Render Search Grid

render-search-grid

Render the 'search-grid' format from a config. It is a deterministic assembler — no

generative image/video, no AI-rendered text. Everything on screen is the brand's REAL

product/lifestyle photography + logo, so the typed hook, feature captions, wordmark, and

photos stay pixel-crisp. The only paid input is an optional music bed, produced upstream

by create-music-elevenlabs and passed to render.py --music.

The format (four beats, one continuous ~18s motion piece, 1080×1920)

• Search (0–5s) — a 3-column masonry grid of the brand's catalog behind a Pinterest

search bar; a believable phrase types in letter-by-letter. Side columns drift DOWN, the

middle column drifts UP (counter-parallax).

• Cards (5–7s) — 3 room/product cards slide in from the RIGHT and stack over a warm

blurred backdrop.

• Features (7–14.5s) — the TOP card physically expands (its box grows from the

stacked rect to full-screen, animating width/height — NOT transform:scale, which would

stretch the image), then swipe-left → swipe-left through the SAME 3 rooms, each now

full-bleed with a caption. The 3 cards ARE the 3 features.

• End card (14.5–18s) — hero + wordmark + tagline + CTA on a warm background.

Scripts (all free / deterministic)

• scripts/build_html.py --config config.json --out index.html — config → a single

self-contained HTML page exposing window.seek(tMs) (images base64-embedded).

• scripts/capture.js --html index.html --out frames --fps 30 --duration 18000 — headless

Chromium frame-steps seek() to a PNG per frame (auto-discovers a cached Playwright

chromium, or pass --exe).

• scripts/render.py --config config.json [--music bed.m4a] --out master.mp4 — orchestrates

build → capture → FFmpeg (muxes the bed with -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 when --music is

given; $0 silent pass without it).

• scripts/prep_assets.py crop in.jpg out.jpg / logo logo.jpg wordmark.png — the two

fixes this format needs almost every time: crop baked-in white L/R margins off heroes, and

key the white out of a black-on-white logo JPG to a transparent PNG.

See scripts/config.example.json for the full config shape (a real worked example).

Config contract (bound by the recipe/orchestrator at remix time)

canvas, hook, grid_cols (3 columns × 6 distinct tiles), rooms (exactly 3

{image, caption} — the cards AND the features), stack_bg (blurred warm backdrop),

endcard (hero, wordmark, tagline, cta, bg). Craft rules the renderer assumes the

inputs already honor: real brand assets only; 6 distinct tiles/column so the drift never

repeats; warm (never near-white) backdrops; cropped hero margins; transparent-bg wordmark;

captions/tagline/CTA are the brand's OWN approved copy (no invented claims).

Prereqs

node + playwright-core (or a cached Playwright chromium) and ffmpeg on PATH; python3

with Pillow (for prep_assets.py).