast person. A role-A beat is a hair clump with eyes, or a blob of congestion, and it has no age and no gender to state. The rule is answering a question the beat does not ask. This is the only lint output this skill tells you to overrule, and only on a beat whose subject is genuinely not a person — a beat that merely FORGOT to describe its human is the case the rule exists for, and it looks identical from here. Check which one you wrote.

Product treatment — pick one and say why

Doctrine C: in-world product, real hero card. The default. The product is recreated exactly in design but rendered in the animated look, so the character can physically use it. The real photograph appears only in the final beat as a hero card, outside the styled world. Recognition comes from design fidelity, not from material.

Always include the lock line, and name specific identifying details — a rivet, a hinge, a lens shape. Generic descriptions produce generic props.

The product is exactly as shown in the reference: same shape, same colour, same proportions, same finish. Do not redesign or restyle it.

Doctrine D: product as character. Available only when the product's real articulation is expressive — a pan-tilt head, a hinged lid, a swivelling arm. The product performs using only movements the real product makes. No eyes, no mouth, no eyebrows, no limbs, no hopping. Head angle and existing mechanisms only.

That constraint is the whole point: every expressive beat doubles as a real feature demo. State the negatives explicitly, because the model will happily bolt on eyes and turn the product into a mascot.

A real product, always. Use the actual brand and the actual packaging from the photo. Never invent a brand, and never blank-label the product to avoid the question.

The board

Before a single call, write the board. It is the artifact the operator approves, and it is cheaper to argue with than any render.

Cast sheet — one image, referenced by every still

POST /v1/images on gpt-image-2, aspectRatio: "1:1", the product photo in referenceAssetIds. On one canvas: the lead in three emotional states readable in the eyes, any secondary character, the product in 2 to 3 views, and a scale line-up at true relative size. The call usually answers with the board; one still going after about 105 seconds answers status: "running" with no images (API 2.39.0): poll GET /v1/generations/{jobId} to a terminal status and read images[] there, never resubmit, because a resubmit is a second charge.

This single image is what makes five separately-rendered beats look like one film. Every beat still references it. Skipping it is the most expensive shortcut available here — five beats with five differently-imagined characters is not an ad, and no amount of prompt discipline recovers it afterwards.

Write the cast sheet TEXT first, from the template in references/formulas.md, and render the image from it. The template has the slots that matter — including the terse tag, the 11 to 30 character wardrobe-anchored phrase repeated verbatim in every later beat. Our renders re-cast on every cut, so "the same woman" names nobody; one measured run came back with three visibly different women across five beats.

If the ad has a mascot scene, the cast sheet carries the mascots too: one canvas with the lead, the problem character and the mascot trio settles all three designs for the price of one image.

Style lock — one paragraph, pasted verbatim into every prompt

Write it once. Location palette, one named practical light source, lens and camera height, the finish of the world. Paste it into every still prompt and every beat prompt, unchanged, character for character. Rewording it between beats is how the grade drifts.

Never name a studio or a franchise. Write "stylized 3D animated feature film look." The trademark risk is higher for this aesthetic than for any other, because it belongs to specific studios and the models will hand you near-copies of their characters if invited.

This is the genre default. Change the palette and the light source to the product's world; keep the structure and the render vocabulary.

<!-- eval:style-lock:start -->

Stylized 3D animated feature film look. Soft volumetric golden-hour lighting from
a large window, warm cosy palette of cream, butter yellow, dusty pink and soft
sage. Subsurface scattering on skin, painterly background, shallow depth of field
with creamy bokeh. Characters have large expressive eyes with multiple specular
catchlights, stylized but believable proportions, smooth simplified hands, soft
hair strands with subsurface glow. Rich material detail: waffle-knit fabric
weave, ceramic glaze, glass refraction. Slightly desaturated colour grade.
Every character reads mid-emotion, caught a moment before a smile or a sigh,
never blank-staring. Vertical 9:16 composition.

<!-- eval:style-lock:end -->

The mid-emotion line is the genre's oldest craft rule and the easiest to lose. A character rendered at rest reads as a mannequin however good the lighting is; the whole look depends on faces caught between expressions. It sits in the style lock rather than in prose because that is the block that actually reaches every prompt.

And the negative block, pasted at the end of every prompt, still and clip alike:

<!-- eval:negative-block:start -->

no live-action footage, no photorealistic humans, no uncanny faces, no dead eyes,
no anime style, no 2D cel-shaded look, no flat illustration,
no named or copyrighted animated film characters, no harsh fluorescent lighting,
no extra fingers, no melted features, no morphing between frames,
no warped product labels, no on-screen text, no subtitles, no captions

<!-- eval:negative-block:end -->

no named or copyrighted animated film characters is the IP line and it is not optional. no on-screen text, no subtitles, no captions is what stops the render inventing its own captions, which it does unprompted and which then collide with the ones burned on in Gate 8.

