Blueprint — our demo

One example among many. Don't reuse its story, arc, shots, props or timings.

Demo: Patent Pending: The Cloud Catcher (46.7 s) · blueprint.mp4 · source in demo/

Story & structure

An inventor's patent drawing of a cloud-catching machine: it is drawn, exploded, runs perfectly, but there are no clouds; the hand revises the drawing, the revision cloud becomes a real rain cloud, it rains on the drawn garden and a flower grows. The style's story powers, as noted for this demo:

The whole film happens on one sheet of blueprint paper lying on a dark drafting table. Everything is white line work on uneven Prussian blue: centre lines, outlines, hatching, dimension lines, leader lines with numbered balloons, a title block and a notes column. The camera moves over the sheet like an eye reading a drawing. It is a 2D line-drawing language. You may use orthographic and oblique/isometric projection, but never 3D rendering.

The charm is the tension between rigorous engineering convention and whimsy. The drawing is dry and exact. The notes carry the jokes ("10 · COUNTERWEIGHT (GRANDMOTHER'S IRON)"). And once per film, a drawing symbol breaks the rules and becomes real.

Learn grammar from, but never copy: the moving technical drawings in Prologue Films' Iron Man (2008) end credits, Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus pages, 19th-century US patent drawings (Fig. 1 / Fig. 2, part balloons, fine-line shading) and the automaton drawings in Hugo (2011). No Marvel elements, no real patents, no real inventor's machine or signature.

The machine (or object, or plan) is the character. Parts act: a boom lifts hopefully or droops, a weather vane perks up or sags, bellows breathe, a gauge needle twitches at zero. The inventor appears only as a hand shadow with a pen tip, or as a signature.

How the topic is adapted (and the same recipe for others): turn the topic into something designed and let the drawing find a flaw that only the drawing can fix. A product launch becomes Fig. 1, exploded view, operation, then a revision that adds the missing feature. A love story: two machines on one sheet, and a revision cloud draws the bridge. A history lesson: a city plan revised again and again (REV. 1, 2, 3).

Demo emotional arc (46.7 s): curiosity (blank sheet, the object is drawn) → pride (exploded view) → excitement (it runs, on the beat) → the flaw (it works perfectly but the world lacks something; music stops) → the hand revises the drawing → the symbol becomes real (suspended chord, no voice) → payoff → echo (stamp, signature, title block).

Shots

Keep storytelling shots close. Only the opening and closing establishing shots are full-sheet.

Demo motion numbers: exploded parts leave one every ~0.055 of the progress on eighth notes and come back one eighth note per group with a brass click; gears advance 7.5° (one tooth) per eighth note with a 0.35-beat ease-out; bellows breathe per beat; failure over ~1.5 s (gears slow, bellows deflate, boom sags, vane droops); joy = vane snaps upright, needle overshoots to 1. The motion rules:

• Line draw-on is truncated by arc length, with a small glowing nib at the head. Stagger items within a layer. Each layer starts on a beat.
• Exploded view: parts leave in sequence, one every ~0.055 of the progress, on eighth notes, with eased motion. The camera pulls back to make room. Parts come back one eighth note per group with a brass click.
• Mechanisms step on the grid: gears advance one tooth (7.5°) per eighth note with a 0.35-beat ease-out, like an escapement. Meshing phase is computed so teeth really interlock. Chain links move with the pinion. Bellows breathe per beat.
• Machine acting: boom angle, vane droop, bellows volume and gauge needle are the face. Failure means the gears slow, the bellows deflate, the boom sags and the vane droops over ~1.5 s. Joy means the vane snaps upright and the needle overshoots (back-ease) to 1.
• Camera moves on ones (24 fps), continuous within a section, with hard cuts on downbeats between sections. Two tiny camera bumps: the paper slap and the stamp.

