digitalsamba/parody-short

Parody shorts

A short comedy for an audience that knows the people in it, or the situation: a team's big night told as an 80s action-show intro, a Halloween creature feature, a Christmas TV ad. The group can be any group (a sales team, a school staff room, a five-a-side club, a family) and the subject anything they lived through together. They land harder than anything else the toolkit makes, because the audience is laughing at things they recognise. This skill is how to make one on purpose.

Built and learned on three videos for one team in November 2026 (an action-show intro of a release, its Halloween sister cut, a Christmas ad of A Christmas Carol). They are not in examples/ because they star real colleagues. Then on two public shorts with an invented cast (a horror trailer about the video call that never ends, a wildlife documentary about the return to the office), each in 16:9 and vertical, plus a brand edition in a product's own UI.

Why they work (in order of weight)

1. Real faces, moving. The step change was animating the team's profile photos. Stills got smiles; the same people raising aviators or toasting with punch got laughs. Recognition is the engine. See people.md.
2. Real in-jokes. Lines found in the team's own channels beat any written gag: a colleague's catchphrase, the feature someone keeps cramming in, the thing someone has been saying all along. The context pass is worth more than script polish. See context.md.
3. A genre whose beats fit the event. The audience already knows the shape (three rules that get broken; ghosts of past, present and future; the team assembling), so the video only fills the beats. The tighter the mapping, the less the script has to explain. See genres.md.
4. Permission to exaggerate. These are not release notes. Once the person asking says facts don't matter, numbers can be inflated and timelines invented. Ask once, early; then stop fact-checking jokes.
5. Affection is the line. Everyone is the hero of a gag or in on it, never its victim. That keeps it warm, and it is also the safety rule (below).
6. A look and sound per genre. Its own fonts, overlay and grade (VHS tracking, film grain and letterbox, candlelight), an original song or score, a few sound effects, at most one narrator line in an ad. Nothing should look like a toolkit template.
7. Short. An ad is 60-90 s. A "show intro" can run 2 min. Past ~2:30 the middle sags; cut there first.
8. Pick every clip. About one LTX clip in three cuts to a stranger. One wrong face breaks the spell, so contact-sheet every clip and re-roll.

Two kinds of cast

• Real people (the group's own photos): the strongest laughs, for an audience that knows them. Internal by default; public only with each person's written OK.
• An invented cast (FLUX portraits, or non-human characters): for a public video, or a shared topic where the audience recognises the situation rather than the people (video calls, the office kitchen). Recognition moves from the faces to the situation, so the situation has to be universal and specific: "you're on mute", the spreadsheet with 412 tabs, the jacket on the hot desk. See people.md step 0.
• Cast once, use everywhere. Generate the invented cast once in a shared folder and give each video its own costumes and clips from the same faces. Two videos with the same four people feel like a series, and a callback between them (video 2's last line is video 1's first) is a free laugh.

Rules that are not optional

• All affectionate. Nobody in the group is the butt of a joke they'd mind. No performance, health, personal life or anything said in confidence. When in doubt, cut the line.
• Real people stay internal. Their likeness belongs to them. Make it for the group, share it link-only, and ask before posting anywhere public. Anyone in it who asks to be left out is left out.
• Nothing sensitive on screen. No customer or partner names, no hostnames, no secret values (a secret is a blurred bar or ••••), no internal URLs. Rename real systems ("RELAY ONE").
• Original words and music. Borrow a genre's form, never a work's characters, names, lines, designs or theme tune. A public-domain story (Dickens, Grimm, Shakespeare) can be used directly; a film or TV show cannot, renamed or not. Write original lyrics for any song (acestep skill).
• Quote only where the audience could have read it. Public team channels, yes. DMs, no. See context.md.

