render-search-grid

Render the 'search-grid' format from a config. It is a deterministic assembler — no generative image/video, no AI-rendered text. Everything on screen is the brand's REAL product/lifestyle photography + logo, so the typed hook, feature captions, wordmark, and photos stay pixel-crisp. The only paid input is an optional music bed, produced upstream by create-music-elevenlabs and passed to render.py --music.

The format (four beats, one continuous ~18s motion piece, 1080×1920)

1. Search (0–5s) — a 3-column masonry grid of the brand's catalog behind a Pinterest search bar; a believable phrase types in letter-by-letter. Side columns drift DOWN, the middle column drifts UP (counter-parallax).
2. Cards (5–7s) — 3 room/product cards slide in from the RIGHT and stack over a blurred backdrop (stack_bg + stack_tint).
3. Features (7–14.5s) — the TOP card physically expands (its box grows from the stacked rect to full-screen, animating width/height — NOT transform:scale, which would stretch the image), then swipe-left → swipe-left through the SAME 3 rooms, each now full-bleed with a caption. The 3 cards ARE the 3 features.
4. End card (14.5–18s) — hero + wordmark + tagline + CTA on endcard.bg.

Scripts (all free / deterministic)

• scripts/build_html.py --config config.json --out index.html — config → a single self-contained HTML page exposing window.seek(tMs) (images base64-embedded).
• scripts/capture.js --html index.html --out frames --fps 30 --duration 18000 — headless Chromium frame-steps seek() to a PNG per frame (auto-discovers a cached Playwright chromium, or pass --exe).
• scripts/render.py --config config.json [--music bed.m4a] --out master.mp4 — orchestrates build → capture → FFmpeg (muxes the bed with -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 when --music is given; $0 silent pass without it).
• scripts/prep_assets.py crop in.jpg out.jpg / logo logo.jpg wordmark.png — the two fixes this format needs almost every time: crop baked-in white L/R margins off heroes, and key the white out of a black-on-white logo JPG to a transparent PNG.

See scripts/config.example.json for the full config shape (a real worked example — the Ruggable build; its warm beige backdrop, red caret and lo-fi music prompt are that demo's picks, never defaults).

Choices

These look values are the caller's creative choices (the video-format recipe asks the user):

• Backdrop mood → endcard.bg, stack_bg, stack_tint. The demo used a warm beige radial gradient (#ecdfce → #d9c6ac) and a warm brown tint.
• Music → the prompt for the optional bed (made upstream by create-music-elevenlabs). The demo used warm nylon acoustic guitar + Rhodes, relaxed lo-fi.
• caret_color is the brand's accent colour (brand kit), not a choice.

When caret_color, endcard.bg or stack_tint is missing or still an unfilled <input:…> / <brand:…> placeholder, build_html.py uses a NEUTRAL value and prints a WARNING; an unfilled text/path field (hook, rooms, endcard.hero, …) is an error.

Config contract (bound by the recipe/orchestrator at remix time)

canvas, hook, grid_cols (3 columns × 6 distinct tiles), rooms (exactly 3 {image, caption} — the cards AND the features), stack_bg (blurred backdrop photo), optional stack_tint (CSS background over it), endcard (hero, wordmark, tagline, cta, bg). Craft rules the renderer assumes the inputs already honor: real brand assets only; 6 distinct tiles/column so the drift never repeats; intentional (never near-white) backdrops in the mood the caller picked; cropped hero margins; transparent-bg wordmark; captions/tagline/CTA are the brand's OWN approved copy (no invented claims).

Prereqs

node + playwright-core (or a cached Playwright chromium) and ffmpeg on PATH; python3 with Pillow (for prep_assets.py).