frames/skills/frames-creative/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
frames-creative	Non-animation creative direction for Frames videos. Use for design spec (frame.md / design.md) handling, palettes, typography, narration, beat planning, audio-reactive visuals, composition patterns, and brand / style decisions. For atomic motion patterns and scene blueprints, use `frames-animation`.

Frames Creative

Brand, pacing, style, narration, and composition direction. Use after the technical contract from frames-core is in place.

For motion patterns, scene blueprints, transitions, and CSS marker effects, use frames-animation — this skill is intentionally non-animation.

Read these two FIRST for any non-trivial composition — they override web instincts:

• references/house-style.md — "interpret the prompt, generate real content," the lazy-default list, and the background/foreground layer recipe. This is what turns a literal restyle into a concept.
• references/video-composition.md — video-medium scale, depth, and foreground detail. It explains how to avoid empty web-page layouts without imposing a universal element count.

Skipping these is the single biggest cause of generic, web-page-looking output. They are not optional rows in the routing table below — for anything beyond a one-line edit, open both before you choose colors or write HTML.

Workflow

1. If a project has a design spec, read it first and treat its frontmatter tokens as brand truth (colors, fonts, spacing, tone, constraints). Which file to read (precedence frame.md → design.md → DESIGN.md) and how to parse it (frontmatter = normative, prose = context) are defined once in references/design-spec.md — resolve and load per that doc.
2. If no design spec exists and the user asks for visual direction, choose a route:
   • Ready-made frame-preset (optional) → frame-presets/ (adopt a FRAME.md as frame.md; see references/design-spec.md)
   • Named style or mood → references/visual-styles.md
   • Fast defaults → references/house-style.md
   • Interactive selection → references/design-picker.md
3. For multi-scene work, plan beats and rhythm before writing HTML → references/beat-direction.md. For scene transitions, jump to frames-animation/transitions/.
4. For motion-heavy work, read references/motion-principles.md (high-level guardrails), then go to frames-animation for atomic rules.

Routing

Topic	Read
Adopt a ready-made frame-preset as frame.md (optional)	frame-presets/ · references/design-spec.md
Default palettes, motion, typography, lazy defaults to question	references/house-style.md
Named style presets, mood-to-style routing	references/visual-styles.md
Palette-specific color tokens	palettes/*.md
Composition patterns — PiP, text-behind-subject, title card, slide show	references/composition-patterns.md
Stats / infographic presentation	references/data-in-motion.md
Structured expansion for open-ended prompts	references/prompt-expansion.md
Video-medium density, scale, color, frame composition	references/video-composition.md
Per-beat direction, rhythm planning, transition timing	references/beat-direction.md
Post-authoring spec verification (colors, type, corners, spacing, depth)	references/design-adherence.md
High-level motion guardrails and GSAP-quality rules	references/motion-principles.md
Font selection, pairings, rendered-video type guardrails	references/typography.md
Story doctrine — hook language, value-before-evidence, storyboard-as-proposal	references/story-spine.md
Script pacing, tone, openings, number pronunciation	references/narration.md
Precomputed audio bands mapped to motion	references/audio-reactive.md

Scripts

• scripts/contrast-report.mjs — inspect contrast warnings from rendered frames.
• scripts/extract-audio-data.py — pre-extract audio bands for audio-reactive compositions.
• scripts/package-loader.mjs — support script for bundled creative tooling.

contrast-report.mjs resolves helper packages from the current project first, then can bootstrap the bundled Frames package version. Set FRAMES_SKILL_PKG_VERSION=<version> only when running the skill outside the bundled CLI/skill install and you need to pin that bootstrap version explicitly.

Run from the repo root with explicit paths, for example:

python skills/frames-creative/scripts/extract-audio-data.py <audio-file>

Animation analysis (animation-map.mjs) lives in frames-animation/scripts/.

Boundaries

• Do not override frames-core technical rules.
• Do not require a design system for a minimal technical composition.
• Do not add extra scenes, narration, music, captions, or transitions unless the request calls for them or you first propose the expansion.
• Keep recipe references task-specific; do not read every reference for simple edits.