Update to Pixara

{
  "description": "A finished story video in 10 second blocks: a style key, a cast sheet per character, a three-act script with a narrator and optional character lines, every take first on ElevenLabs V4 or Seed Audio 1.0 for dialogue, five-shot blocks with a blocking still when two characters share a frame, assembly by construction, captions from the script. Use when: a narrated story with characters; a storybook or bedtime story, a myth or fairy tale retelling, a kids video or kids song video, a picture story, a comic-style short, an animated short with a beginning, middle and end. Not for: an explainer or documentary with no cast (faceless-explainer), a person talking to camera (presenter-video), a live-action cinematic trailer (cinematic-trailer), a single illustration, one character sheet on its own (character-sheet).",
  "included_files": [],
  "name": "animated-story",
  "skill_md_contents": "---\nname: \"animated-story\"\ndescription: \"A finished story video in 10 second blocks: a style key, a cast sheet per character, a three-act script with a narrator and optional character lines, every take first on ElevenLabs V4 or Seed Audio 1.0 for dialogue, five-shot blocks with a blocking still when two characters share a frame, assembly by construction, captions from the script. Use when: a narrated story with characters; a storybook or bedtime story, a myth or fairy tale retelling, a kids video or kids song video, a picture story, a comic-style short, an animated short with a beginning, middle and end. Not for: an explainer or documentary with no cast (faceless-explainer), a person talking to camera (presenter-video), a live-action cinematic trailer (cinematic-trailer), a single illustration, one character sheet on its own (character-sheet).\"\n---\n\n# Animated story\n\nProduce ONE finished story video. It runs on the same block engine as the faceless-explainer recipe (fixed 10 second blocks, every take before any clip, five hard-cut shots per block) with a cast that must stay themselves across every block, a narrator, and, when the brief wants them, character lines. Read faceless-explainer with get_skill for the block prompt and character-sheet for the cast; this recipe adds what a story needs.\n\n## Rules that never bend\n\n- Blocks: the duration in seconds divided by ten, whole blocks only. One narration line per block of 20 to 23 words, generated before any clip, never paraphrased, sized to its window.\n- One style key image and one style formula of 80 to 100 words for the whole piece, passed or pasted byte-identical into every prompt; one hero portrait per character approved before any block, passed as a reference on every block that shows them.\n- The narrator carries the story; characters speak only in declared dialogue blocks, and then only through a voice take laid over the clip, never native video speech, so the words are exact.\n- Two characters in one frame means a blocking still for that scene: one wide frame in the style placing each character by their reference on a named position, passed with the cast so the clip keeps who stands where.\n- Picture-story mode (the roster stills and one still per block with slow pushes in the assembler) is the cheap path; offer it when the brief is a bedtime story or a picture book.\n- No text inside clips. A title card is a designed frame from a text-rendering image model as its own shot; captions come from the subtitles tool with the authored script.\n- Nothing about a real person; a named public figure is declined.\n- A story with nobody presenting on camera is still full of faces: every character keeps theirs, and the word faceless never enters a cast sheet, a style key or a clip prompt.\n\n## Intake, only for the gaps\n\nParse the brief first, then ask in one message only for what it left out: the length (60, 90, 120 seconds; recommend 90), the look (storybook watercolour, flat cartoon, clay, paper cut-out, anime, comic ink, 3D toy), the audience (kids or general), the mode (animated clips or picture story), the aspect (16:9 or 9:16). Never ask about models or voices by name. Captions and a title are the one delivery question after the master exists.\n\n## Phases\n\n1. Style key. Write the style formula (medium, line and shape language, palette as five colours, light, texture, camera distance habit, mood; ending in negatives: no photoreal skin, no text, no logos). generate_image one style key on bytedance/seedream-5-pro at 1K from the formula: a neutral scene in the look, no subject. Look at it inline; get a nod. The formula and the key travel with every prompt from here.\n2. Story. Three acts across the blocks (a setup, a turn, a payoff), one narration line per block of 20 to 23 words with numbers as words, a through-line object that resolves at the end, a cold open under eight words. Dialogue blocks, when wanted, hold one or two short character lines instead of narration, marked with the speaker. A kids song comes from generate_music on minimax/music-3 with the lyrics, and its blocks carry no narration. Show the script with the block count before any spend.\n3. Cast. For every character, the character-sheet recipe in this style: the identity prompt, a hero portrait at 3:4 on bytedance/seedream-5-pro with the style key passed as a reference and the formula in the prompt, the split-screen when the character has many blocks. Look at each inline; the user approves each; the hero portrait is the reference for every block that shows them. Locations and props as a roster on the key, as faceless-explainer's phase 3: each location at the output aspect, props at 1:1, no location for more than two consecutive blocks.\n4. Takes. Narration with list_voices on eleven-labs/v4, one voiceId and one delivery phrase repeated verbatim on every take; character lines on bytedance/seed-audio-1.0 with one voice description per character repeated verbatim (a two-voice exchange in one take when both speak in one block). generate_batch the takes, wait_for_jobs, get_media_metadata on each key; a take over 9.5 seconds is rewritten shorter and regenerated, three attempts, never time-stretched.