Taste

Taste

Most AI video advice stops at how to render frames. This skill is the layer above that: what the frames should look like, in what order, cut to what rhythm, so the result reads as one intentional thing instead of a pile of generations.

It encodes a specific taste — the angelcore / cloud-trance / hyperpop family (Bladee "Silver Surfer"-era ethereal trance crossed with heavy angelcore) — distilled from a corpus of saved Reels and a tour through a ~70-entry visual-genre library. It is opinionated on purpose. Taste is a point of view, not a menu.

The companion file references/genre-taxonomy.md holds the full named-genre catalog. This file is the actionable layer: mood, grammar, pipeline, and a beat-mapped shot plan.

When to Activate

• Building a music video, lyric video, fancam, or visualizer.
• Making a short-form edit / reel where the feel matters more than the information.
• Driving AI b-roll generation (fal.ai, Veo, Kling, etc.) and the prompts need a coherent direction instead of one-off vibes.
• Assembling a moodboard or choosing a visual genre before any rendering.
• The user says "taste", "make it feel like X", "give it a direction", "angelcore", "cloud trance", "hyperpop edit", "Bladee", "dreamcore", or names a saved reference.
• The current edit works but reads as flat, generic, AI-slop, or stylistically incoherent.

This skill sits on top of video-editing (the mechanics) and remotion-video-creation (the renderer). Use those for how. Use this for what and why.

Core Thesis

1. Taste is the last layer, and it must be decided first. video-editing correctly says taste is the final human pass. The trap: if you only decide taste at the end, every generation and cut upstream was a guess. Pick the direction before the first prompt, then let it constrain everything.
2. Coherence beats novelty. One look executed across 30 shots beats 30 looks. A named genre (below) is a constraint that buys coherence for free.
3. Cut to the song, not to the footage. In a music video the timeline is the waveform. Every hard cut lands on a beat or a transient. Frame math is in the pipeline section.
4. Generate selectively, edit ruthlessly. AI makes b-roll that does not exist; it does not make taste. You still throw away 80%.

The Aesthetic Vocabulary (distilled)

The reference corpus tours a large library of named visual genres. The full list lives in references/genre-taxonomy.md. The useful move is not memorizing 70 names — it is seeing that a genre name is a complete prompt-and-grade preset. When you pick one, you inherit its palette, texture, lighting, and subject matter as a unit.

The genres cluster into families. Pick a primary family and at most one accent:

For the current project, the primary is Ethereal / divine with a Hyperpop / Y2K-cyber accent — i.e. holy light and crystalline bloom, punctuated by chrome and neon. That pairing is the angelcore × cloud-trance brief.

The Mood System — angelcore × cloud-trance

Distilled directly from the strongest reference reels. This is the concrete grade.

Palette

• Base: near-black void (#05060a) and bone white (#f4f1ea). Most frames are one or the other.
• Divine accent: molten gold / ember orange (#ffb24d → #ff7a18) — the one warm light in the dark.
• Crystalline accent: iridescent violet→cyan→magenta bokeh (#8a6bff, #4fc3ff, #ff6ad5) — the hyperpop bloom, used in bright frames.
• Danger accent (sparingly): a single glowing red (#ff2a2a) on monochrome — for one or two shock cuts only.
• Hyperpop subject: candy pink hair / chrome / glossy white against blue sky.

Rule: one accent per shot. Gold lives in dark frames; iridescence lives in light frames; never both in one shot.

Light & texture

• Darkness pierced by a single warm source (ember bloom, divine shaft). High contrast, deep blacks.
• Crystalline / glitter bokeh, lens flares, bloom, light leaks — heavenly, not dirty.
• Film grain + subtle chromatic aberration on the dark frames; clean gloss on the bright frames.
• Macro detail on negative space: a hero object centered on black (key, eye, gear, petal, water).
• Subjects: winged figures, clouds, halos, angels, crystalline structures, candy-cyber portraits.

Motion

• Slow, floating, weightless camera (drift, slow push, slow orbit) — cloud trance.
• Bursts of speed only at the drop. Otherwise everything breathes.
• Particles rising (embers, dust, glitter) — upward motion = ascension.

The Editing Grammar (distilled)

From the reference edits, the techniques that recur and define the style:

1. Beat-locked hard cuts. No dissolves in the verse/drop. Cut on the kick. The eye should feel the BPM.
2. Hero-on-black macro inserts. A single sharp object centered in black negative space, held for 1–2 beats, then cut. Rhythmic montage of these = the cloud-trance signature.
3. Bloom / explosion reveal. A white or ember bloom that blows out the frame on a transient, then resolves into the next shot. The "divine flash" transition.
4. Color-pop on monochrome. Run a passage in B&W, then a single colored element (red eye, gold flame, pink hair) punches through on the downbeat.
5. Speed-ramp into the drop. Ramp footage from slow to fast across the last bar before the drop, hard-cut to tempo on the one.
6. Caption keyword highlight (for talking-head / lyric sections only). All-caps, one or two words highlighted in the accent color, synced to the vocal. Use for lyric video, not for the pure visualizer.
7. Reaction PiP (for explainer/edit-commentary only). Picture-in-picture talking head over b-roll. Out of scope for the music video itself; documented because the corpus uses it heavily.

Do-nots: crossfade transitions in tempo sections; more than one accent color per shot; a shot held past its musical phrase; readable on-screen UI chrome (crop it out); mixed aspect ratios in one timeline.

The Pipeline — mixing the ECC video skills

This skill is the conductor. Each ECC skill is an instrument. Do not skip layers.

0. TASTE (this skill)        decide genre + mood + grammar BEFORE anything renders
1. STRUCTURE (video-editing) map the song: timestamps for intro/verse/drop/bridge/outro
2. GENERATE (fal-ai-media)   make b-roll per genre prompt-presets; throw away 80%
3. CUT (video-editing/FFmpeg) beat-cut + reframe to 9:16; assemble selects on the grid
4. COMPOSE (remotion-video-creation) overlays, blooms, lyric text, beat-synced sequencing
5. MOTION (motion-* skills)  easing curves, light-leak/particle motion, transition timing
6. AUDIO (fal-ai-media)      transition risers/impacts to sell the cuts (track itself is in Ableton)
7. POLISH                    grade to the palette above, final pacing pass, export
8. DISTRIBUTE (content-engine) platform-native versions + caption/cover