Booth Loop Video
You need something on the screen behind your stand. Not a slideshow with a transition every eight seconds, and not a video that needs an editor, a brief, and three weeks. This skill renders a silent, looping MP4 — 1920x1080, 30 fps, one to two minutes — from a description of what you want it to say.
Describe the message, hand over your brand colours, and the agent writes a Python render script, shows you a still from every scene, and only then renders the video.
What it does
The agent generates a single self-contained script that paints every frame with Pillow and pipes them to ffmpeg. That means real motion — eased fades, animated counters, progress bars, typed-text reveals, orbiting nodes — not a set of static slides with a crossfade.
Because the whole thing is a script, iteration is conversational: “slower orbit”, “make the headline bigger”, “swap magenta for green” edits a few constants and re-renders.
Why frame-by-frame instead of a slide export
Exporting a deck to video gives you a deck playing at 0.1 fps. This gives you a motion graphic. The trade-off is that you’re writing code rather than dragging boxes — which is exactly the trade-off an agent is good at absorbing.
What makes it different
Most of this skill is the accumulated list of things that go wrong, written down so they don’t go wrong again:
- The z-order rule. Pillow paints in call order. Draw a hub, then its spokes, and the spoke lines run straight across the hub and through your labels. The skill forces a two-pass draw — all connectors, then all nodes — for any diagram layout. This is the single most common defect and it’s invisible until you look at a frame.
- Preview before render. A full render takes minutes; a preview PNG takes seconds. The agent renders one still per scene and shows them to you inline before committing to the render.
-pix_fmt yuv420p. Without it the MP4 plays fine in VLC and in nothing else — not QuickTime, not PowerPoint, not the media player on the screen at the venue.- Font probing across platforms. A hardcoded font path silently falls back to a tiny bitmap font and produces a video that looks broken. The skill probes a candidate list per weight and reports what actually resolved.
- Contrast for a show floor. Dark card on dark background is a design-tool favourite and unreadable on a badly calibrated panel under bright lights. Chat and quote UI goes on a white card, and contrast gets checked on a rendered frame.
- Frames go to the system temp folder, never the working directory — rendering thousands of PNGs into a OneDrive- or Dropbox-synced folder stalls the render and thrashes the sync client.
How to use it
- Tell the agent what the video is for and roughly what it should say — the pitch, the three things you want a passer-by to take away, the call to action.
- Give it your brand colours, or let it use the neutral navy/blue default. It won’t invent a brand for you.
- Review the per-scene preview stills it sends back and correct anything that looks wrong. This is the cheap moment to fix layout.
- Approve the render. Output lands at
output/booth_loop.mp4. - Iterate in plain language until it’s right.
Requirements
Python with pillow, imageio, imageio-ffmpeg, and numpy. The agent installs
them if they’re missing. imageio-ffmpeg bundles its own ffmpeg binary, so there’s
no system ffmpeg install and nothing to put on PATH.
Tips
- Write for eight seconds of attention at three metres. If the opening scene doesn’t land on its own, nothing after it will.
- Keep it under ~25 words on screen at any moment.
- Make the first and last frames identical so the loop point disappears.
- It’s silent by design. Booths are loud and most venue screens are muted anyway.
- The output works as a LinkedIn post or an embedded slide, not just a booth loop.
Known limitations
- No audio track. Add one afterwards with ffmpeg if you need it.
- No live footage or video-file editing — this generates from scratch.
- Complex scenes at 30 fps take a few minutes to render. Preview stills are the answer, not patience.