VOICE STYLE block — required in every prompt that carries a voice

Cast the narrator as concretely as the style lock casts the look: age, gender, register, pace, and what it must NOT sound like.

The NARRATOR is a warm, low, unhurried woman in her forties, close and confessional, the tone of someone telling you something true rather than selling. Never bright, never announcer-like. The IN-SCENE voices are ordinary and unperformed.

Always include the negative no upbeat announcer voice. Models drift toward radio-ad delivery, and that single drift kills the emotional register. On a beat whose narration comes from the VO track rather than from the render, this block describes the in-scene voices only — the narrator is cast once, at Gate 5.

Beat board — the table you get approved

Two things are decided here: what happens (the skeleton) and how the genre says to shoot it (the role). The roles are in references/formulas.md; this is where they are assigned.

#	Beat	Genre role	Seconds	Track	Visual
1	Hook — the want, stated out loud	A. anthropomorphized problem	5	SYNC	…
2	Problem — the attempt fails	A. second problem character, or the human low	5	VO	…
3	Low point — the private defeat	B. protagonist reveal	4	SYNC	…
4	Turn — the product arrives and is used	C. mascot mechanism	6	VO	…
5	Payoff — warmth, then the hero card	D. CTA and end card	5	VO closes	…

That mapping is the default, not the only one. Role A can hold two beats as a montage; role B can take the SYNC beat as a first-person testimonial. What does not move: role A opens and role D closes, and at least one of them is SYNC.

Rules for the board:

1. One action per beat. Two actions in one prompt is the single most reliable way to get glitched physics. Splitting them is what a storyboard is FOR.
2. Give each beat its own setup. Five beats in one location at one shot size reads as boring no matter how clean the arc is. Change location at least once; vary shot size (medium → close → wide). Measured against the reference ad this skill was rebuilt to match: its beats each had their own world — a macro problem shot, a lit interior, a stylized interior cross-section, a card — and T12's three all shared one. That is the difference a viewer names first.
3. The low point is the shortest beat and the most important one. Everything rides on that face.
4. Word budget is per beat, not per ad. Two spoken lines per 5-second beat is the ceiling: at the measured 2.0 words/sec that is ~10 words a beat, so five beats make a 45–50 word script for 25s (60 needs 30s). Count before you write.
5. VO and SYNC never overlap in the same beat. Write the SYNC lines first; fit the narration into beats that have none. And keep the narrator's words out of the prompt for any beat you are giving a VO line — see the hard constraint above. The board's Track column is what records that decision per beat.
6. The two tracks own different things. VO owns the problem, the mechanism, the offer and the brand: that track carries the selling. SYNC owns proof that the feeling is real. Never give SYNC the offer. Sign-off under 6 words (~3s at the measured rate — read it against its gap), hero card at least 2 seconds.
7. Prefer escalating specifics over comparisons. "Four times. Four and a half. Five. All the way to six" argues the same point as "most stop at three" without asserting a competitor fact you cannot verify.
8. No em dashes in ad copy. Never say free: every Novoads plan is paid.

Gate 3 — stills first, all of them, then STOP

Render every beat still BEFORE any clip. Sequentially, each referencing the cast sheet and the previous still:

POST /v1/uploads (product photo) → PUT the bytes with the returned `headers` VERBATIM
      │
      ▼
POST /v1/images  cast sheet   1:1   ref [product]
      │  ← images[].assetId (a `running` answer: poll it first). Pass it straight to the next call.
      ▼
POST /v1/images  beat 1       9:16  ref [castSheet, product]
POST /v1/images  beat 2       9:16  ref [castSheet, beat1]
POST /v1/images  beat 3       9:16  ref [castSheet, beat2]        ← sequential,
POST /v1/images  beat 4       9:16  ref [castSheet, beat3]          each on the
POST /v1/images  beat 5       9:16  ref [castSheet, beat4]          one before
      │  ← each one's assetId feeds the next, no upload in between
      ▼
╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  BOARD GATE — show all six images in order. Wait for the operator.    ║
║  Six images spent, every clip still unspent — and the clips are       ║
║  most of the run. A wrong character, a wrong palette or a wrong       ║
║  location caught here is the cheapest fix this pipeline has.          ║
╚═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

One still call in full. Every other call in this file is the same shape:

curl -sS -X POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/images \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"gpt-image-2","prompt":"<style lock + beat 1 + negatives>",
       "aspectRatio":"9:16","referenceAssetIds":["<castSheet>","<product>"]}'

POST /v1/images usually answers with the finished image. One still going after about 105 seconds answers status: "running" with no images (API 2.39.0): poll GET /v1/generations/{jobId} to a terminal status (succeeded, failed, blocked, canceled) and read images[] there, never resubmit. Otherwise the finished image is in the response, and the call blocks for 60 to 90 seconds while it renders. Write each image to disk as you read the response — on a numImages > 1 call only the first image is recoverable afterwards, and the rest exist nowhere but that response body.