Score structure

• Music: two-part baroque invention at 108 BPM in G major. Harpsichord theme (a one-bar sixteenth-note "gear" motive), bassoon staccato imitating two octaves below.
• Operation adds violins and cellos spiccato eighths ("gears biting").
• The flaw: instruments drop out with a written-out ritardando, then true digital silence.
• The revision is silent except for a three-note questioning figure.
• The miracle holds a Dsus4 string chord with two breathing swells, unresolved.
• The catch resolves to G on the downbeat.
• Rain uses harp and harpsichord arpeggios.
• A short full cadence lands on the stamp, and the theme returns in augmentation for the end card.
• Rendered with core/audio/sampler.py: VCSL harpsichord and harp, VSCO 2 CE bassoon, strings and spiccato.
• Foley follows materials:
• Paper: roll unroll crackle and slap, T-square wood slide, technical pen scratch (2–6 kHz grain, length = stroke length), lettering (bursts of short strokes), compass squeak, hatching (13 strokes/s).
• Brass and wood: part clicks (3.1 / 5.2 kHz resonances), escapement ticks, chain rattle, bellows breath, wind-down ticks that slow by ×1.35.
• The magic moment: soft paper "puffs" on the two breaths, a noise swell, nothing else.
• Water: soft damped pats per drop plus a light rain bed.
• Rubber stamp thump, pen cap click at the very end.
• Voice: dry-humoured British engineer reading his own design notes, Kokoro bm_daniel, lang en-gb, speed 0.9. Five or six short lines. Keep the climax voiceless.
• Mix: music ducks to ~0.36 under voice and foley ducks by half. Whooshes low-passed at 2.5 kHz (unfiltered, they mask "bellows" in whisper). −14 LUFS. mux.sh grain 4 (the paper grain is in the image already).

Palette & props

• Sheet: 3200 × 2200 units, folded in quarters. The blue is procedural in a WebGL fragment shader in sheet coordinates, so it stays crisp at any zoom. Low-frequency fbm between #18336B and #2A58A6, horizontal coating streaks, a slight left-to-right fade, fibre noise, sparse fibres, fold creases (bright edge, dark edge, worn whitening along the fold), irregular bleached edges and corners, small specks. Outside the sheet: dark drafting cloth #0D1116 with a drop shadow.
• Lines: pale blue-white #E7F0F9, slightly soft (mipmap bleed), with a faint ink breakup driven by paper grain.
• Weights in sheet units: outline 3.2, detail 2.0, thin 1.25, hair 0.9.
• Screen width = sheet width × zoom^0.65. Close-ups do not turn into sausages and wides do not vanish.
• Dashes: centre line [34,7,6,7], hidden [11,7], phantom (cutting plane) [30,6,5,6,5,6], all scaled with zoom so the pattern stays on the paper.
• Occlusion: every solid is filled with "paper" (black in the ink buffer) before its outline is stroked, painter's order. Extrusion in oblique uses a sweep: stroke the outline at N depth steps at 2× width, then fill the same N steps with paper. What survives is a clean silhouette of half width. Front face and visible vertex connectors are drawn on top.
• Composite: the ink canvas is greyscale (white = exposed line). The fx canvas has R = shadow darkening, G = wetness, B = stamp ink, and is added with lighter. The overlay canvas holds subtitles. Shadows darken lines too, which is how a lifted object proves it has left the paper. To keep an object from being darkened by its own shadow, multiply its area by rgb(0,255,255) on the fx canvas.
• Hatching (fine-line shading) for sections, soil and the counterweight, at 45°, spacing 8–14 units.
• The magic object (climax only): union of circles (15 scallops plus 4 inner lobes).
• Flat state: an outward-scalloped revision cloud.
• Puffed state: one radial gradient across the whole union (top-left light) plus small highlights on the top lobes, a blurred white glow, engraved crescent shading on the lower right (mask = union minus the union shifted up-left), and a thicker outline on the shadow side.
• It leaves a pale "unexposed imprint" where it was drawn. Its shadow offset grows with lift (up to ~240 units down).
• Palette discipline: blue and white only. One stamp red #C23B2E, used exactly once.
• Typography (all OFL):
• Architects Daughter for hand lettering (header, labels, notes, subtitles).
• B612 / B612 Bold for title-block fields and "PATENT PENDING".
• Allura for the signature.
• Text is written on left to right with a glowing nib.

