Launch Videos, Built from Code
A launch film used to mean a crew, a week and an invoice. A free open source tool now claims to build one by reading your website. This exploration tests that claim on a live product site and reports what actually came out, including the defect its checker found in the site itself. Round two hands the film to the mascot and asks what actually makes a thing feel alive.
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- The artwork animates itself The rig verdict forced a strategy change, and the research pointed at the proven technique already written down in this house: a video model in-betweening two poses of the SAME original artwork. Four shots, four first-attempt successes, the head never redrawn, the ears never separated, and the fox finally turns to camera and waves. Systems Open →
- He hears it before he sees it Knees, ears and sound. A second parts sheet gives the gait a bent-leg passing position and the jump a tuck; the ears become their own layers and perk a tenth of a second before the head turns; and thirty six synthesized sounds end three films of silence, with footsteps computed from the same constants that drive the legs. Systems Open →
- The fox, animated properly Better but far from elegant, so this round went to the literature: a four beat gait with linear stance so the feet stop skating, the body lowest just after each footfall, a 140 millisecond hips to chest to head cascade, a tail that is a wave through three joints, and no frame that is truly still. Same parts, same toolchain; everything that changed is timing. Systems Open →
- A rigged fox, not a sprite The note was that he jumped around like a PowerPoint icon. He did. This cut takes the fox apart into six pieces with their own pivots: a real four leg walk cycle, a head that lags the body by 60 milliseconds, a tail that arrives after he stops, and blinks that close faster than they open. Systems Open →
- The fox does the work Round two, after the first cut read as a slideshow with a mascot stapled to the end. Six poses from the character library turn the illustration into a performer: squash and stretch, anticipation, a trot cycle, and the pose swap landing on the impact frame. 690 frames in 16 seconds, and the cut rate went DOWN. Systems Open →
- A launch video, made by reading the website HyperFrames read a live product site, took its photographs, typefaces and colours, and rendered a sixteen second film in twenty four seconds with no API key and nothing uploaded. The film is here. So are the five errors its checker refused to render, and the accessibility miss it found on the site by accident. Systems Open →
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The point of the test was never the money saved. It was whether a marketing asset can become something a machine can check, the way code is checked, before anyone looks at it.