A generated image IS an assetId — chain it directly. The response carries images[].assetId alongside images[].url, and that id is what referenceAssetIds, startImageAssetId and sourceAssetId take. No download, no re-upload, nothing in between:

POST /v1/images → images[0].assetId  ← pass this to the next call, as-is

Chain from assetId, not from url. The URL is a one-hour presign for fetching the bytes; the assetId does not expire that way. Still download each still as it lands if you want the files locally — a slow board review will outlive the URLs.

Chain each still on the previous one, not just on the cast sheet. That is what carries the location, the light and the wardrobe forward. gpt-image-2 takes up to 4 reference images, so cast sheet plus previous still plus the product leaves room for one more; use it for the product when the product is in frame. That cap is per model and the bodies are strict, so a fifth reference is 400 Too big rather than a silently dropped image.

This gate is one stop, not five. Do not ask after each still. A board is approved as a board — the operator is judging whether beat 3 follows beat 2, which they cannot do one image at a time.

Gate 4 — the clips, in waves of five

curl -sS -X POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/videos \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"seedance-2.0","prompt":"<beat N>","durationSeconds":5,
       "aspectRatio":"9:16","startImageAssetId":"<beat N still>","audioEnabled":true}'

Returns 202 with jobId, status, creditsCharged and model.

Submit in waves of at most five. Five video generations may be in flight per organization; a sixth comes back 429 with error.details.reason of concurrency_limit, which is a real refusal and not a queue. Five beats is exactly one wave. Six beats is one wave of five, then one. The stills are not part of that budget — images have their own ceiling of 12 — but they are chained sequentially anyway, so it never comes up.

Write every jobId down the moment it comes back, before you start waiting — id, which beat, and creditsCharged from this 202. The charge is on the submit response and nowhere else; the poll payload does not carry it, so a line written without it can never be completed. A job whose id you recorded is a lookup when something goes wrong. A job whose id you did not is an investigation.

Poll GET /v1/generations/{jobId} every 15 seconds, until TERMINAL. succeeded, failed, blocked and canceled are all terminal; a loop that waits only for succeeded spins forever on a render that is already dead. Not every 3 seconds: five jobs on a 3-second interval spends the whole per-key rate budget on polling. queued means charged and submitted but not yet rendering, which is normal and not a stall. Expect 3 to 8 minutes per Seedance beat.

Download the finished clip through GET /v1/generations/{jobId}/watch, which 302s to a URL signed at request time, so it never hands you an expired link:

mkdir -p outputs/<ad-name>
curl -sSL -o outputs/<ad-name>/beat1.mp4 \
  https://api.novoads.ai/v1/generations/$JOB_ID/watch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY"

The mkdir -p is not boilerplate: outputs/ is gitignored and absent in a fresh clone, and curl's failure on a missing directory reads like a broken download of a render that already succeeded and was already billed.

If a call times out, do NOT generate again. The work usually completed and was charged; what timed out was the response carrying its id. Call GET /v1/generations?limit=10&kind=video, find the job by createdAt and its prompt, and take it from there. There are no idempotency keys, so a blind retry renders and charges a second time.

Per-clip QA, before you spend a voice-over on it

Check each clip as it lands. A beat that fails here is one still and one clip to redo; a beat that fails after the mix has cost the mix too.

1. The character is the same character as the cast sheet.
2. The action in the prompt is the action on screen, and it is ONE action.
3. Nothing grew eyes, limbs or a mouth that the design does not have.
4. The product's identifying details survived, and any printed label is legible.
5. The clip's own audio is usable — ambience and in-scene voices, not a music bed competing with the narration you are about to lay over it.

The repair depends on the failure, and the two repairs are opposites. A beat that did two things, smeared its action or glitched its physics gets a SHORTER prompt: fewer clauses, one action, the actor named in it. A beat that grew a sixth finger, melted a feature or drifted a label gets ONE added negative naming that artefact exactly. Getting it backwards is why a beat gets re-rolled three times. The table in references/formulas.md has both cases.

Gate 5 — the voice-over

One line per beat that needs narration. Pick the voice once:

# read the catalog once and filter in your own code — do not print it
curl -sS https://api.novoads.ai/v1/voices -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" \
  | jq -r '.voices[] | select(.source=="platform") | "\(.id)  \(.name)"'

curl -sS -X POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/voiceovers \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"script":"<beat 2 VO line>","voiceId":"<the one>"}'

This call returns the finished mp3, not a job. 200, with url, assetId, characters and creditsCharged in the response. There is nothing to poll — download the url immediately, because it is time-limited and minted per response. If a call times out, do NOT retry it: the audio was probably rendered and charged, and GET /v1/generations will show it with its cost.

voiceId is required and has no default — a default would be a performance you are charged for without having heard it. GET /v1/voices returns the platform voices plus your own organization's clones; an id belonging to another organization is a 404.

