Widescreen narrated application videos #

A reusable pipeline for 1920×1080 narrated proposal/application videos: illustrated per-segment slides with Ken Burns zoom, top-left titles with slide-number superscripts, a top-right bouncing wordmark, a karaoke word-train caption layer, and a narration + ambient-bed audio mix. A matching single-page broadside storyboard PDF falls out of the same config.

Serpentine (serpentine-video/) is the template. The engines are generic; each video is just a config + illustrations.

Engines (generic — don't edit per-campaign) #

• marketing/bin/compose-widescreen.mjs <campaign-dir> — builds the .mp4
• marketing/bin/captions-train.mjs <campaign-dir> — the word-train caption .mov (called by compose)
• marketing/bin/storyboard-widescreen.mjs <campaign-dir> [--open] — the broadside PDF

A campaign = a folder under marketing/campaigns/ #

my-video/
  campaign.mjs            # config (see serpentine-video/campaign.mjs)
  01_intro/
    gens/native.png       # the illustration (or pencil.png fallback)
    cover-prompt-native.txt# the gen prompt (shown in the storyboard)
  02_…/ …                 # one folder per segment, named to match the recap audience

Segment names + timings come from the recap audience, not the campaign — the folder names must match the segment names in recap/out/segments.json.

How to make a new one #

1. Author the narration as a recap audience: recap/audience/<name>.mjs (narration text + segment markers + on-screen slide text). Set voice.speed (~1.08 reads well) and sing: false.
2. Build the transcript/audio: node recap/cli.mjs build <name> → writes recap/out/{recap.mp3, words.json, segments.json}.
3. Make the illustrations: one gens/native.png per segment folder (1024×1536 portrait works; it's cover-cropped to 1920×1080). The pop-style prompt convention lives in serpentine-video/STYLE.md.
4. Write campaign.mjs (copy serpentine's): name, audience, out, bed, palette, wordmark, titles{}, textFixes[], and storyboard{} metadata (titles/onscreen/markers/beats/spine).
5. Compose: node marketing/bin/compose-widescreen.mjs marketing/campaigns/<name>-video
6. Storyboard: node marketing/bin/storyboard-widescreen.mjs marketing/campaigns/<name>-video --open

Tunables (optional, in campaign.mjs) #

• caption: { smooth, activePx, nearPx, ghostPx, pop, spread, gap, bandY } — word-train scaling + scroll feel. smooth lower = smoother/laggier scroll (default 0.18). activePx/nearPx/ghostPx set the size gradient.
• palette: { cream, green, shadow } — text + glow + shadow colors.
• wordmark: [left, right] — top-right wordmark (omit to skip it).

Gotchas #

• node-canvas cannot render the YWFT font (renders .notdef tofu) — that's why every glyph is pre-rendered via ImageMagick. Don't "simplify" it back to fillText.
• Recap's recap/out/ is shared scratch — build one audience, then compose, before building another.
• Intermediates live in /tmp/wsvideo-<name>/ (word PNGs, captions.mov, the ffmpeg filter graph + cmd.sh for debugging).