render-cinematic-music-video

Assemble a cinematic music-video ad from a config: a live-action-STYLE short film where an original sung anthem is the score and every visual beat is a shot-on-film tableau (Kodak Portra grain, light leaks, natural light, handheld imperfection) timed to the lyrics, arranged as a 3-act arc (its shape is the user's story_arc choice) with the hook line on the chorus drop. This capability is the FREE, deterministic assembly — cut-to-window, hard-concat, anthem mux, caption burn, and the brand end card.

scripts/config.example.json is the worked example (Hype and Vice "Game Day Girls", ~28s 1080×1920 9:16, 14 tableaux) — copy its structure, never its creative values; scripts/PIPELINE.md maps every config block to its source step and scripts/README.md documents the free assembly.

Run

This is the FREE, deterministic assembly stage — it spends nothing. The paid inputs are separate capabilities: the sung anthem (create-music-elevenlabs, force_instrumental false — the lyrics ARE the script, returns mp3 + words_timestamps); one 35mm-film keyframe per beat in one look pack (create-image-gpt-image-fal); and one Kling 3.0 i2v clip per beat (create-video-fal). Given the delivered anthem + words.json + one clip per beat + the brand end-card asset, render-cinematic-music-video cuts each clip to its lyric window, hard-concats on the beat, muxes the anthem, burns the cinematic lower-third captions, and overlays the end card → the master. Re-cuts reuse the existing anthem / keyframes / clips and cost $0.

Choices

The creative content this stage assembles is decided upstream by the format's choices, asked of the user before any paid step. The worked example's values are examples, never defaults:

• song_style — the anthem's genre, mood, BPM and arrangement. The demo used a triumphant 120-BPM indie-pop cinematic anthem.
• vocalist — who sings it. The demo used a confident-but-warm female lead.
• cast — who is on screen in the tableaux. The demo used four young college women.
• setting — place + time of day (drives the look pack's light and palette). The demo used an American college town on game day, autumn, golden hour.
• story_arc — the 3-act shape of the tableaux and lyrics. The demo used one game day, morning → stadium peak → twilight, with an origin-story wink.

This assembly reads them only through the config (tableaux[] windows + captions, the anthem, captions.accent_words, end_card.*); it hardcodes none of them.

Contract (the free assembly)

• The sung anthem carries the story — no separate VO. The generated ElevenLabs track IS the bed and the script (force_instrumental false); do not add a spoken voiceover or a second bed.
• Plan the timeline AROUND the delivered anthem. The anthem is generated first and reshapes/overshoots length; snap every tableau boundary to the lyric-phrase edges in the returned word timings — never trim the anthem to a pre-planned grid.
• Captions from the anthem's OWN word timings, not Whisper. Derive words.json from the music model's words_timestamps, chunk ~4 words at lyric boundaries, and burn cinematic lower-third serif captions (--placement low) with the hook line accent-treated (bold-italic). Whisper on sung audio returns "🎵 Music Playing 🎵".
• Land the hook on the chorus drop. The hero tableau (is_hook) is timed so the load-bearing line sits on the chorus drop; accent that line in the captions.
• One cinematic look pack + hard cuts on the beat. The look pack (named film stock + grain + flares + handheld) plus a continuity anchor holds every clip together; cut each clip to its lyric window and hard-concat (one optional match-cut into the hero reveal) — no dissolves.
• End card from the real brand asset — never AI-render the wordmark as diffusion text. Composite the lockup (PIL/ffmpeg) from the real asset or use a designed keyframe base; diffusion garbles a wordmark.
• FFmpeg composite, deterministic, FREE. Normalize each clip to its beat-locked window, hard-concat, mux the anthem (afade in/out + loudnorm I=-14), burn the caption ASS, overlay the end card → a 1080×1920 h264+aac master. No paid calls, no keys.