A website goes in, a Remotion render comes out
Keeping it. It's my main experiment.
I built a pipeline that reads a live site (real copy, CSS palette, computed fonts, logo cascade, background pattern), turns it into a shot list written as numbers rather than prose, and renders it in Remotion, which is motion graphics authored as React code. First full run was a 15-second vertical reel for bug-shot.com. Every word on screen is verbatim from the site, and the logo came in as decomposed SVG so the wings actually animate instead of squashing. Cost per video is under one cent: extraction runs in Playwright, the render is local.
One master, four aspect ratios
Keeping it, with a rule
That same run produced 16:9, 4:5 and 1:1 off the vertical master. Two of them came out free, because the dominant axis never flipped. The 16:9 didn't: when the axis flips, a stack has to become a row, and 2 of the 5 scenes needed real recomposing. So I check whether a format fits and whether it still works, and only the second answer counts.
A wrong render looks exactly like a right one
Cost me a render. Now it's a validator.
The first version of that reel had 6 defects and 3 were invisible on paper. A shot list written for 16:9 rendered at 9:16 with panels outside the frame. A highlight scheduled at frame 104 in a scene that ends at 97. An overlap that read as a hard cut, because the incoming scene carried an opaque background and wiped the one underneath. Remotion rendered all of it without complaining. Those checks are now a script that rejects the config before anything gets rendered.
Most of my production now starts in a terminal
Keeping it
I run my work through Claude Code and write my own agent skills, one per job that keeps coming back: pulling a client's logo, screenshots and design tokens off their site, turning a screenwriter's photo of a handwritten formula into usable syntax, drafting client emails in my own voice, filing finished work where I'll find it again. Each skill is a text file of rules I wrote after getting that job wrong by hand. The line I hold is that the step gets automated and the judgement doesn't: my video pipeline runs in 5 phases and stops for a human at every one, because each of those stops exists thanks to a rerun it once cost me.
Photoshop scripts for the elements that repeat every week
Keeping it
For 7Graus I wrote two Photoshop scripts. One writes math formulas in the brand font with every term on its own layer, so the equation solves itself on screen when you animate it step by step. The other builds data tables from pasted spreadsheet data as real vector shapes and live text. Both carry the advance widths pulled from the font files, which is why a fraction bar lands on the pixel instead of near it. Rebuilding those by hand used to eat a morning per video.
What a year inside an AI video platform taught me
Two rules I now apply everywhere
At Lunair I work on a platform that turns a URL or a prompt into a finished video, which means I see generative tooling before it's polished. Two lessons stuck. Brand gets measured off the live site: a client brief called their product a clean dark-mode interface, I built an entire design document on that sentence, and the video came back in colours the brand doesn't own anywhere (the site returns #F9F9FB in both schemes, the dark class never lands). And you have to know which engine you're writing for: the classic one treats the rendered frame as the first frame, so nothing already in it can enter, while the motion graphics one moves elements in and out. Write for the wrong one and you get back nothing, a broken pop, or people melting.
A second brain, so the same lesson isn't learned twice
Keeping it. It's the one that compounds.
Every finished job gets a card in an Obsidian vault: what it was, what broke, what I decided, and a link to the real files. Claude writes the card and cross-links it to the client, the people involved and the earlier jobs it touches, so the vault is a map instead of a folder. It costs about a minute per delivery. The payoff shows up 4 months later, when a problem reappears and the fix is already written down in my own words with the reason attached. Most of the rules inside my agent skills started as a note in there. It's the closest thing I have to a system that makes the next hundred videos better than the last hundred.