Write the lines to the gaps, not to the beats. A beat with a SYNC line has no room for narration. Read each line aloud against the beat's length before generating it: 13 characters per second of speech — so a 5-second beat holds ~65 characters, and the hard 1,000-character ceiling is ~75 seconds, refused with a 400 before anything is charged. (Measured 13.2 = the 2.0 words/sec rate written out: 29 words/188 chars over a 14.2s span, 2026-08-11, one render, spaces counted. This read 15/sec yet called 1,000 chars 40s, implying 25.)

The script is read VERBATIM, including anything in square brackets — the model interprets those as performance tags rather than skipping them. Keep stage directions out.

Language, if the ad is not in English: pass language and pick a voice whose languages include it. A mismatch is refused before anything is charged, which is the good outcome; picking a voice that does not speak the language and getting a charged take in the wrong accent is the bad one. Voices with no recorded languages — typically your own clones — accept any value.

Voice-overs have their own concurrency budget of 10, counted separately from the five video slots, so a batch of lines can never refuse a render. A 429 here carries details.reason: voiceover_concurrency_limit and clears in seconds.

Gate 6 — the music bed

curl -sS -X POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/music \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"prompt":"<what it sits under>","instrumental":true}'
# → 202 { jobId } — poll GET /v1/generations/{jobId}, then read audio[]

Generating the bed is this gate. LAYING it is the LAST thing that happens, and never as hand-written ffmpeg — it goes through music-mix after Gate 8's burn, because the script stream-copies the picture and the burn's own transcription of the voice should never have music under it:

python3 shared/skills/music-mix/scripts/music_mix.py \
  captioned.mp4 music.mp3 master-lofi-warm.mp4

Read that skill first. What it does that a hand-written chain did not: it measures the bed rather than multiplying it — volume=0.10 is -20 dB on a level nobody checked, measured on a real run at -33 to -40 dB, a bed paid for and never heard — refuses a silent track or an inaudible gain before rendering, ducks under the voice, masters, and verifies. Report its verification line verbatim.

One request returns TWO takes for one charge. Listen to both and use the one that sits better under the voice; they differ in length and arrangement, not price. Two takes is also what makes 2 or 3 named variants free — another music_mix.py pass each, no second generation. Expect one to two minutes of audio whatever you ask for; the script trims it. audio[] on the polled job is the only place the second take is published.

prompt is capped at 500 characters, and the cap applies to the composed prompt: style and the instrumental sentence are concatenated into it before submission. A music job spends one of the five shared video slots.

If /v1/music is absent from GET /v1/openapi.json, skip this step. It sits behind a deployment flag; where music is off the path answers 400 invalid_input rather than a 404, and the music estimate arm is gone too. Say one sentence — "no music bed on this account, mixing without one" — and carry on. The ad works without it; clip audio plus narration is a complete mix. No bed means no script pass either, so master the captioned cut by hand, to the target the mixer uses:

ffmpeg -i captioned.mp4 -af loudnorm=I=-14:TP=-1.5:LRA=11 -c:v copy master.mp4
ffmpeg -i master.mp4 -af ebur128=framelog=quiet -f null -    # read Integrated

Gate 7 — local assembly

This is where the seams either disappear or announce themselves.

Do the assembly in outputs/<ad-name>/, not in the directory you started in. The downloaded beats, beats.txt, the trimmed clips, the placed VO lines and the master are one run's working set — a dozen of them loose in a repo root is a diff somebody else has to explain. Make the directory before the first download and stay in it; every path below is relative to it.

Trim to the narration, not to the clip

For each beat: the clip is as long as you asked for, and the line inside it is whatever length it is. Trim the clip to the voice-over plus 0.5 seconds, not the other way round. Dead air at the end of a beat is the single most common tell that an ad was assembled rather than shot.

# VO duration, to two decimals
ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of csv=p=0 beat2-vo.mp3
# trim the clip to it, +0.5s of air
ffmpeg -i beat2.mp4 -t <vo+0.5> -c:v libx264 -c:a aac beat2-trimmed.mp4

Trimming is the default, not the only option. A beat with no narration keeps its own length; otherwise measure both and pick per beat. A, most beats: the VO is shorter, so re-encode the clip to vo + 0.5s — 0.25s of lead, 0.25s of tail, and anything past that is dead air. B, when the visual needs its full length for a long camera move, the mascot mechanism or a CTA hold: extend the VO instead, a word or two or a second short line, re-rendered and re-measured.

If the VO is LONGER than the clip, never speed it up. No atempo. Split the line across two beats, or re-render the beat at a longer duration. A voice at 1.1x is audible as a voice at 1.1x, and it costs the ad its calm.

Re-check the caption's vertical position after trimming. The frame at the new cut is not the frame that was there before, so a caption band that sat over clean floor can land on a face or a label. This is why captions are burned AFTER the trim and the mix, never before: the timings and the safe area both move.

Concatenate, then build ONE voice track

The picture and the voice are assembled here. The bed is not — Gate 6 says why.

