@ts_floydThe prompt is only a tenth of what makes Opus 5.5 work for motion design. The other nine tenths live in the harness, and according to an 18-page PDF blueprint, that means a render contract goes into CLAUDE.md before anyone starts prompting. From there the guide lays out ten techniques. The brief itself gets written in XML blocks covering role, purpose, visual_identity, story, motion, and audio, because as the guide puts it, Claude reads a program, not a wish. Style references matter more than description. Frames get pulled every 0.5 seconds to build style_guide.md and shotlist.md, with the instruction to take the grammar, never the content. A reference beats ten adjectives. Every beat needs a job. The structure runs seven deep: Hook, World, Question, Mechanism, Discovery, Payoff, Loop. Dead beats kill retention. Before animation starts, the character bible gets locked: proportion, palette, expressions, motion grammar. Identity before movement. window seek(t) renders any frame from just t, with no state between frames. Render frame 300 twice and the hashes match, which is what makes the output deterministic. Easing curves get replaced with springs, assigned by element function, and if it looks like PowerPoint the spring is wrong. Sound comes first. A beat grid keeps clicks on peaks and reveals on downbeats, so one clock syncs everything. No single prompt handles every job. Specialist passes run instead: a style extractor, then a shotlist architect, a motion director, a sound designer, and a harsh critic. Finally, Claude scores its own frames from 1 to 10. Nothing below 8 ships, and the run repeats until an 8 or higher lands three times in a row. Send the PDF to Claude, then the full guide with demos sits in the article below.

@ts_floydThe prompt is only a tenth of what makes Opus 5.5 work for motion design. The other nine tenths live in the harness, and according to an 18-page PDF blueprint, that means a render contract goes into CLAUDE.md before anyone starts prompting. From there the guide lays out ten techniques. The brief itself gets written in XML blocks covering role, purpose, visual_identity, story, motion, and audio, because as the guide puts it, Claude reads a program, not a wish. Style references matter more than description. Frames get pulled every 0.5 seconds to build style_guide.md and shotlist.md, with the instruction to take the grammar, never the content. A reference beats ten adjectives. Every beat needs a job. The structure runs seven deep: Hook, World, Question, Mechanism, Discovery, Payoff, Loop. Dead beats kill retention. Before animation starts, the character bible gets locked: proportion, palette, expressions, motion grammar. Identity before movement. window seek(t) renders any frame from just t, with no state between frames. Render frame 300 twice and the hashes match, which is what makes the output deterministic. Easing curves get replaced with springs, assigned by element function, and if it looks like PowerPoint the spring is wrong. Sound comes first. A beat grid keeps clicks on peaks and reveals on downbeats, so one clock syncs everything. No single prompt handles every job. Specialist passes run instead: a style extractor, then a shotlist architect, a motion director, a sound designer, and a harsh critic. Finally, Claude scores its own frames from 1 to 10. Nothing below 8 ships, and the run repeats until an 8 or higher lands three times in a row. Send the PDF to Claude, then the full guide with demos sits in the article below.