Titles & subtitles

• Subtitles are drawing notes: a light box (rgba(12,28,62,.58), 1.2 px outer and 0.8 px inner white rule, ~110–150 px tall), a "NOTE / n" cell in B612 Bold, the text in Architects Daughter 38 px written on in 0.35 s, and a small leader tick at the lower-left corner.
• Position per shot, in empty sky, never fixed to the bottom. The bottom of the frame is where the ground line, base and title block live.
• Wrap at ~880 px.
• Every subtitle is also lettered into the sheet's GENERAL NOTES column (under the fixed notes "ALL DIMENSIONS IN MILLIMETRES." and "DO NOT SCALE DRAWING."), so the final wide shows the whole voiceover as drawing notes.
• Title: the sheet header (Architects Daughter 132 units, letter-spaced, double underline), with PATENT PENDING and a subtitle line in B612.

End card

End card: the title block. The last row is lettered in: STYLE: BLUEPRINT / DRAWN BY: LemoLab × Claude Opus 5.5. The "LemoLab × Claude Opus 5.5" sign-off belongs to this library's demo only; a user's film carries no LemoLab credit and no copy of this card.

Build notes

styles/blueprint/demo/
  paper.js    WebGL2 compositor: procedural cyanotype sheet, ink bleed, wet stains, shadows, stamp, roll
  draw.js     drafting engine: camera, oblique projection, draw-on polylines, solids, hatching, dims, balloons, text
  machine.js  the Cloud Catcher: parts, gear meshing, explode offsets and paths, garden and flower
  sheet.js    border, header, title block, parts list, notes, revision cloud ↔ cloud, rain, hand shadow, stamp
  film.js     the whole timeline (108 BPM grid): cameras, acting, subtitles, sound events
  main.js     page entry (?frame=1|2|3 gate frames, ?nosub, ?poster)
  mix.py      foley + voice + music ducking       music/score.py  original score (sampler)
  tools/      subs.mjs (SUBS → subs.json), check_mix.py (whisper on the final mix)

1. node core/render/still.mjs styles/blueprint/demo --range 0:46:1.5 then sheet.py to review. Iterate per section.
2. .venv/bin/python core/tts/tts.py lines.json voices, then asr_check.py (6/6 OK).
3. node core/render/events.mjs, then music/score.py, then mix.py, then tools/check_mix.py.
4. node core/render/video.mjs styles/blueprint/demo --fps 24 --workers 3 (1120 frames, Canvas2D + WebGL, ~30 s).
5. sh core/render/mux.sh out/video24.mp4 mix.wav blueprint.mp4 24 4. Or run everything with sh styles/blueprint/demo/build.sh.

Pitfalls

• The machine near the sheet edge: wide shots show the desk. Put the main figure at least 960/zoom from any sheet edge you will frame in a wide, or make the sheet bigger (for this demo 3200×2000 is too small: use 3200×2200 and keep the machine toward the right).
• Explosions that go up hit the header. Explode mostly upward and sideways, and flatten the boom during the explode so the net extends sideways.
• Subtitles on the ink canvas vanish off-sheet and cannot occlude lines. Use a separate overlay texture composited last (premultiplied alpha).
• The magic object darkened by its own shadow. Multiply its area on the fx canvas with rgb(0,255,255) to zero the shadow channel only.
• Per-lobe shading makes "grapes" or bubble wrap. Use one gradient across the union, crescents from a union-minus-shifted-union mask, and arcs only on the upper inner lobes.
• Overlapping additive circle fills make bubbles. Fill a union as one path with fill('nonzero').
• Scallop arcs drawn the wrong way round look like a starburst. Choose the arc direction that contains the lobe's outward angle.
• A half-puffed cloud looks like a donut. Grow the inner lobes early (r × min(1, pf × 2.2)).
• The payoff must be big. A small clump in the lower third undersells the emotional return. Give the payoff object ~1/3 of frame height, centred, drawn stroke by stroke (stem → leaves → one petal per beat), with visible stains around it. Keep subtitles off it.
• A caught object shows through the net. Don't paint the net over it wholesale: fill the bag below the front rim with the object's body, then draw mesh and front rim on top, and skip the back rim.
• sfx.thump() is 0.35 s long: pad before adding to longer buffers.
• Whisper reads "Figure one" as "Figure 1": use an asr field in lines.json.
• A stray file at the repo root: always write with absolute paths inside your style dir.