Video storytelling

How to build the visual layer of a long-form video so a viewer is still oriented at minute nine. Applies to any talking-head video with a script: a news take, a single-topic deep dive, a comparison, a tutorial, a listicle.

The failure this replaces is scene-thinking. A new graphic every few seconds makes the viewer restart comprehension every few seconds, and no individual graphic is at fault, which is why the feedback comes back as the vague "confusing" or "too much going on" rather than as a specific defect.

For a neutral practice beat sheet, read docs/STORYTELLING-WORKBOOK.md at the repository root. The reusable design system is in this skill's reference/design-system.md; the worked open-loop geometry is in reference/patterns/wall-of-slots/. Private source videos are not required.

This is not hyperframes-video-beats. That skill places overlay cards on top of a talking head. This one designs the thing the video is about.

1 · The four principles

One persistent world

The video lives in a single space, and it never resets. Everything the viewer has already seen still exists where they left it, and new material is added to it rather than replacing it. An element, once drawn, is never redrawn, moved, or relabelled.

Everything else in this skill depends on that. The camera has nowhere to go if the space keeps changing, a spotlight means nothing if there is nothing else on screen, and an open loop cannot stay open in a world that resets.

The world also has to be worth staying in, so decide the spatial grammar before building anything and hold it for the whole runtime. In the reference build: left to right is toward the outcome, up is toward a human and is the only warm thing on screen, down is into a system of record. A viewer who learns that in the first two minutes reads the rest of the video for free.