Comic History Cartoon — our demo

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

Demo: One Piece of Paper 《一塊紙》 (51.0 s) · comic-history.mp4 · source in demo/

Alsace-Lorraine changed hands four times: 1871, 1918, 1940, 1944–45. Each time someone tore the piece of paper off the map and pasted a new one. The people living on it never moved; only their papers changed. An English narrator (Kokoro bm_george), Chinese and English subtitles burned in as comic caption boxes and written to comic-history.srt. Facts and sources: demo/FACTS.md. The generals are comic personifications of states, not portraits; the Alsatian woman is a personification of the region's people, not a real person.

Story & structure

Logline: one piece of paper was torn off and pasted back four times; the woman living on it never moved house, but her home switched countries four times.

Arc: 1871, a Prussian general hops in, scissors cut the border, a grey patch slaps down, the French general stamps his foot → the camera pulls back: it is a comic page; in the next, narrow panel an Alsatian woman's identity card reads Française, a stamp drops: DEUTSCH → whip across the gutter to 1918: the French general tears the grey paper off and flings it in the Prussian's face, the helmet flies, a blue patch slaps on: MINE AGAIN → 1940, a narrow, dark panel with no jokes: a faceless hand presses a grey patch down, it will not lie flat, a corner peels up → 1944–45: the French general tugs the corner, cannot get it off, falls over, pastes another layer on top, THUNK → tilt down and push in: four layers of paper seen from the side; the woman, now a grandmother, stands on the stack with her granddaughter; a STRASBOURG pin drops on the real Strasbourg → pull back to the whole page; a title card slaps into the last panel.

Native moves spent, each a step further than the last: cut along the dotted line (1871), stamp the papers (Alsace), tear it back (1918), it won't lie flat (1940), layer on layer (1944–45 and the stack), pin on the map (the ending).

The comic page has six panels: 1871 (wide), Alsace (narrow), 1918 (wide), 1940 (narrow, dark), 1944–45 (wide), title card (narrow).

Shots

# Time Panel Shot Camera / transition Native move / note
1 0.0–10.0 1871, full screen Prussian general hops in on the beat holding a grey patch; the 1871 tag drops in; a dashed cut line prints, scissors snip four times, the cut land greys and hatches; he lifts the patch overhead and trembles; one in-between frame and SLAP; LORRAINE and ALSACE print on the patch; HEY! then MINE NOW. 歸我了！; treaty slip pasted under the tag; the French general stamps; two paper clouds slow push 1.0→1.065, big shake on the slap, slow pull back; small shake on the stamp cut along the dotted line; height is shadow; impact spreads (hat flies off and lands)
T1 10.0–11.0 1→2 first sight of the comic page pull back to 0.6×, then slide to the narrow panel, which parks at the right of frame with the 1871 panel still beside it page reveal
2 11.0–16.2 Alsace, narrow a timber-framed house; the woman holds up her card, Française; a stamp drops past her nose: DEUTSCH; she switches to the worried head locked; the whole panel jolts at the stamp stamp the papers
T2 16.2–16.8 2→3 whip pan diagonally across the gutter with speed lines time jump
3 16.8–26.2 1918, full screen the French general hops over, tears the grey paper off (ragged fibres, shreds left under it), flings it into the Prussian's face, the helmet flies and lands; a blue patch slaps on; MINE AGAIN. 又歸我了！ push in on the tear, pull back with the throw; shake on the slap tear it back; callback to 1871's line
T3 26.2–26.9 3→4 slide to the narrow panel, which parks at the right; the panel darkens and cools, its shadow falls over the lit 1918 panel beside it tone change
4 26.9–33.4 1940, narrow, dark only the piece of land; a faceless dark grey paper hand presses a grey patch down and leaves; a corner peels up close-up 2.3×; light shake on the press it won't lie flat; no comic sound
T4 33.4–34.1 4→5 diagonal drop down the page, pull out then push in back to the light
5 34.1–38.0 1944–45, full screen the French general tugs the peeled corner, it holds, he falls on his back; he pastes another blue layer: THUNK push in 1.06 on the tug; the biggest shake of the film weight of thick paper
6 38.0–46.2 1944–45, full screen the map flattens into a tabletop: four layers of paper seen from the side; grandmother and granddaughter hop onto the stack hand in hand; the grandmother stamps twice (the 1871 rhyme); the STRASBOURG pin drops tilt down and push in to 1.85× layer on layer; pin on the map
T5 46.2–51.0 the page pull back to rows 3–5 of the page; at 47.0 s the title card slaps into the last panel; held to 51.0 s pull back to 0.7×, slow drift end card