\n5. Blocks. Five shots per block with faceless-explainer's block prompt: the formula verbatim, the manifest naming the key, the location, each character by their portrait and any prop, five shots with times that sum to ten and no two neighbours sharing size or angle, the through-line when it appears, an Audio line of ambience and action sounds only, a negative line of no lip movement, no speech, no captions, no text. A blocking still first for every scene with two or more characters, generated on bytedance/seedream-5-pro with the portraits as references and passed with them. In a dialogue block the speaking character's mouth moves on their line's beat and the Audio line says so; the take is laid over it in assembly.\n6. Clips. One generate_video per block on minimax/hailuo-3-max in reference mode with resolution \"768P\" exactly (capitals, the only value it renders; never 480P), duration 10, 16:9 or 9:16, the references in referenceImageUrls in the manifest's order (the key, the location, the characters, the props, the blocking still, at most seven of its nine slots); about 830 credits a block, verified with a 30 second three-block story where the cast held. Launch independent blocks together with generate_batch and wait with wait_for_jobs. Picture-story mode skips this phase and uses the roster stills and one still per block generated the same way.\n7. Check. Tell the user what to check per block unless they asked for no check-ins: five cuts (a block with fewer than four is regenerated once with the cuts spelled out, then accepted), the look held, each character matching their portrait, no text, no leading freeze.\n8. Music. generate_music once on google/lyria-3.5 (instrumental) in the story's mood with a named tempo, loop-safe, at least the piece's length; a kids song replaces it on its blocks.\n9. Assembly. get_assembly_guide once, get_media_metadata on every key, then assemble_video: block N clip (or still with a slow push) at 10N for 10 seconds on the base track; block N take centred inside its block on an audio track; the bed on a second audio track at 0.6 with duck: true; a designed title card as a 2.5 second first shot only when asked; no text clips.\n10. Delivery. Captions through the subtitles tool on zapcap/subtitles when wanted, with referenceTranscript authored from the script, one cue per block split into lines of at most five words and timed from the take's real start inside its block. Then one paragraph: what it is, the acts in a line each, and two next steps (a second episode with the same cast, a picture book from the stills). State each character's hero portrait key once so the user can bring the same cast back next time; nothing here is remembered for them yet.\n\n## Pixara tool mechanics\n\n- Discover: recommend_model for a goal, list_models for a service or a capability, describe_model for the exact parameters, the constraints and the price. The models named in this recipe are the ones verified for it; if one has left the catalog, take the newest model with the same tags.\n- Run: generate_image, generate_video, generate_voiceover, generate_music and the editing tools return a job id. wait_for_job(id) polls for up to 45 seconds; call it again until the job finishes. A failed job is refunded and its error names the constraint that was hit; fix that and retry once.\n- Waves: when several generations do not depend on each other (a shot list, a set of variants, the takes of a voiceover), queue them in one generate_batch call and wait for all of them with wait_for_jobs; one failing job never stops the others.\n- Results: every finished asset carries a URL and a key. Pass the URL as the input to the next generation (describe_model names the image, video and audio fields). Pass the KEY to assemble_video, and call get_media_metadata(key) for exact durations before sizing clips.\n- Inputs from the user: request_upload then finalize_upload (or upload_widget) for a local file, upload_asset for a URL, list_generations to reuse earlier work.\n- Money: prices are per model in list_models; estimate_cost before anything expensive; confirm before choosing a model that costs several times more than an alternative.\n- Seeing: images render inline, so look at every image before building on it. You cannot watch video here: when a clip finishes, tell the user what to check (face, hands, lips, unwanted text) and let them confirm before assembly, unless they asked for no check-ins.\n- Words on screen are minimal and live inside the picture: a title, a step name or a price is a designed frame from a text-rendering image model (google/nano-banana-pro at any aspect; openai/gpt-image-2 only at 1:1, 2:3 or 3:2, the only aspects it renders here) with the exact string, animated with image-to-video or placed as an image clip; the assembler's text clip is the last resort for a plain line nothing else can carry. Never ask a generation model to render text you did not receive verbatim from the user.\n- Captions never come from the assembler or a video prompt: when a piece has speech and the user wants captions, run the finished master through the subtitles tool on zapcap/subtitles with the language, a style as preset when the user wants a particular look (list_caption_styles shows them with previews; the default is clean plain text), position only when the style's own placement does not fit (a percentage of the height from 0 at the top to 80 at the bottom, around 70 for a 9:16 talking piece), and the authored script as referenceTranscript when one exists: one entry per cue with text, startTime and endTime in seconds, which keeps the script's spelling while word timing still comes from the audio. veed/subtitles is the fallback only: when ZapCap refuses the video (no audio track, longer than 30 minutes), when its job fails (one retry on VEED, never a second ZapCap run), when the captions are authored text on a piece with no speech (VEED burns them from srtContent), or when the user picked a VEED style. Never caption one piece with both. The clean master stays the master; the captioned file is the deliverable.\n- minimax/hailuo-3-max: resolution is the string \"768P\" exactly, capitals, its only value (never 480P, and a lowercase 768p is rejected); duration 5 to 15; referenceImageUrls holds at most nine.\n- Voices: eleven-labs/v4 for every voiceover (a voiceId from list_voices); minimax/speech-2.8 only when it fails; bytedance/seed-audio-1.0 for voice replication from a sample the user owns, a two-voice dialogue in one take, or spoken lines with sound effects.\n- Talk to the user in model display names, never ids, and never narrate these mechanics.\n"
}