Woodcut Print — Style Prompt

A relief print that carves itself: every frame is a black wood block, and light only exists where a knife has cut it away. One colour at most, and only for the thing that burns. References (grammar only): Frans Masereel Passionate Journey (1919) and Lynd Ward Gods' Man (1929), wordless woodcut novels told as a sequence of self-contained plates; Käthe Kollwitz's woodcuts, where emotion lives in the direction of the gouge; Gustave Doré's engraving, where line spacing and direction build light and volume. Never copy their plates, figures, borders or titles.

1. Essence, and what it is not

Each shot is one printed plate: black ink on laid paper, framed by a paper margin. It follows three rules of real relief printing:

1. Black is the wood, white is what the knife removed. Light is carved: a bright area is many wide cuts, a dark area untouched wood.
2. Pictures appear by being carved. Nothing fades in: cuts grow stroke by stroke along the form, coarse gouges first, fine lines after.
3. The block is a mirror. Letters read backwards until the paper is pulled; that reversal is the style's own transition.

Not copperplate engraving (no swelling burin lines on white, no crosshatch built up from white ground), not linocut poster art (no flat colour areas), not a black-and-white photo run through a threshold filter (the cuts must follow the form).

2. Materials & rendering

• Print frame: the printed image area sits inside a paper margin; the wider bottom margin holds captions. The image edge is the block edge: ragged ink, never a clean rectangle.
• Knife classes (widths in 1080p pixels at 1× camera):

• Hatching (Doré grammar in wood): line direction follows form (a round object is wrapped in arcs, slopes follow the fall line, fire and light radiate, cloth follows its folds). Width follows tone: bright = wide cuts almost merging into white, mid-tone = thin cuts, dark = no cuts. Far = dense and fine, near = sparse and coarse. Every line is a separate cut (30–160 px, blunt entry, tapered exit, chipped edge), never a continuous machine line.
• Figures: black silhouette + white knife halo + grazing-light hatching on the lit edge only (light z ≈ 0.2, so flat areas stay black). Skin carved white, features left black (the wordless-novel rule).
• Close-ups (hands, objects): sculpt a small height field (capsules, blobs, planks, creases), light it and run it through woodcutFilter (§10), so cuts follow the isophotes like an engraver's.
• Printing: the mask (white = cut) goes through a WebGL2 compositor: knife burr on edges, ±6 % ink unevenness, wood-grain streaks, specks where ink didn't take, a mottled colour plate with a small fixed misregistration. Block mode: glossy inked wood with grain sheen, pale wood in the grooves.

3. Colour logic

• Two values carry everything: near-black ink and warm laid-paper white. The raw wood colour appears only in shots that show the block itself.
• At most one colour plate, printed only where white has been carved, so it glows out of the cuts and never sits on the black. A colour plate over ink is nearly invisible, so plan it on carved white.
• The colour is reserved for the one thing that matters (a flame, molten metal, a heart, a signal lamp). It can spread at a peak and shrink to a single highlight afterwards; it is never decoration.
• Examples of a plate: a burnt copper-orange for heat; a cold Prussian blue for water or night; a deep oxblood for a wound or a seal. Choose it from the topic.

4. Type & subtitles

• Captions are letterpress in the paper margin, below the plate, like a plate caption in a woodcut novel. They never cover the image. A letterpress old-style face (IM Fell English, OFL) around 40–44 px, in ink, pushed through the same print shader. The ink comes up in 0.1 s with no slide and fades over 0.15 s. Hold ≥ max(1.8 s, speech + 0.6 s).
• Titles are carved, not typed: cut into the block (IM Fell English SC), mirrored if the block is shown before the print is pulled.
• Any closing text is a fresh print: letterpress in the margin or carved out of a black panel.

5. Motion quality

• Characters on twos (12 fps); camera, particles, fire and light on ones (24 fps). Hatching lives in each body part's local space, so cuts move with the limb and don't boil; only fire and liquids re-cut every 2 frames, as deliberate boil.
• Anticipation / action / follow-through on every key action: a few frames back → a 2-frame strike → settle + a short shake.
• Carve reveal: each stroke has its own start time and speed (0.08–0.35 s). Reveal keys: light (bright areas first, coarse to fine), radial (from a point: rays, a pour), down, or any function.
• Hard cut = a new impression: two frames of misregistration (a few pixels, then back).
• Paper transition (the one transition grammar): brayer rolls ink (a wet highlight sweeps) → paper lays down → baren spirals, the image soaks through → the sheet peels on a cylinder toward camera, heavy then fast, its back showing the mirrored show-through.
• What never moves: the paper margin.

6. Camera grammar

The camera moves over the paper; the margin stays fixed. The knife tip, or the brightest cut, is the focus.

