Style Library

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Left alone, AI-made videos drift toward one look: dark background, glow, glass cards, busy animated UI. The style library gives the agent 28 real alternatives. Each preset distils the grammar of well-known work (palette, type, composition, motion, transitions, sound) into instructions an agent can follow, and each comes with a 5-second swatch rendered by this repo. All 28 swatches show the same content, the title "每一帧，都是代码。" ("every frame is code") and the three steps outline → storyboard → first draft, so the only difference is the style.

Watch them in a row in styles/gallery.mp4, about 1.5 s per style. The reel is picture-only for now; each swatch's own media/swatch.mp4 carries its score. The full list, with the works each style learned from, is in styles/README.md.

What a preset is

A folder styles/<slug>/ with:

• STYLE.md: the works studied; visual, motion and sound grammar; what it suits and doesn't; bans; a prompt block; an engine recipe; self-checks;
• tokens.json: the numbers, machine-readable;
• swatch.js and score.json: the swatch's picture and music, as code;
• media/: swatch.mp4 and a poster frame.

Six families

Family	Presets
Film and title design	cutout-jazz · scratched-type · monumental-scifi · symmetry-pastel · neon-step-print · archival-pan-zoom · clockwork-map
Brand and launch	product-keynote · swiss-grid-type · brutalist-meme
Data and explainers	dark-math · editorial-data · bubble-chart-story · fui-hud · isotype
Illustration and print	bouncy-flat-2d · halftone-comic · risograph · silhouette-papercut · watercolor-pastoral
Chinese aesthetics	ink-wash · dunhuang-mural · shadow-puppet · guochao-festive
Retro and tech	blueprint · crt-terminal · synthwave-outrun · pixel-16bit

The sources include Saul Bass's title sequences, Se7en, Blade Runner 2049, Wes Anderson's symmetry, Wong Kar-wai's step-printing, the Swiss grid, 3Blue1Brown, New York Times data graphics, Otto Neurath's Isotype, the halftones of Spider-Verse, 16-bit Super Nintendo pixel art, ink wash painting, the Dunhuang murals, shadow puppetry and guochao.

Choosing at gate ①

The agent offers 2–3 presets that are far apart, with their swatches; at effort studio it also renders a 10–20 s sample of each candidate. You pick one or mix: one main style, borrowing at most one thing from another (a transition, a typeface). Don't stack two textures, such as halftone with ink wash or scanlines with paper grain. You can also name a preset in your request ("in the ink-wash style") or name a film you want it to feel like.

In the project, the preset is a starting point, not a cage. The project's STYLE.md records only what you change and why.

Commands

bin/vh style list                                   # the 28 presets, their family, whether a swatch exists
bin/vh new promo launch-film --style cutout-jazz    # adds STYLE_PRESET.md and style.tokens.json; appends the preset's prompt block to BRIEF.md
bin/vh style <slug> --draft                         # render a swatch at draft quality (the published one is left alone)
bin/vh style check <slug>                           # determinism: lossless frames from different worker counts must match
bin/vh style gallery --mp4                          # rebuild styles/gallery.jpg and styles/gallery.mp4

Rules every preset follows

• Learn the grammar, don't copy the work. No original characters, logos, shots or footage. Living directors' names appear only in the "learned from" column, never in a prompt as "in the style of".
• Treat cultural subjects accurately. No mixing of dynasties or regions into one pot, no bundle of "oriental elements"; flying apsaras have no wings; Chinese shadow puppetry is not wayang kulit.
• Sound is half the style. Every swatch has its own score, written for bin/vh music in that style's sound grammar. A "silence" is a held breath over a quiet bed, never digital silence.
• Local fonts only. Fonts are referenced with @font-face local() and never shipped. Missing fonts fall back, and each STYLE.md notes which fonts the swatch actually used.
• Facts are checked. Years, authors and sources were verified; anything uncertain is marked as such.

Honest status

An independent reviewer, a "harsh motion director" who didn't make the swatches, scored every swatch on the 7-dimension layer twice, with three rounds of fixes in between. The median lowest score rose from about 4.5 to 6. No swatch has all seven scores at 8 or above yet. The two presets added in v0.2.1 have lowest scores of 7 (pixel-16bit) and 6 (isotype). The library is still being polished; it is not a finished portfolio.

Two items on the Roadmap address this: every swatch reaching all-8 (planned for v0.3), and a more distinct, genre-true soundtrack for each swatch through an extended music engine (in progress).

Add a style

The six steps are in styles/README.md ("加一个新风格"): break down 1–3 works with playbook/07; write STYLE.md from _TEMPLATE.md plus a tokens.json; copy swatch.js from _swatch/demo/ and add a score.json for sound; iterate with bin/vh style <slug> --draft --hud, then render with bin/vh style <slug>; run bin/vh style check <slug>; rebuild the gallery and add a row to the table. Then open a pull request, see Contributing.

Other style libraries

Read-only copies are fetched into references/repos/: lemo-opuscar's 43 styles (MIT), the designer styles in HyperFrames' creative references, and OpenMontage's styles. License verdicts for each are in references/community-skills.md.