FMT="aformat=sample_rates=48000:channel_layouts=stereo"   # one shape for all

# 1. concat the trimmed beats
printf "file '%s'\n" beat*-trimmed.mp4 > beats.txt
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i beats.txt -c copy stitched.mp4

# 2. place each VO line at its beat's start. adelay is MILLISECONDS and takes one
#    delay PER CHANNEL: `adelay=5000|5000` on a MONO take delays the single
#    channel it has and drops the second value. `all=1` delays whatever it finds.
ffmpeg -i beat2-vo.mp3 -af "adelay=5000:all=1,$FMT" vo2-placed.wav

# 3. the beats' own audio, placed the same way, split by track type
ffmpeg -i beat1-sync.mp4 -vn -af "adelay=0:all=1,$FMT" sync1.wav
ffmpeg -i beat2-vo.mp4   -vn -af "volume=0.28,adelay=5000:all=1,$FMT" amb2.wav

# 4. one voice track. duration=longest, NEVER `first` — `first` ends the mix when
#    input 0 ends: measured, the audio stopped 2.4s before the picture and the
#    hero card played silent. normalize=0 stops amix dividing by the input count.
ffmpeg -i vo2-placed.wav -i sync1.wav -i amb2.wav -filter_complex \
  "[0:a][1:a][2:a]amix=inputs=3:duration=longest:normalize=0:dropout_transition=0[a]" \
  -map "[a]" voice.wav

# 5. the voice onto the picture. Read its duration back against stitched.mp4.
ffmpeg -i stitched.mp4 -i voice.wav -map 0:v -map 1:a -c:v copy -c:a aac voiced.mp4

The clip track is TWO different things and one level cannot serve both. On a VO beat the clip audio is ambience and belongs at about 28%, which is what step 3 does to it. On a SYNC beat the clip audio IS the dialogue and belongs at 100%, because attenuating it is attenuating the only line in the shot. Measured, and the reason this is a rule: a run mixed at a flat 28% buried its SYNC beat so far down that an independent judge measured the line at -36 dB, under a caption spelling out words the viewer could not hear. That is worse than no line.

If the narration is fighting something, lower the AMBIENCE track before you raise the voice. Never lower a SYNC beat's own track to make room. The order from here is fixed: end card → concat → voice mix → transcribe → captions (Gate 8) → the bed, laid by music_mix.py.

If you hear a line twice, the mix is not the problem. That beat's prompt carried the narrator's words and Seedance rendered them, and no level will fix it — re-render the beat with the narration removed from the prompt. The transcribe-verify step below is what catches this, and it is why that step is not optional.

The end card is composited, never rendered

The last beat ends on the real product photograph, dropped over the render. Do not ask the model to draw the card: asking it to draw a card is asking it to regenerate a wordmark from scratch, and it will get it wrong. Measured on this family of runs — Novoads.ai came back as Novads.ai in every frame with the label-hold clause present and the key frame spelled correctly, and Owala came back as ovola. The model carries a MARK, which is a shape, and destroys TYPE.

# 1. find the cut to the card (expect a dissolve, not the hard cut you asked for)
ffmpeg -i beat5-trimmed.mp4 -vf "select='gt(scene,0.3)',showinfo" -f null - 2>&1 | grep pts_time
# 2. measure the product's bounding box in BOTH the rendered card and the real
#    photo, then scale and position the real one to match. Matching by eye jumps.
# 3. fade the real card in on the render's own dissolve curve, at full opacity
#    BEFORE the wordmark becomes legible, or the misspelling ghosts through.
#    `-loop 1` is an INFINITE input and overlay runs to its LONGEST one, so
#    without `shortest=1` and `-shortest` this repeats the last frame forever:
#    measured, a 155 MB end card on a 5-second beat.
ffmpeg -i beat5-trimmed.mp4 -loop 1 -i endcard.png -filter_complex \
  "[1:v]scale=<w>:-1,format=rgba,fade=t=in:st=<t0>:d=0.4:alpha=1[card];\
   [0:v][card]overlay=<x>:<y>:shortest=1:enable='gte(t,<t0>)'" \
  -shortest -c:a copy beat5-carded.mp4
# 4. card BEFORE the concat, and add this to beats.txt: that glob wants -trimmed

Match the card's background to the render before you composite it. A retail photo shot on near-white dropped onto a warm cream field leaves a visible rectangle seam, and the seam is the first thing a viewer sees on the last frame. Sample the render's own background colour and pad the card to it, or key the photo's white out entirely.

Do not let the card be a frozen frame in silence. Hold the beat's own room tone under it and let the music resolve rather than cut. A warm animated film that ends on a still, silent packshot ends on the worst-made object in the ad.

Then read the wordmark at full crop. Pull the frame, crop the label, look at it at full size. A contact sheet at thumbnail size is too small to catch a single missing letter, which is exactly how the first one shipped.

