skills/ai-host-video/references/motion-style-editorial-overlay.md

# Editorial Overlay

Use this direction when the presenter must keep the picture and the graphics should feel
considered rather than loud — culture, luxury, the business behind an industry, or any
presenter-led explainer that wants to look expensive. Its character comes from composed
emptiness and a single accent doing all the marking. Its strongest contrast is between a
decisive arrival and a hold long enough to read the line twice.

## Still composition

- The presenter holds the frame. Compositions dock into the empty side of the shot on a
  consistent margin, with a generous gap measured against the widest gesture, and never cross
  the face or the hands.
- Keep a quiet neutral ground, near-black ink and one accent red. The accent marks one thing per
  composition — a rule, a live value, a selected row — and never becomes a field behind copy.
- Lead with a display serif of real thick-to-thin contrast for claims and figures, and set
  everything functional in a quiet grotesque: kickers, labels, sources, indices.
- Hold the type in soft containers rather than on hard cards: a pill behind a label, a rounded
  plate behind a caption, nothing behind a claim that can stand on the ground alone. Two corner
  families only — a squircle for plates, a full pill for labels.
- Depth is a wide faint shadow and a one-pixel light edge, never perspective or gloss. Where the
  footage under a plate is busy, the plate itself supplies the contrast; a full-frame scrim does
  not belong here.
- One object per beat, composed around a large deliberately empty region. It is the composition,
  not what is left over.
- Set one dominant scale against one small scale with nothing in between, and let the small
  scale carry sources, kickers and indices.
- Numerals are display material: a page count, a revenue figure, a ratio at headline scale can
  be the subject of a whole beat.
- Every number on screen must trace to a real source. Invented statistics or fabricated document
  marks destroy this direction faster than any visual error, because its authority is editorial.

## Motion vocabulary

- **Arrive and settle:** an element rises a short distance while fading in, with a long settle
  and no bounce, then holds without further movement.
- **Draw the structure:** a rule extends down the margin, a hairline connects two objects, or a
  seam parts — the frame explains where the idea sits before the idea arrives.
- **Wipe into a measure:** a wipe crossing the composition resolves into a proportional band
  carrying the figure it was hiding.
- **Lift one out of many:** a single row, block or value separates from a ghosted set and holds
  beside it, so the proportion is seen rather than stated.
- **Swap at the baseline:** a word is struck, dropped or overwritten in place, keeping the
  sentence's structure visible through the change.
- **Compress and leave:** several elements collapse into one summary object, which then exits
  before the next idea arrives.

## Adjustable starting points

- Nothing snaps. Entrances are brief but unhurried with a long settle; exits run quicker than
  entrances, and one easing serves the whole episode.
- Overlap rather than queue: the next element starts before the previous has finished, with an
  offset short enough that the group reads as one gesture.
- Travel is a hint of arrival, not a journey — a short rise, upward by default. Nothing scales
  from nothing and nothing rotates in.
- Let the frame rest. Every beat needs a stretch where only the presenter moves.
- Keep the accent's total area small. When it starts reading as a colour scheme rather than as
  an emphasis, the composition has lost the language.
- If an effect is visible as an effect — a glow, a sweep, a texture — it is too strong. Grain,
  if the brief asks for it at all, sits under everything at a strength you feel rather than
  notice.
- Check the display serif at viewing size after any grain or compression pass: hairlines are the
  first thing a treatment destroys.

## Example development

A rule draws down the margin and a kicker sets above a serif claim while the presenter keeps
talking. A wipe crosses and resolves into a proportional band carrying a sourced figure. A
ghosted column appears and one row lifts into ink on its own rounded plate as the number rolls
to the value. The elements compress into a single labelled pill, the corner metadata fills in,
and everything leaves before the closing line arrives and holds.

## Standalone typography

One statement set large in the empty half, with a small index above it and the accent marking
exactly one word, carries the whole direction with no container at all. Reveal the lines as a
connected gesture, keep one word through the next phrase, and let the result hold. When a second
thought is needed, replace the line rather than adding to it.

## Avoid

Bounce, dissolves, rotation on entry, drifting type, hard drop shadows, gradients as decoration,
a fourth colour, decorative micro-copy, invented sources, an opaque panel over a person, and a
second treatment competing with the first. Do not spend a mechanism twice — with a family this
small, a repeated device is immediately obvious, and a drawn rule is connective tissue rather
than one of your reveals.