Cosmic myth reel

Assemble a cosmic-mythology-voiceover reel from a config: a faceless, cinematic storytelling video where one spoken voiceover carries the whole narrative over a slow, weighted Ken-Burns zoom across curated stills in ONE locked look, with ONE on-screen hook line and burned captions. The narrator, voice, tone, story shape, visual world and art style are the recipe's user choices — this capability only assembles what it is given (the demo: a warm contemplative "the steady star, not the brightest" reframe over deep-indigo + gold cosmic stills). This capability is the FREE, deterministic assembly — the weighted beat-sync sequencing, the Ken-Burns render, the concat, the VO composite, the hook overlay, and the caption burn.

scripts/config.example.json is the worked example — reference only, never the default (Peerlark Optics "The North Star isn't the brightest", ~31s 1080×1920 9:16, 12 weighted Ken-Burns cuts); scripts/PIPELINE.md maps every config block to its production step and scripts/README.md documents the free assembly.

Run

There is a single runnable script — scripts/render.py (config-driven, ffmpeg + Pillow only, NO API keys and NO drawtext/libass required):

python3 scripts/render.py --config config.json --vo working/vo2/vo_atempo.mp3 \
  --stills-dir working/stills --out working/final.mp4 \
  [--words working/vo2/words.json] [--endcard working/endcard.png]

This is the FREE, deterministic assembly stage — it spends nothing. The paid inputs are separate capabilities — the spoken VO (create-vo-elevenlabs, ElevenLabs eleven_v3 from a tone-tagged script, atempo time-stretched so the delivered duration sets the timeline) and the 4–6 hero stills in one look pack (create-image-fal, Flux Pro 1.1, reused as repeats to reach the ~10–12 cuts). Given the VO + the stills + the per-cut weight array + the hook line, render.py distributes the cuts across the VO duration by the weighted formula, Ken-Burns-renders each still, concats, composites the VO, fades the hook line on over the open, burns the captions, and (if --endcard is passed) appends a brand end card → the master + a poster. Re-cuts reuse the existing VO / stills and spend nothing. See scripts/README.md §0 for the full arg contract.

Contract (the free assembly)

• The spoken VO carries the narrative — no talking head, no sung song. The generated/supplied VO IS the audio bed (no music bed by default); do not add a presenter or a second bed.
• Plan the timeline AROUND the delivered VO duration. The VO is atempo time-stretched (clamp the factor ≤ ~1.25 so the voice never chipmunks); its delivered length sets the timeline — never trim the VO to a pre-planned grid.
• Weighted beat-sync, not a fixed grid. For each cut, cut_dur = VO_dur × weight / Σweights — heavier weights hold longer on the emotional beats (the open, the turn, the close); the setup cuts run shorter. Every cut stays proportional to the whole VO.
• Ken-Burns per still. Render each still with scale 2×, center crop, and a zoompan to the configured zoom_end (~1.10); apply zoom_out on the flagged cuts; fade_in on the FIRST cut and fade_out on the LAST. Stills are reusable — the sequence repeats a few across the cuts.
• ONE look, no in-world text. Every still reads in the single chosen look (the demo's: deep-indigo + gold + volumetric light); the reel's only text is the hook + the captions, added in post (the "no text, no words" descriptor keeps words off the stills).
• ONE hook line, alpha-faded on over the open. Burn the single hook line over the OPEN only (fade in ~0.5s, hold, fade out ~0.6s) — never a persistent caption, never in-world. render.py does this with a PIL PNG + ffmpeg fade=…:alpha=1 (no drawtext dependency, since stock ffmpeg often lacks it); an ffmpeg drawtext alpha window is an equivalent alternative where available.
• Captions from Whisper — bottom, white. VEED/Whisper subtitle burn tracks the spoken VO in the bottom third, white #FFFFFF. If the host ffmpeg lacks libass (no subtitles/ass filter), render the cues as timed PIL PNG overlays (ffmpeg overlay=…:enable='between(t,st,en)') at the same bottom placement — a free local Whisper + ffmpeg burn is the fallback to the VEED tier.
• FFmpeg composite, deterministic, FREE. ffmpeg-concat the Ken-Burns clips, composite the VO under the picture (libx264 crf 18 + aac 192k), burn the hook alpha-fade + the caption track → a 1080×1920 h264+aac master (~31s). No paid calls, no keys (the local caption fallback is free).