Opening and ending come from the topic. Framing: black masses on carved white or white on uncut black, never grey on grey; text only in the margin. Transitions: hard cut (new impression) or the peel; never a dissolve.

7. Sound palette

• Instruments: low strings (contrabass, cellos; spiccato, pizzicato), wood and skin (log drum, woodblock, frame drum), gran cassa, timpani, one tam-tam, synthesised struck metal (modal: 3–5 inharmonic partials + hammer transient); a bowed saw or hurdy-gurdy drone for a folk colour.
• Options: withhold the timbre of the story's object until it appears; a metric modulation instead of a tempo jump; a modal shift inside a long decay; one drone under a locked plate.
• Foley follows the material, all synthesisable: knife into wood (transient + band-passed fibre tearing tied to knife speed), chips, brayer tack, paper air, baren rasp, the wet peel; metals by size (large = low, small = high and pure); resonant objects as modal models plus echoes for distance.
• Silence is a tool: near-silence with one faint ambience, or true digital silence before the loudest moment; the first sound after it is chosen.
• J/L cuts carry sound across plates and peels.
• Mix: music ducks ~8 dB under voice and a little under key foley; foley ducks too under voice. Pan hard transients off centre. −14 LUFS.
• Voice: few lines, low and plain, like captions spoken; the plates tell the rest.

8. Native moves

A menu: use the ones your story needs.

• Light is carved. A burst of radial cuts from a point. Fits content like: a power grid switched on; a scientific insight; a lighthouse restored.
• Carving = time. Patient work on screen, cut by cut. Fits content like: a year of training; a building rising; a craft apprenticeship.
• Mirrored block → true print. A backwards word reads true when the sheet is pulled. Fits content like: a vote result; a name cleared; a misunderstanding put right.
• Stab cuts as texture. White dots can freeze mid-air or be inked back in until the black is clean. Fits content like: stars going out over a city; rain stopping; a disease receding on a map.
• The one colour plate spreads and withdraws. Fits content like: a blood donation; a sunrise over a harvest; a single lit window in a blackout.
• Filter a sculpt or a frame into form-following cuts. Fits content like: a portrait of a real person drawn from a photo; a machine part; an archive image re-cut.
• Wordless-novel sequencing. Self-contained plates, few or no lines; a gap can be silent. Fits content like: a migration; a strike; a life in seven plates.

9. Pitfalls of the medium

• White marks on white areas are invisible → stab cuts need dark masses behind them.
• Hatching every surface looks like fur or rain → grazing light; 3–6 cuts on the lit edge only.
• Black faces with white cuts don't read small → skin white, features black, a black keep-line around white parts.
• Hand-drawn close-up props look like mittens and blobs → height field + woodcutFilter.
• Short hatch segments with a tonal wobble turn into zig-zag chevrons → long cuts (14–50 × spacing), one broad highlight band, a thin rim light, a stronger halo.
• Steam or smoke on top of the subject reads as flames → draw it behind, so only wisps escape.
• Lazily cached strokes shared between shots make frames depend on the render worker → every cache builds itself on first use.
• Fine hatching + ink noise + grain inflate the file → a higher CRF with -tune grain; check a 1:1 crop. woodcutFilter NaN in flat areas → clamp before sqrt.

10. Engine

demo/engine/index.js (imports only /core/lib.js) carves and prints any path or shape, on two canvases: a mask (black = uncut, white = cut) and an optional colour plate. Main functions: shape (carved solid with halo and form-following hatching), cutAlong (a path as hand-cut strokes), hatch (streamline hatching of a region), flecks (stab cuts), rays (carved light), drawStrokes, plate, woodcutFilter (image or frame → cuts), makePrinter(W,H).render (print / block compositor). Reusable demo pieces: demo/trans.js (paper peel), demo/hands.js (height-field sculpts). Option table, a minimal example and the filter recipe: DEMO.md.

11. Variation space

You decide the story, characters (or none), plates, opening, ending, camera path, pacing and what the one colour is for. All far from our demo:

• Structures: a book of hours (seven locked plates, one per hour, no moves inside a plate); the same block recut (carved deeper each scene, the image changing as wood goes); two blocks printed in turn (two places alternate impressions until one sheet carries both).
• Openings: the finished print on a wall (then back into the block to see it cut); white paper (an inked block pressed onto it: the first image arrives whole); wood grain that becomes water or a field as the first cuts follow it.
• Endings: the block cleaned (ink washed off, pale carved wood remains); a stack of prints (rising over many sheets of one plate); an uncarved corner (holding on black wood the knife never reached).

How our demo was made (story, shots, score, end card, build, engine reference): DEMO.md. Read it after your treatment exists.