Score structure

120 bpm (a bar is 2 s), B-flat major, about 25½ bars; every cue is written in film seconds in demo/mix.py.

Time Section Instruments
0–10 1871, the German side's march tuba and trombone oom-pah; a rising xylophone note on each hop, four falling xylophone notes for the snips; only a thin violin tremolo during the wind-up (3.0–3.85 s), then the whole band on the slap; brass cadence at 8.5 s
10–16.2 Alsace glockenspiel and pizzicato music-box tune; stops dead on the stamp, the tuba sinks two notes
16.8–26.2 1918, the French side takes the tune accordion musette, snare brushes, the slap and a flourish
26.9–33.4 1940 both accents gone: low strings in G minor and slow timpani like footsteps; no comic sounds
34.1–38 1944–45 a snare roll that builds under the tug-of-war; the THUNK is the heaviest hit of the film
38–51 the ending for the first time the accordion melody plays over the tuba's oom-pah; glockenspiel on the pin; the whole ensemble on a B-flat major chord as the title card lands, left to ring out to 51 s

Foley is all synthesised in mix.py: paper slaps, scissors, rubbing paper flat, tearing, the slide whistle of a flying hat, pin clicks, tape, paper clouds.

Mix: the voice is compressed and set by RMS about 10 dB over the music; while it speaks the music and foley dip 3 dB and the music's 300 Hz–4 kHz band another 7 dB. mux.sh masters to −14 LUFS (−13.9 LUFS, true peak −1.2 dB measured) with grain level 1.

Palette & props

End card

The title card slaps into the last (narrow) panel at 47.0 s: ONE PIECE OF PAPER · 一塊紙 · Alsace-Lorraine 1871–1945; under a thin printed rule, the style name Comic History Cartoon / 搞笑歷史卡通 and LemoLab × Claude Opus 5.5 (IM FELL English, about 29 px on screen). Held to 51.0 s. 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

demo/
  build.sh         one command: fonts (if missing) → parts (if missing) → voice (if missing) + speech check → events → picture → mix → master → subtitles → readcheck → poster, styleframe
  index.html       render(t): the page camera PCAM, six panels drawn into their own canvases, the printed map, puppet rigs RIG (FK + two-bone IK),
                   patches (cut, tear, fold, stack), bubbles, year tags, caption boxes from SUBS, fillMixed()/numFont() for numbers, EV, TEXTS
  mix.py           narration + foley + score from out/events.json → out/mix.wav (film seconds; --from/--to render a span)
  europe.json      the printed map's data (Natural Earth 1:50m, Europe only; from tools/europe_map.py)
  tools/europe_map.py  builds europe.json from world-atlas 2.0.2 (Natural Earth 1:50m countries)
  tools/extract.py keys and cuts src/sheet-*.png into parts/*.png, parts/index.json and parts/*_debug.jpg (numbered parts, for reading pivots)
  tools/srt.mjs    the .srt from the page's SUBS table
  tools/sheets.json  the prompts the three part sheets were generated from
  vo/lines.json    the voice script (numbers spelled out for the voice, digits in the subtitles)
  FACTS.md         every fact in the film with its source
  CREDITS