Before you start

• GPU endpoints (Modal, once): uv sync --extra modal && uv run modal setup, then uv run tools/modal_setup.py flux2 image_edit ltx2 qwen3_tts. LTX is gated: it needs a Modal secret with your Hugging Face token (docs/modal-setup.md). Music: a free ACEMUSIC_API_KEY in .env (acestep skill).
• The project is a plain Remotion project in projects/<name>/; no template fits, since nothing here should look like one. Copy package.json and remotion.config.ts from any template (the config makes lib/ imports resolve), keep one composition per cut in src/Root.tsx, and put the cast's clips in public/people/. A shot is a <Sequence> on absolute frames with the person in it:

import { LivingPhoto } from '../../../lib/components/LivingPhoto';
// plays the clip once and holds its last good frame; fit slows a slightly short clip to fill the shot
<Sequence from={120} durationInFrames={180}>
  <LivingPhoto src="people/sam-xmas.mp4" hold={140} fit={180} pos="center 30%" style={{ inset: 0 }} />
</Sequence>

Workflow

Step	What	Read
1. Brief	Event, audience, cast (3-6 people), genre, length, "do facts matter?"	this file
2. Context	Mine the group's channels and tools; write public/bible.md	context.md
3. Map	Genre beats onto the event; one beat per person; pick lines from the bible	genres.md
4. Cast	Photos or an invented cast, costume with image_edit, animate with LTX, contact sheet	people.md
5. World	FLUX backgrounds (text-free), SFX, music or a song with original lyrics	acestep, elevenlabs
6. Build	Remotion shots on absolute frames; LivingPhoto for the cast; genre overlay	people.md, video-design
7. Check	Contact sheet of the render, qc.py --render --fix, sync_check.py --cues, then the safety rules again	video-design/critique.md, CLAUDE.md
8. Cuts	Vertical, and a brand edition if wanted: new layouts over the same assets	formats.md

Shots, not scenes. These are edited like ads: a fixed shot list with absolute frame ranges, a 10-20 frame dissolve between shots, the song or score under everything. If there is narration, generate it first and anchor to it (CLAUDE.md, Audio-Anchored Timelines); an ad with one closing narrator line can be music-led.

Sound on a movement: measure, don't eyeball. A sneeze, a jacket landing, a badge jingle: place each sound with tools/sync_check.py --clip (where its peak meets the movement), list it in the project's sync-cues.json, and run sync_check.py --video ... --cues on every render before showing it. A hand-placed sneeze was half a second early; three other cues were 0.8-1.0 s off. If a clip freezes or cuts, end its sound there too.

Text is the punchline carrier. Speech bubbles, a stamp, a dance card, a tombstone, a typed label. Remotion renders all of it (FLUX and LTX garble text). Give every on-screen gag a frame cue and a sound.

Voices. For a narrator nobody owns, design one with Qwen VoiceDesign from a written brief ("a warm, middle-aged British woman narrating a wildlife documentary, hushed, a slow measured pace"; "a deep, gravelly movie trailer announcer"): qwen3_tts.py --design-instruct "..." --text "<a 20 s seed paragraph in the genre, not the script>" --format wav. VoiceDesign makes a new voice on every call, so design once, then clone that reference for every sentence (three takes, pick_takes.py). Describe a genre, never a real person; picking a narrator the genre's famous voice isn't (a woman for a wildlife film) keeps it clearly original.

Cuts. Plan the vertical cut and any brand edition from the start; they reuse every generated asset and cost only a render each. See formats.md.

Reuse across genres. A cast animated once can be re-costumed for the next holiday: the photos, crops and context bible carry over, and only the costumes, clips and world change.

Cost (Modal, 2026-11)

LTX ~$0.08 a 5 s clip, image_edit ~$0.01 an edit warm (a cold start is ~10 min; send one edit first and wait), FLUX ~$0.01 a background or portrait, ACE-Step song a few cents. A 90 s ad with five cast members and re-rolls is about $2. Two 80-100 s shorts sharing one invented cast (9 costume edits, 16 clips, 2 designed voices) came to about $2.50 together. The acemusic API can return 502s mid-batch; a failed take is skipped, so re-run for more.

Related

context.md, genres.md, people.md, formats.md here; ltx2, qwen-edit, acestep, elevenlabs, video-design, remotion skills; lib/components/LivingPhoto.tsx.