Shipped First logged 18 September 2026

Launch Video Kit Teaches Agents to Cut a Trailer

An agent skill pack that turns a coding agent into a motion designer: storyboard, camera, copy and framing rules, then a polished 12 to 15 second launch film built from the product's real components.

Watch the film ▶

Film 01 / 0:14 Tasklight reference film The kit's 14-second worked example: eight scenes, an invented product and every framing rule in use. Silent by design, because most people watch launch films on mute.

scene archetypes: 8
framing rules written as code: 12
choreographed cursors: 22
reference film: 14.3s

Why it's cool

Most product videos are either a wobbly screen recording or a week of someone's After Effects time. I wanted a third option: point an agent at a codebase and get back a polished launch film, made from the product's own components, fonts and data. It looks exactly like the product because it is the product, animated.

The film above is the kit's reference film for Tasklight, an app that does not exist. It is there so every agent sees a worked example of every rule before it touches a real product.

What I had to steer

Left alone, agents make videos that look like PowerPoint. Everything moves at once, text flies in from nowhere and nobody can read it. So I wrote the taste down as rules and made them checkable. One thing leads at a time. Text must be at least 26px at 1080p and stay up long enough to read, with the maths written out. Every cut blurs through. The end card holds for at least a second and a half.

The loop matters as much as the rules: storyboard first, check it, render stills at the key moments, then actually look at them before rendering. And never invent UI the product does not have. If a feature has not shipped, the film changes the beat and says so on screen.

What I wired together

A Remotion template with tuned presets for springs, zoom tiers and blur. A dolly camera with log-space zoom and transit blur. Word reveals, word swaps and typewriter text. An iPhone frame and lock-screen notification. Twenty-two cursors with choreography, and stubs that let a real Next.js app render inside Remotion.

A storyboard file is the single source of timing. Check and stills scripts sit on top. It installs into any repo as a Claude Code skill, or through an AGENTS.md pointer for Codex and Cursor. I took the publicly described launchvideo.dev workflow as the starting point and wrote everything from scratch.

Where I pushed it

This pushed agents into a craft, not just code. Motion design is all taste, and taste is supposedly the thing agents cannot do. It turns out a lot of taste is rules nobody bothered to write down.

It is already in use: TabRestrain's 15-second storyboard passes the kit's framing checks and is waiting for its final render. The one line I hold firmly is that reference footage never gets published as if it were a real product film.

The build log

Entry 01 18 September 2026

A Motion Designer in a Skill File

The Question

Fantasy Auction already had two films and TabRestrain needed one. Every new product wanted a launch film, and starting each one from a blank Remotion project and a vague prompt is how you get the PowerPoint look: everything moving, nothing readable.

Could I package the judgement of a motion designer as a skill, so any agent in any of my repos could make a decent 15-second film without me sitting over it?

The Build

The kit is a skill pack plus a Remotion template. The skill reads in order: setup, story, staging, scenes, text, and a guide for filming a real React or Next.js app. Each file is short and opinionated. The story file turns a request into a promise, proof and a beat sheet. The staging file sets four zoom tiers and the rule that only one thing leads at a time. The text file has the read-time maths.

The template does the heavy lifting: a camera that dollies over a stage, springs with numbers already tuned, blur on every transition and a storyboard that owns all the timing. A check script fails the storyboard if it breaks a framing rule. A stills script renders review frames so the agent has to look before it renders.

Then I made it prove itself with a reference film for a fake product, Tasklight. Eight scenes, fourteen seconds, every rule in use.

The Outcome

It works. The reference film looks like a real launch video, and the kit installs into other repos as a skill. TabRestrain’s storyboard already passes its checks.

My take: most “AI can’t do taste” complaints are really “nobody wrote the taste down”. Write it down and make it checkable, and the agent gets surprisingly close.

Contact sheet of review stills from the Tasklight reference film — The stills script renders key moments from every scene. The agent has to look at these before it is allowed to render the film.