And review the CLIPS at full size, not on the contact sheet. Measured on a run that used this file: a payoff beat rendered TWO cots and TWO babies, and it survived a contact-sheet review because at thumbnail width the second cot reads as furniture. The contact sheet is for judging whether beat 3 follows beat 2. It is not for judging whether beat 3 is correct.

Verify what it actually says, before it ships

Doctrine: shared/references/craft.md § 1. The call below is this surface's; the rule is not this skill's.

The render can gain or lose a word, and a script that survived in your head is not evidence. Upload the master and transcribe it, then read it back against the script:

curl -sS -X POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/transcripts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"assetId":"<the uploaded master>"}' | jq -r '.text'

POST /v1/transcripts is synchronous and charged — the words are in the response, billed per minute of source with a one-minute minimum, so an ad this length bills the minimum. It returns text, words[] with per-word timings in seconds, segments[] and an srt. Transcribing the same source twice is free, so a retry after a timeout is not a second charge. It sits behind the TRANSCRIPT_API flag: where it is off the path answers 400 naming what the deployment does render, and you transcribe locally instead.

Read the transcript against the board. A dropped word in the offer line is worth a re-render of that beat.

Gate 8 — captions

Captions are burned SERVER-side, and the source has to be an asset the API can reach. A local file is not a caption source until it is uploaded.

# 1. mint a presigned PUT for the master
curl -sS -X POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/uploads \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"contentType":"video/mp4","sizeBytes":<n>}'
# → { assetId, uploadUrl, method, headers } — then PUT the bytes to uploadUrl,
#   sending `headers` VERBATIM. Content-Type and Content-Length are signed into
#   the URL, so an omitted or library-inferred Content-Type is a 403, not an
#   upload.

# 2. burn
curl -sS -X POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVOADS_API_KEY" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"assetId":"<the master>","preset":"<a style>"}'
# → 202 { jobId } — poll GET /v1/generations/{jobId}

GET /v1/caption-presets lists the styles with their tier and rate, and an ad this length bills the one-minute minimum on either tier. Read the list rather than trusting the names below — presets are added, and the rate is the list's to state, not this file's.

Two things worth knowing before you iterate: re-captioning the same video in the same preset is free and idempotent, and the second call returns the first job's id — but a different preset is a new job and a new charge. And a source rendered with audioEnabled: false comes back 409, because there is no speech to transcribe.

Which preset, and why it is not a free choice

The genre's caption look is a specific thing: heavy sans-serif, white fill, a thick dark outline, roughly 7% of frame height, sitting in the lower third but clear of the platform UI, changing per phrase rather than per word. That is what a hand-burned caption track was built to produce, and it is what to match when picking from the list.

You want	Reach for	Note
The default heavy-outline social look	a basic-tier preset such as hustle, slay or flex	Fixed styling, which is the point: it will not surprise you
Per-phrase emphasis, a punchline that pops	a dynamic-tier preset such as glide or fusion	Context-aware animation, worth it on a hook beat. Read its rate off the list
A quiet, typographic register	simple, plain or lowkey	Basic tier. Right when the ad is doing the work and the captions should not

Two things the preset cannot do for you, and both are yours:

• Placement against the frame. The preset picks a band; your role D still is what leaves the lower third clean for it. Ask for the negative space in the still prompt, not in the caption call.
• The words. Presets style a transcript; they do not correct one. See the gate below.

Burning locally is the fallback, not the default. Take it when the transcript keeps mangling a name you cannot move to the card, or when a brand's caption styling is contractual. shared/skills/caption-video/SKILL.md is that path: free, any style you can write, and you own the timing, the font licence and the safe area. At this length that is five phrases of timing to get right by hand, which is why it is the fallback.

╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  CAPTION GATE — BLOCKING. Read every caption against the script.      ║
║  A garbled brand name is a FAILED RUN, not a note in the report.      ║
╚═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

Captions are TRANSCRIBED, not taken from your script, so they inherit every mishearing the transcript does — and brand names are what they mishear. Measured on real runs: a voice-over saying "Owala FreeSip" was captioned "Olaf. Free sip water"; "bottles" came back "bootles"; and a run whose own transcript read NoseFrida 1499 shipped captions reading "Nos Frida 1499." — the brand split in half and the price read as a number nobody says out loud.

The check is the burned frames, not the transcript you already have. The captions endpoint returns a new MP4 and nothing else: no caption text, no SRT, and GET /v1/generations/{jobId} on a caption job carries neither. A clean transcript of the audio is not evidence the burn is clean, because the burn ran its own transcription. So you look at the video.

That class of defect blocks the ship. Do not deliver a master with it and mention it in the notes; that is what happened to T12 and the caption was the first thing a viewer read. Compare the burned captions word by word against the board's script. If a brand name, a product name or a number is wrong in even one frame, the run is not finished.

