Cinematic UI 2.0中文

Docs / 05

Media and looks: what the picture is made of

Photoreal 3D is one option, not the default. See the media Cinematic UI can cast from a film, from ink wash to pixel, and how the asset call works.

The medium is the answer to one question: what is this film’s picture made of? The skill reads the film’s relationship to reality and builds in the medium that follows, instead of defaulting to glossy 3D or glass.

The media

Each of these ships as tested code in kit/looks.js:

  • Ink wash
  • Pencil and watercolour
  • Pixel
  • Halftone and CMY print
  • CRT and neon
  • Cel shading with outlines
  • Liquid
  • Gradient light
  • Illustrations and photographs as layered 2.5D planes
  • Hand-drawn line boil for DOM and SVG

Beyond the looks there are two more routes: a studio-lit HDR 3D stage for films that really are solid and glossy, and a no-canvas path for films made of type.

In the skill’s terms the families are observed (photography, footage), constructed (photoreal 3D), drawn (line, cel, painted multiplane, ink), designed (flat shapes, print, type), heightened (neon, grain, gradient light), elemental (ink, liquid, cloth) and handmade (stop motion). Real archival photographs developed in a darkroom, a single continuous drawn SVG line, typeset accounting documents and a candle-lit 3D glass bottle are all media chosen this way in the demo productions.

Why 3D is not the default

The kit’s 3D stage is one medium among many. A film made of type, drawings or photographs may need no canvas at all. Photoreal 3D on a film that was never solid or glossy is on the skill’s list of things to refuse, as is a 3D object that floats and spins in the hero and is never seen again.

Every treatment writes one sentence, this film’s mechanism becomes this mark-making, spatial and temporal language because…, and a “why not 3D” (or “why 3D”) line. Common pitfalls it guards against:

  • Genre association. “Miyazaki, so anime” or “sci-fi, so neon.” The medium comes from how the film is made and what it looks at.
  • The filter applied afterwards. A look laid over a composition designed for something else. A drawn film is blocked as drawings.
  • Fake handmade noise. Wobble and grain on perfectly regular geometry reads as a plug-in. Irregularity has to be in the shapes.
  • Technology without material. Splats without a capture, footage without footage, 3D close-ups without a model.

The medium also has to be one you can supply. Hand-drawn with no illustrations and no generation is not a choice, so the agent picks the nearest medium the film supports that it can make well.

The asset call

After the medium is chosen and the shot list is drafted, the agent lists what the film needs and asks you once, in one message. Each asset gets the routes that make sense: you supply it, it comes from a free licensed library (real photographs, footage and sound), it is AI-generated (with tool, count and rough cost), or the shot is redesigned around a stand-in.

The rules of the call:

  • Real things, such as the logo, the product, people, screenshots and numbers, come from you. The agent never generates a likeness of a real person or a real product and presents it as real.
  • No generation credits are spent without a yes. If AI assets were approved up front, it does not ask again.
  • Shots follow assets. A weak asset stays in wide shot, in silhouette, out of focus or off screen; the strongest asset gets the close-ups. The shot list is rewritten after the answers come back.
  • Generated sets stay coherent: one style sentence reused in every prompt, one model, consistent light direction.

Open asset calls go at the top of the delivery report.

Real footage, legally

find-footage.mjs searches open libraries for photographs, footage and sound: Openverse, Wikimedia Commons, public-domain films from the Internet Archive’s Prelinger and FedFlix collections, NASA, and Pixabay or Unsplash with a free key. You search with the shot (“dawn mist over still water, wide, low contrast”), cast from a contact sheet that shows every licence, and get back trimmed, compressed clips with poster frames and a CREDITS.md. Footage can run as a background, scrub with scroll, sit in the 3D set under the film’s looks, or play frame-exactly inside a rendered film.