Three fixes, in order of preference:

1. Keep the brand name out of the NARRATION entirely and put it on screen as the composited end card, which is where a wordmark belongs anyway. This is the only fix that removes the failure mode rather than catching it.
2. Keep numbers out of the narration too. A price spoken aloud is a price the transcript writes as digits. Put it on the card.
3. Burn the captions locally from your own script, where you own every character. The server pass is the cheap default, not the safe one.

Output format

Deliver in this order, no preamble:

1. PRODUCT READ — verified facts, buyer language, who actually buys, what you will not claim, anything unbuyable.
2. FIT — one line confirming Gate 0, or a plain refusal naming a better format.
3. ANGLE — the enemy this ad attacks.
4. DOCTRINE — C or D, and why.
5. CAST + STYLE LOCK — the cast sheet text, including the terse tag, and the paragraph that will be pasted into every prompt.
6. BEAT BOARD — the table, with the genre role assigned per beat. Word count per beat against the two-line ceiling. At least one SYNC beat.
7. COST — the POST /v1/estimates figures, announced in one line.
8. Then generate: cast sheet, all stills, stop at the board gate, clips, VO, music, composite the end card, assemble the voice mix, verify, caption, lay the bed with music_mix.py, and read the captions against the script before calling it finished.

The calls

The fields that matter to a beat. Auth, strict-body rules, status codes and error envelopes are in skills/novoads-api/reference.md.

POST /v1/uploads      { contentType: "image/jpeg" | "video/mp4", sizeBytes: <n> }
                      → 201 { assetId, uploadUrl, method, headers } — PUT the
                        bytes with `headers` VERBATIM. Free. The upload URL
                        expires in 900s; the assetId does not expire at all.

POST /v1/estimates    { kind: "image" | "video" | "voiceover" | "music" | "caption", … }
                      → { credits, balance, sufficient, shortBy?, topUpUrl?,
                          warnings? }   Strict per arm. `warnings` is advice and
                        refuses nothing; this is the ONLY endpoint that returns it.

POST /v1/images       { model: "gpt-image-2", prompt, aspectRatio: "1:1" | "9:16",
                        referenceAssetIds: [castSheet, previousStill, product?] }
                      → 200 { jobId, images: [{ url, expiresInSeconds, assetId }] }
                        the finished image is in the response (or `running`: poll the job), and
                        the call blocks ~60-90s. `assetId` chains straight into
                        the next call. Max 4 references on gpt-image-2. Its own
                        concurrency budget of 12.

POST /v1/videos       { model: "seedance-2.0", prompt, durationSeconds: 4-15,
                        aspectRatio: "9:16", startImageAssetId: <this beat's still>,
                        audioEnabled: true }
                      → 202 { jobId, status, creditsCharged, model } — not ready
                        yet. `creditsCharged` is HERE and nowhere else.

GET  /v1/voices       → { voices: [{ id, name, source, languages?, category?, labels? }] }
                        Read once. Pick one. Reuse it for every line. Unpaginated
                        and LARGE — filter it in your own code, do not print it.

POST /v1/voiceovers   { script: <=1000 chars, voiceId (REQUIRED), language? }
                      → 200 { url, assetId, characters, creditsCharged, voiceId }
                        ALREADY DONE — no jobId to poll. Download `url` now.

POST /v1/music        { prompt: <=500 chars, instrumental: true }
                      → 202 { jobId } — poll, then read audio[] (two takes, one
                        charge). Flag-gated: absent from openapi.json when off.

POST /v1/captions     { assetId | jobId, preset }
                      → 202 { jobId } — poll. Same video + same preset is free.

GET  /v1/caption-presets → { presets: [{ id, tier, credits }] }

POST /v1/transcripts  { assetId | jobId }
                      → 200 { text, words[], segments[], srt, creditsCharged }
                        SYNCHRONOUS and charged. Timings in SECONDS. The same
                        source twice is free. Flag-gated.

GET  /v1/generations/{jobId}        → { status, kind, outputUrl?, audio? }
GET  /v1/generations/{jobId}/watch  → 302 to a freshly signed download URL
GET  /v1/generations?limit=&kind=   → the recovery path when a call times out and
                        you never received the jobId. Reads only, spends nothing.

Worked beat prompt

A finished beat 4 (the turn) POST /v1/videos prompt — one action, style lock included, negatives at the end. lib/generation/__tests__/pixar-storyboard-skill-prompts.test.ts reads this exact block and runs it through the same rule engine POST /v1/estimates lints with, so the worked example cannot drift into one the lint has real complaints about.

<!-- eval:beat-prompt:start -->

Stylized 3D animated feature film look, 9:16. A warm kitchen in late afternoon,
one window low and to the left as the only light source, honey and clay palette,
35mm at chest height, shallow focus band on the counter.

The grandmother sits at the table with the copper kettle in front of her. She
lifts the lid in a single frame and the steam catches the window light across her
face. She says, half to herself: "There you are."

No other speech in this shot. This beat's narration is laid in afterwards from
the voice-over track, so nobody here speaks it.

The kettle is exactly as shown in the reference: same shape, same colour, same
proportions, same finish. Do not redesign or restyle it. Hold the printed markings
on the base sharp and legible. The woman is a warm, unhurried grandmother in her
seventies in a grey cardigan.

no named or copyrighted animated film characters, no photorealistic humans, no
uncanny faces, no dead eyes

<!-- eval:beat-prompt:end -->

IP rules

The trademark risk here is higher than for any material-based style, because this aesthetic belongs to specific studios and the models will hand you near-copies of their characters.

• Never name a studio or a franchise in a prompt. Write "stylized 3D animated feature film look."
• Never depict named or recognisable characters. Original designs only.
• Do not reproduce a studio's mascot or signature motifs, even by allusion.
• The negative block above carries the four negatives that enforce this, and it is pasted into every prompt, still and clip alike.

Failure modes

• The prompt is rejected. Only content moderation can refuse a render, and it answers 422. There is no rule-id rejection any more, so a refusal is not a wording problem to lint your way out of — read what it says. Nothing is charged.
• 429 with details.reason: concurrency_limit on the sixth clip. Not an error in your request: five video generations are already in flight. Wait for one, then submit. This is why the waves are five. Branch on details.reason — image_concurrency_limit, voiceover_concurrency_limit, caption_concurrency_limit and transcript_concurrency_limit are four separate budgets, and none of them means "stop rendering".
• A 403 carrying Cloudflare's error code: 1010. Not your key. The edge refuses Python's stdlib urllib User-Agent outright, and the body is an edge page rather than the API's {"error":{…}} envelope. Use curl. Do not regenerate the key or tell the user their plan lapsed.
• The character changed between beats. The cast sheet was not referenced, or a still was chained on the cast sheet alone rather than on the previous still. Re-render the stills, not the clips.
• The grade drifted across beats. The style lock was reworded. Paste it verbatim and re-render the affected stills.
• Two props in one clause glitch physics. "Swallows capsules with water" rendered capsules on the counter and an empty palm. Split into sequential single-action sentences, name the actor in each, and add explicit negatives.
• A stray reference became a shot. Every reference passed to a render is a shot the model may spend time on; an unneeded product still produced a 0.13s flash insert. Pass only what the beat needs.
• The render gained or lost a word. Measured: "And wake up, we're rested" for a scripted "And wake up rested". Transcribe before shipping; never assume the script survived.
• The wordmark on the rendered product is garbled. Expected, and the labelHold clause does not fully fix it — measured on a run carrying the canonical clause verbatim that still rendered "Owala" as "ovola". The model carries a MARK (a shape) and destroys TYPE. Do not re-roll hoping for a clean one: keep the label small and out of focus in the beats, and composite the real product photo over the final beat, which is what Doctrine C does and why.
• The product grew eyes under Doctrine D. State the negatives explicitly and re-render. If it happens twice, switch to Doctrine C.
• The captions renamed the product. They are transcribed from the audio, not from your script. Blocking, not a note. See Gate 8.
• Every beat is a VO beat and the ad feels flat. The doubling rule was over-obeyed. At least one beat must be SYNC, and role A is the one that wants it: a problem character speaking its own complaint is the genre's opening move.
• The beats all look like the same shot. No role was assigned, so every beat became a setup shot. Each beat gets its own world and its own shot size, and the roles in references/formulas.md are what produce that variety for free.
• The product is in every frame. It belongs in roles B and D and on the end card. In the hook and the mechanism scene it is a distraction from the only thing carrying the ad, which is a face.
• Dead air between beats. The clips were not trimmed to their narration. Go back to Gate 7.
• A caption for a line nobody can hear. The SYNC beat's own audio was mixed at the ambience level. Its track goes at 100%, not 28%. See Gate 7.
• The music bed cannot be heard at all, or the whole ad plays quiet. The bed was laid by hand: a multiplier instead of a measurement, and no mastering pass. Lay it with music_mix.py, which refuses an inaudible bed before it renders and masters and verifies afterwards.
• The audio ends before the picture. amix=duration=first. Use longest.
• The render duplicated a prop or a character. Measured: one cot and one baby came back as two. Name the count in the prompt ("exactly one cot, exactly one baby") and negate the clone, and review the clip at full size.
• 402. Not enough credits. error.details carries required and available — report both and the top-up path. Do not retry.

Hard rules

• One product per run.
• Stop at the board gate. The operator approves the board before any clip fires.
• Never invent reviews, ratings, prices, or performance claims.
• Never claim what the reviews contradict.
• Use the real brand and the real packaging from the photo. Never invent a brand and never blank-label the product.
• On-screen text is short words and numbers only, never sentences.
• No em dashes in ad copy. Never say free: every Novoads plan is paid.
• The end card is composited from the real photograph. Never rendered.
• If a fact cannot be verified from the source given, leave it out and say so.
• Transcribe the master before you call it finished.
• Read the burned captions against the script. A garbled brand name blocks the ship.